Peter Calder: Neighbours, everybody needs web neighbours...

Casey Eden, co-founder and managing director of Neighbourly, says the site was developed because many of his friends didn't know their neighbours.

For people who can’t pluck up the courage to knock on the neighbours’ door, perhaps a virtual neighbourhood

Good fences make good neighbours, the saying goes. Yet when a high fence goes up in my neighbourhood, I always have the sense that something is lost.

A website launched nationally last week is based on the idea that the metaphorical fences we live behind are more impenetrable than the real ones. The site, neighbourly.co.nz, which has been running as a pilot scheme in the upscale harbourside suburb of St Heliers since February, is described as "a free and private social network" that "creates an easy way for neighbours to talk".

My initial reaction, when I received my invitation to join, was that it was a sophisticated exercise in irony: an online community - located on a system known as the World Wide Web - made up of people who lived within earshot of each other. Surely someone was pulling my leg.

Not at all, said Neighbourly co-founder and managing director Casey Eden when I got him on the phone (he was in Australia at the time, which can be seen as in the neighbourhood, depending on how you define the word).

"In a perfect world," he told me, "something like Neighbourly would not be needed. If you go back 20 or 30 years, your neighbourhood was your original social network. Your neighbours were the people you relied on, the people you saw if you needed to borrow a tool or get a babysitter. You couldn't expand that network."

I'm rattled by the contradiction. Isn't a neighbourhood by definition something you can't expand? Isn't it the nearness of neighbours that makes them special?

Eden agrees that social networks - we avoid the F word - create an illusion of engagement that makes actual engagement harder to manage. I'm reminded of the joke that Christmas is a day when everyone in the family gathers in one room and looks at their mobile phones.

Eden says when he and co-founder Shane Bradley asked around among their friends, "person after person said they didn't know their neighbours".

"It sounds simple to walk over and knock on the door but for a lot of people it's a skill they've forgotten. Shane and I are big, confident guys who are happy to cold-call people in a sales environment, and we realised we were terrified to walk next door to our neighbours'."

All this seems beyond counter-intuitive. I'm almost twice the age of 32-year-old Eden, and my virtual life is only a pale shadow of my real one. By this I mean that I don't check text messages while I am in the middle of a face-to-face conversation and I take exception when other people do. In short, I don't know much about virtual life.

So you have every right to call me old-fashioned, but there's something pretty bizarre about the idea of combating the isolation caused - or at least exacerbated - by the modern passion for living life online by joining an online group.

Perhaps the appropriate analogy is that of vaccination: a vaccine exposes us to a mild form of a disease in order to fortify us for a later battle with the real thing. But can it be true that meeting your neighbour in cyberspace makes it easier to meet them over the back fence? It seems to me that it would make it harder.

In the four houses that I have lived in as an adult, I've almost always known the neighbours. We've mowed each other's lawns, shared fruit and veges, helped out when misfortune called.

So it's not surprising that my invitation to join Neighbourly didn't come from any of my neighbours. It came in an envelope addressed to "My Neighbour" at my address and when I registered and logged in (for research purposes only, you understand) I could see that none of them was signed up. (The invitation, Eden explains, would have been randomly generated at his office, because Neighbourly works when somebody picks up the idea and runs with it).

Unsurprisingly, advertising is coming, which is entirely reasonable. But it will be local businesses advertising to locals, Eden says, "so it's a win-win".

That puzzles me, too. Surely the thing about neighbourhood businesses is that the neighbourhood already know about them. But then, I don't know much about advertising, either.