This is mostly a publicist’s piece in about a web site that sells to apartment building owners a web site where their tenants can network.  I’m impressed that the vendor can sell these to landlords.  Most landlords know better than to let their tenants help organize against him.  I recall as story from years ago about a landlord suing a site because his property had such awful ratings.  There is a nice success story near the end of the article about a child birth counselor getting a lot of buisness by advertising via the site.

My town of 40 thousand people has a surprisingly successful email list.  It survives because there a tremendous pool of people here who know how to manage an email list of this kind.  Replicating that success, using volunteers, would be hard.  In time such skill will be more common place, in the meantime I find it somewhat more plausible that a firm could do it.