On Monday, Zillow.com apologized for a company e-mail that inadvertently promoted a new neighborhood service that wasn't quite ready.

Now, after that minor dust-up, the mystery is over. The Seattle company this evening is taking the wraps off community Web pages for more than 6,500 neighborhoods in 130 U.S. cities.

In a way, Zillow is attempting to combine its real estate data with the citizen journalism movement, encouraging people who live in select neighborhoods to upload photos, events, news and other information.

The idea is that people will not only visit Zillow to learn about homes, but -- one could imagine -- local restaurants, recent crimes or the history of the neighborhood. With this feature, you could also see Zillow moving down the path of trying to link people together in certain neighborhoods to share a lawnmower, sell a grill, host a fundraiser or, perhaps, find a date. And if that occurs, the real estate information and Zestimates offered by Zillow today might just be a Trojan horse into other lucrative advertising markets.

Zillow's announcement comes just a few days after the collapse of Backfence, a venture-backed startup that attempted to create "hyperlocal" online communities in 13 towns. But Zillow, which has much deeper pockets, is pushing forward.

"In the offline world, conversations happen all the time around homes, neighborhoods and communities. With these additions, we're adding the data, tools and a platform for these conversations to thrive online – and help people become smarter about real estate, for free, in the process," said President Lloyd Frink in a statement.

In addition to the new neighborhood pages, Zillow -- following up on Redfin's announcement last week -- is creating community forums for people to discuss national real estate topics. It also is adding the ability for people to add polls to the Web site. And the company upgraded its home page in order to give return users more personalized information about their neighborhoods.