Next Door Is The Winner

Way back in the early 2000s there were several web sites that wanted to help activists and neighbors keep tab on goings-on in the neighborhood. Some of these were focused on crime, drawing information from police data in cities across the country. Many of these are still around such as Mylocalcrime.com and Crime Report. Others would offer features such as aggregate data about weather, real estate, city inspections and other activity, or try to open communications channels between citizens and government.

 Still others tried to set up hyperlocal news feeds (patch.com, newsvine, everyblock) or create local social justice movements (unthink.com). But one by one these  fell by the wayside or became irrelevant. Nextdoor.com won.

Nextdoor is, as you undoubtedly know, a social network for neighborhoods. It's like a private Facebook for your block and surrounding streets. Users are vetted by the nextdoor system so that only people who actually live in the neighborhood can participate. Particpants can post news items, recommend local businesses, post classifieds, and share current or real-time info of use to the community. Local neighborhood leaders, such as community association officers, are invited by nextdoor to be lead members, responsible for inviting new residents to join and (lightly) policing the boards to keep the discussions, safe, friendly, and neighborly.

Each Nextdoor community follows the borders of defined city neighborhoods or natural boundaries. In our relatively small neighborhood there are 1024 households, according to Nextdoor. Of these 128 have joined, representing 171 individuals. Since our downtown community has apartments and multi-unit houses, this may overstate the actual number of households. On the map above, which covers a couple of neighborhood streets, green indicates houses or apartments with Nextdoor members. Yellow indicates pending invitations. Pink indicates non-members, though many of the pink areas are actually industrial properties.

Nextdoor can be highly useful. In the past 48 hours my neighbors have posted on dozens of different topics such as:

• questions about why police helicopters were busy over the neighborhood
• one person was giving away free infant car seats
• another person was selling a bench
• yet another per son was looking for a house-sitter
• questions were asked as towhen the fountains in the center of the city would be turned back on
• reports of a car break-in
• posts about traffic closings and safety tips for pets in summer

Once a critical mass of neighbors is involved Nextdoor operates much like other social networks except that its focus is solely on local news and information. Posts of personal news and family photos, sharing movies and music, and political arguments, such as one would find on Facebook, are rare. Political arguments in particular should be rare. They interfere with the goal of sharing useful civic information and building helpful community relationships based on shared geography, not on politics.You can read more about site features and tools here.

Currently, commercial information on Nextdoor.com is limited to user recommendations of existing businesses. That could change. Nextdoor.com evolved from an earlier social ratings site called Epinions.com.  It's ultimate aim is to make money connecting local businesses via advertising to residents or connecting them to services.