Nextdoor, the social network built for the neighborhoods around you, just dropped some great news. They are leading with a set of major improvements to further engage the user. For 15 years, the creative company’s work has been a catalyst of community dialogues across the country. Today, it’s digitizing and making local word-of-mouth ubiquitous with unique features. These updates bring groundbreaking features such as personalized local news and real-time emergency alerts. You can check out an AI-powered feature Faves that helps you find local businesses and things to see in your itinerary.
Nextdoor serves as a vital resource for hyperlocal information that is often unavailable through larger platforms such as Google or ChatGPT. Users often ask for advice on Nextdoor when they need to find a plumber, for example, or look for restaurants close by. This most recent update introduces some pretty exciting changes! The new feature makes local news available right inside the app, so they know what’s going on around them and back home.
The new feature “Faves” uses artificial intelligence from conversations among neighbors. This is all possible because of the power of the platform to provide targeted, tailored automated suggestions for local businesses and services. According to Nirav Tolia, co-founder of Nextdoor, “We have an LLM for every neighborhood where we’ve taken 15 years of neighbor conversations and we can now answer questions about that information in a really compelling way.” The new capability will greatly enhance the user experience. It will serve up tailored recommendations that are in step with the priorities and knowledge of folks who live and breathe their communities.
Nextdoor is just one company trying to improve its platform’s emergency response capabilities. To help promote local businesses and spread local news, they have recently partnered with Samdesk and Weather.com. This joint partnership will enable the app to provide extremely localized, real-time alerts to the public. This is an incredibly important feature because Nextdoor is inherently tied to a geospatial platform. Tolia explained the significance of these alerts: “When there’s something that is definitely worth paying attention to, we call that the yellow state, and we’ll put that alert right at the top.” This will allow users to receive more timely notifications about emergencies or important events occurring in their immediate area.
Nextdoor’s commitment to fostering local conversations extends far past just offering a free, online forum for dialogue. The platform intends to let small businesses, schools and other community organizations create native presences within the app. This program builds on the new relationships and trust formed between local businesses and their neighbors during the pandemic. It further provides businesses a space to interact face-to-face with their customers.
Historically, Nextdoor has used a content moderation model called “community moderation” that only employs user-generated content made by neighbors. Tolia emphasized the importance of this approach, stating, “The reason that this is so important for us is historically, Nextdoor has relied 100% on user-generated content.” This groundwork has enabled the platform to flourish as a reliable research source for deep local knowledge.
Nextdoor is still growing and developing, acknowledging the irreplaceable role it plays in neighborhoods. Local news and real-time alerts take it to another level on top of its amazing features. This new add-in deepens its function as a connective tissue between people and communities. As Tolia humorously pointed out, “I give the funny example of, if you wanted to know all the lemonade stands that kids are operating in your neighborhood, you can’t go to Google Maps and find that.” This underscores just how unique Nextdoor’s offerings are compared to other large search engines.