Facebook Takes Aim At Nextdoor With New “Neighborhoods” Feature

When your company gets big enough and an idea infringes upon your customer base, you always have the option to just rip it off and claim it as your own. After all, Microsoft started its journey to becoming a trillion dollar company with Windows 95 after ripping off Apple, who ripped off their operating system from Xerox.

And that trend in technology is still apparent today with Facebook, who is now testing a “Nextdoor” style feature called Neighborhoods, that allows users to join community based groups. 

When you enter a profile and address it allows you to join a local neighborhood so you can display posts and content just among neighbors, including people who may not be friends. 

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Facebook told Bloomberg about the feature: “More than ever, people are using Facebook to participate in their local communities. To help make it easier to do this, we are rolling out a limited test of Neighborhoods, a dedicated space within Facebook for people to connect with their neighbors.”

The feature could have a major impact on NextDoor, which works with 25% of U.S. neighborhoods, per engadget. Nextdoor helps people inform neighbors about events, the sale of items and report crimes. 

“We’re going to make communities as central to the FB experience as friends and family,” Mark Zuckerberg was heard saying both last year and this year. 

Facebook’s feature could also allow the platform to hone in aggressively with their advertising and gather more data on its users – two big positives for the social network. Meanwhile, the project is already being beta tested in Canada:

You can select your local neighbourhood + permit FB to use your location to display posts, groups, marketplace items + more from your others in your neighbourhood

You can create a ‘Neighbourhood’ profile for other users, who are not Facebook ‘friends’, to learn more about you pic.twitter.com/P0Ys3w9d4L

— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) October 20, 2020