Thursday, November 12, 2015

What Is Nextdoor.com?

The Dearborn Police announced today they have partnered with Nextdoor.com; but what is Nextdoor.com? Is S.O.D.A. using Nextdoor.com? Should you sign up?

Nextdoor.com is a "free" service what allows communities to create a private social network. Anyone can create and claim an area that isn't already claimed and make a "neighborhood". Once signed up you can invite others in that neighborhood to join. This includes email invites as well as postcards mailed to addresses you invite. Only people that can prove they live in that area can join your neighborhood.

S.O.D.A. has worked with Nextdoor.com's Support to claim as much of our boundaries as possible.  The S.O.D.A. board is posting information and maintaining the Southwestern Outer Drive page on Nextdoor.com, however Nextdoor.com is NOT going to be the main source of association information.

The main information source will remain www.sodadearborn.com
Many residents do not want to be on social media sites of any kind. We want to make it as easy as possible for residents, this is why we've spent considerable time this past year creating several avenues in which to receive association information.

List of S.O.D.A. information sources and priority;
  1. http://www.sodadearborn.com
  2. https://www.facebook.com/groups/southwesternouterdrive/
  3. https://twitter.com/SodaDearborn
  4. https://southwesternouterdrive.nextdoor.com/
Should you sign up for Nextdoor.com? There are a couple things to consider.
  • The creators of Nextdoor.com have stated in articles in the New York Times and Mashable.com that one of the goals of the site is to mine the data in order to serve ads to it's users. Of course the site needs to fund it's self somehow.
  • Once registered on the site, your address is listed on your profile and your property is highlighted on a map. The address in your profile can be hidden by changing the default settings for your account, but your property will still be highlighted on the map as being apart of Nextdoor.com
  • Personal information entered into your profile is displayed to all users in your "neighborhood". Many of those people you may not personally know. The only way around that is to not fully fill out your profile.
  • Information posted to the site only reaches your neighborhood, or the immediately surrounding neighborhoods. While this is good in some cases, S.O.D.A. wants to be able to inform all city residents in other cases and this site would not allow that. This is why sodadearborn.com remains the main information source for the association.
For those that find Nextdoor.com a useful tool, you are more than welcome to use it. For those that do not wish to join Nextdoor.com, know what nothing has changed for you. All information about S.O.D.A. and our events will be posted to sodadearborn.com and copied to sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Nextdoor.com

Below are a couple of screen shots of what Nextdoor.com looks like.