After forays into dating, the number one social network by users is “inspired” by Nextdoor with a feature that will help you get to know your neighborhood.
This isn’t the first time Facebook has been “inspired” by the ideas of a rival social network, it happened with live feeds (available first on Periscope, a sister app to Twitter) and then with Tinder, the most popular dating app around. Looking at everything from the outside, Zuckerberg’s choices have not always proved farsighted (the “stories”, launched first on Snapchat, work better on Instagram; online dating still travels mainly on Tinder), but this does not seem to discourage the young billionaire. It will be for the greater number of Facebook users, more numerous than any other social platform, but still an excellent starting point for testing new features.
What is the new Facebook feature dedicated to neighbors and neighborhood
So here is Neighborhoods, which will allow users of the blue effe to know places and people nearby. The function is practically the same as Nextdoor, a social networking service for inhabitants of the same neighborhood, launched in 2011 in the United States and available, to date, in 11 countries around the world, including Italy. In its launch phase, just begun, Facebook Neighborhoods is accessible only from Canada. But plans call for a later arrival in the United States.
How does Neighborhoods work? It is a specific section of the Facebook app, accessible to anyone who is registered with Zuckerberg’s social network and is over 18 years old. The Neighborhoods profile is different from the main one. It includes the possibility to upload a biography and report personal interests and favorite places. So the purpose is to help the user “connect with their neighbors, participate in local community activity and discover new places nearby,” so the company on the official blog.
What we still don’t know about Facebook’s special feature for local communities
At the moment it’s not very clear how the new Canadian feature differs from what, in fact, happens in Facebook groups (if you try to search by keyword, you’ll find that there’s probably already someone who has taken the trouble to group the inhabitants of your neighborhood or municipality). Probably everything will be more “organized” to meet the needs of local communities: Neighborhoods is proposed as a catalyst of social ties, but also a collector of these groups, in a game of subsets that, at least on paper, seems a bit confusing. And then it will offer the possibility of discovering new places recommended by the residents themselves, a useful information for those who have recently moved and that could also have a positive impact on the local economy.
Giuseppe Giordano