Have you received a mailing from Nextdoor.com inviting you to join Nextdoor Newton Lower Falls (www.nextdoor.com/join)... perhaps by a neighbor you know? You might wonder how it is different from our ListServ or the two Lower Falls  Facebook groups.

Nextdoor.com is a legitimate site. It is sort of like Facebook for neighborhoods. I, too, got a post card asking me to join. I did because I was curious and I had heard good things about it.

It looks a lot like Facebook...in that people "post" a question, a picture, or make a statement. There are also a lot of advertisements. Lots and lots of advertisements. You can visit the site or you can opt to have updates sent to you via email. You can choose to have the updates sent daily or a couple times a week or shut them off completely. You can also do that with our listserv, by the way.

One useful thing is that you can broaden the area of what you consider your "neighborhood." If you want to include posts from Auburndale or Wellesley Lower Falls, you can.

My take on Nextdoor is this: it is fine. It might be annoying for some...but useful for others. We have a very homegrown email list in NLF. Nextdoor doesn't seem as personal or immediate as our listserv. Feel free to join it or the NLF facebook group that has been set up as well if you'd like to. There's no harm in trying it out unless you are very concerned about privacy issues--because there is no doubt that the people who run Nextdoor must be getting something out this wonderful "free" service that they've set up for us. The same goes for Facebook and Google! Our listserv is powered by "Google Groups," by the way!

Best,

Michael Lorant
Communications Chair, NLFIA