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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

So Nextdoor will have a competitor soon. I was honestly wondering when this would happen because the geographic based reviews and advertising approach totally aligns with the type of service that Google would NOT kill after a couple of years.

Maps, business reviews and advertising...only makes sense.

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Why isn't Facebook competing more actively in this market? It seems that the data they have access to is better suited for this scenario.

They used to have a neighborhood feature, but I am guessing it just fizzled. Also I don’t really want my neighbors to have a view into my Facebook profile

Remember sidewalk? There have been a number of players who could have parlayed into nextdoors turf, but have not been successful. Google has the budget and heft, so maybe.

Google just can't let anyone else corner the market on something. Its like a virus.

A virus that makes them create a half-stepping competitor before shutting the whole thing down in a couplefew years.

Yep. At this point I’m burned out on google products and moving on. No way would I commit more data to google for something they’ll abandon when the person who used this project as their resume builder moves on to the next job.

Unless they're going to leverage their monopoly in Search or Android to get into this business, Nextdoor doesn't have anything to worry about. Google doesn't have a history of releasing products that succeed organically.

And they probably will, but that's why the EU's antitrust cases against Google are so important!

> Nextdoor doesn't have anything to worry about

Also, a good part of Nextdoor's growth is due to real-world hands-on activity. Things like actual people being rewarded for handing actual neighbors flyers. Nextdoor will even send its members postcards to get their neighbors on board. Again -- physical objects.

Google doesn't do physical. If a problem can't be done remotely through machine learning, it's not worth doing.

Does Nextdoor have employees delivering those rewards for the flyers? If not, I don't see what's so different. Sending a postcard is just calling a different API.

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