Ever wish you could easily contact all your neighbors at once and let them know that you’re having a party, and might be just a little bit louder than usual this weekend, rather than go door-to-door?

Ever wish you could ask your neighbor to stop parking in your parking spot, without leaving a passive aggressive note?

Ever wish you could more effectively market a garage sale, a block party, a lemonade stand, or a missing bunny, without hanging posters everywhere in a 2-mile radius?

Well, now you can. And it’s pretty amazing.

My husband’s company, Shasta Ventures, recently invested in a site called Nextdoor, so I decided to check it out (loyal wife that I am).  The site markets itself as “The private social network for your neighborhood.” At first I was skeptical – we already have Facebook for keeping in touch with friends, not to mention Twitter, Instagram and the rest of the gang – why on earth do we need yet another social network to update and manage? But my husband’s colleagues are pretty smart and good at what they do, so I decided to give it a whirl.

Nextdoor is a free, private website that only verified neighbors can access. As soon as I heard about the site, I started thinking about tons of ways to use it: securing last minute babysitters, finding an electrician I can trust, and simply getting to know neighbors that I’ve never organically met while working in the yard. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my Bay Area neighborhood already had an active page (guess that’s what happens when you live in the Silicon Valley), and I signed our family up and waited to see what would happen.

I’m on a mission to unclutter and simplify my life, and one area that I kept neglecting as I sorted through my stuff was my exercise area. I had a bunch of exercise equipment in my basement that I never used and that just made me feel guilty every time I walked by, taunting me with the awesome body I could have if I actually made time to use the equipment.

Normally, my two routes for getting rid of the exercise stuff would be to list it on Craigslist, which would be effective, but then I’d have to deal with a ton of random people, or find a way to load it all into my car. I could also donate it to the local Goodwill, but again I would have to load up my car. Neither option sounded too appealing, which was why everything had sat in my basement for so long, reminding me of my daily laziness.

SEE ALSO: 10 Great Places To Sell Your Stuff Online

I posted a photo of what I wanted to give away, and within minutes I found a taker for half of the equipment. We were heading out to dinner, so I responded that I would just leave it outside my front door.  I placed it on my porch, and attached a little note about how glad I was that my exercise equipment was going to find a nice new home in the neighborhood.

When we returned from dinner, everything had been picked up, and in its place….a bag of delicious Ghiradelli chocolates and other goodies! I don’t know about you, but I have NEVER received a thank-you gift from anything I’ve posted on CraigsList. How cool!

A few minutes later, someone else responded to my post. Because they could see the other responses on the thread and knew that someone had already picked up the first half of the equipment, they asked if they could come by for the other half.  It was late, so I left the rest of the stuff outside my doorstep as well. When I woke up the next morning, it was gone and in its place…a $15 Starbucks gift card!

I was two-for-two on getting cool thank-you gifts in exchange for stuff!

I realized that there was a new kind of social norm emerging here. The fact that these people are your neighbors promotes a culture of sharing, kindness and appreciation. I definitely got the feeling that people on the site “had my back,” a feeling I don’t get on more anonymous sites.

The next day, my husband needed a ladder. We don’t have a car that can fit a ladder, so we needed to find one from someone on our block that we could carry over to our house. Within five minutes, he was able to locate a neighbor on Nextdoor who could loan him one.

What I realized through my experience with the site is that there is a special need to communicate with neighbors that doesn’t exist anywhere else online. There is a camaraderie that geographical closeness creates, and there are some things that you only need to share with people within a certain distance of your home. I can imagine the site being incredibly useful for communicating about crime in a neighborhood, or reacting to a potential disaster/crisis situation.

Now of course, the site is only useful if the majority of your neighborhood is on it.  If a request for a ladder falls in a forest and nobody hears it, has the request actually been made? Apparently, there is a really interesting tipping point, at which a neighborhood quickly goes from just a few people using the site to a lot of people using the site, almost overnight. This makes total sense because neighbors talk. In person. All the time. So as soon as a few people start using the service, word spreads like wild fire.

I’m excited to see how the site changes relationships within my neighborhood, and keep thinking up new things to post. So the next time I’m tempted to leave a passive aggressive note on someone’s windshield, or just blast loud music and pray….I’ll remember that I don’t have to.

Written by Randi Zuckerberg

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