(CBS/KPIX) - Moving your neighborhood association online may seems like the antithesis of community, but a new company says they're putting the neighborhood on the net. It's actually getting the users out of the house.
When Steve Osborn moved his family to Orinda, California last year, they had no trouble meeting the neighbors.
"When we bought the house, the sellers introduced us to Nextdoor and invited us to join," says Steve Osborn. With a few steps to verify he really lived in the neighborhood, Osborn became part of "Nextdoor Sleepy Hollow," a private social network just for his area.
"We use it to meet people," says Osborn. He also uses it to recommend household service providers, find baby-sitters, even share solutions for getting rid of garden moles.
"It's absolutely not a replacement for those real-world conversations you have with your neighbors," says Nirav Tolia. "It just makes it easy to get to know them and eventually get together with them more frequently."
Nextdoor.com CEO Nirav Tolia and his co-founders came up with the idea of using technology to build community. "The more that you communicate with your neighbors using online tools, the more likely you are to communicate with them in person."
That's exactly what Rebecca Branstetter found when she and her husband Steve joined the Nextdoor network for their Oakland hills neighborhood. "We didn't know that this neighborhood had a lot of young children in it and we were really excited when people would join on Nextdoor we would see that they had kids and we could have play dates."
"The more neighbors you know, the easier it is to communicate with them. The easier it is to communicate with your neighbors, the easier it is to look out for each other," says Tolia.
That was certainly the case in the Branstetter's area, when neighbors started noticing unusual activity. "We started getting security alerts about burglaries in the neighborhood," says Branstetter.
And we were able to get a description of the car, part of the license plate, the perpetrators, and later the police were able to apprehend them."
Nextdoor is still running on venture capital, but Tolia says it will always be free for users.
