A Chicago-founded social media site dedicated to informing and uniting neighbors is closing---again.
EveryBlock, the neighborhood news site that aggregated everything from news stories and crime reports to restaurant inspection results, will shut down July 19, and its users will be unable to access their past posts after that. Nextdoor, the neighborhood-centric social media platform, is acquiring the EveryBlock trademark and domain from Comcast.
Nextdoor co-founder and CEO Nirav Tolia declined to disclose the details behind the acquisition. A Comcast spokesperson also declined to disclose further details about the deal, but said that the move was “a business decision.”
“Though EveryBlock had a large number of users in Chicago, it wasn’t as successful in the limited number of other locations where it was available,” a Comcast spokesperson said in an email. “With a much larger national user base and availability in more than 175,000 neighborhoods across the country (and growing), Nextdoor is a more robust, readily-available and viable platform.”
After July 19, EveryBlock users in Chicago and other cities will be directed to set up an account with Nextdoor. The San Francisco-based startup will not obtain EveryBlock user information from Comcast, Tolia said. Though Nextdoor is acquiring the EveryBlock trademark and domain, it does not have the capabilities to continue running the site, Tolia said.
Current EveryBlock users must log in to download a PDF file containing their comments and posts. Comcast did not confirm whether the company would delete all user data after the site shuts down July 19.
“We don’t have expertise in what EveryBlock has built,” Tolia said. “It wouldn’t make any sense to continue EveryBlock as a standalone. That’s not our business; our business is Nextdoor.”
EveryBlock users who sign up for Nextdoor will be able to find out about local crimes, locate nearby businesses and communicate with other neighbors like they had before, but they won’t receive an automated feed of 311 requests, business licenses or other neighborhood-specific data points that EveryBlock used to aggregate from various sources, Tolia said.
In addition to talking with users who have verified their address, Nextdoor users can also find out about local events, neighborhood home values, and post lost and found notifications. Some of the Everyblock code will remain available on GitHub for free, Tolia added.
Adrian Holovaty launched EveryBlock in Chicago in 2008, jumpstarted by a $1.1 million grant from the Knight Foundation’s Knight News challenge in 2007. NBCUniversal, now owned by Comcast, acquired the hyperlocal news and social media site in 2009. In 2013, NBC unexpectedly shut down EveryBlock in 2013, a decision that drew outcries from more than 500 users at the time, according to CityLab. Following Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal, Comcast revived EveryBlock Chicago in January 2014, according to a company press release.
The site expanded to cities like Philadelphia, Boston, Denver, Houston, Nashville and Seattle. Since the announcement of the acquisition, Nextdoor has seen an uptick in Chicago-area users, Tolia said.
“It’s not as if we didn’t have a presence in Chicago... but we can always do better and this partnership will help us do that,” Tolia said.
