What Nextdoor is doing right with hyperlocal and Patch is doing wrong

Gigaom reporting:
Serving hyperlocal community-level or neighborhood-level markets with news and information is a tough business — just ask NBC, which recently closed the doors on its EveryBlock unit, or AOL, which is still fighting to keep the losses at its Patch operation from sinking the ship. So why should anyone pay attention to a startup like Nextdoor, which just got $21 million in financing from a group of venture capital funds? Because Nextdoor is doing the exact opposite of what Patch and others have done — instead of making its network wide-open, it is keeping the barriers to entry high, and that could be the key to its future success...
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Instead of starting with the news and then trying to add social-networking aspects later, Nextdoor started with the social networking side: the idea behind the service is that you and your neighbors need a place to talk about those school closings or crime reports or even where to find a good mechanic or babysitter, and doing it on Facebook or Twitter or another public network isn’t appealing for a variety of reasons, including privacy concerns.
So what Nextdoor does is make it as difficult as possible to join — the exact opposite of what Facebook and even Patch try to do. Only people who actually live in a specific neighborhood can join the Nextdoor network for that area, and the service doesn’t just accept your word: it verifies it by checking your credit-card information, calling your home phone or sending a postcard directly to your house with a special registration code on it.


http://gigaom.com/2013/02/12/what-nextdoor-is-doing-right-with-hyperlocal-and-patch-is-doing-wrong/