Entries Tagged 'Community' ↓

Jon Lebkowsky has written a response to The Economist’s article on Social Networks, Everywhere and Nowhere on the Social Web Strategies blog. Money quote:

For months I’ve been saying that Facebook is the next AOL - a gated community that works for a while, but ultimately can’t be open enough to sustain prominence. This is probably true of MySpace, too… at the moment, both systems are growing and capturing mindshare… will this last?

I haven’t mentioned it here yet but earlier this week I signed on to be an anchor member of Montreal’s own Station C co-working space. In the old days, there were desk-rental outfits where people could, for a small fee, go and work back when working at home was not respectable or even possible for most people.

Co-working is different than that. Co-working is explicitly about not only the facilities themselves but the community using the facilities as well. I’ve been discussing this idea with one the founders of Station C, Patrick Tanguay for several years now, and I’m really excited that he and and Daniel Mireault have managed to get Station C off the ground. And even more, that they have succeeded in landing a prime location and doing a top-notch job in terms of furnishings and recruiting. Judging by the list of people I know who will be joining us, it’s going to be a fantastic crew.

Journalist Mark Glaser, host and editor of MediaShift, has published a fantastic post: Traditional Media Ready to Elevate the Conversation Online. It’s all about how the so-called mainstream media has been trying to adapt to a media environment in which discussion and audience commentary is ubiquitous. It turns out there is starting to be a bit of a consensus around best practices, though these are far from universal yet.

John Battelle is reporting on his Searchblog that SixApart has sold LiveJournal to SUP, with whom they had entered into a partnership/localization agreement just over a year ago. I don’t know the details, but it makes sense for 6A to have cut LiveJournal loose - the journalling/social networking product doesn’t really fit into their blog-centric and increasingly enterprise-oriented strategy.

Here’s the press release from Six Apart.

There’s an interesting article in the NYTimes today about the concept of “friends” and social networks: Friending, Ancient or Otherwise. The suggestion in the article is that one of the reasons humans respond so well to online social networks is that they tap into ancient communication and community-forming patterns. I have been writing the same thing about older-style online community for years now (which reminds me, I should collect some of that writing and post it here).

It’s hardly news, but Matt Haughey (and the team - Josh Millard, Jessamyn West, and Paul Bausch) has build one of the web’s great online communities over the years. In the last little while, they have been quietly adding a raft of really great community-building features.

One example unveiled today: Profile Photos of MeFites - succinctly introduced by Matt: “updated nightly, a dump of everyone’s uploaded profile photo”. Doesn’t seem like much, perhaps, compared to the latest chump-biting app from Facebook (!) or whatever - but the sum of this plus the rest of the new features is far greater than the parts. In a web full of “communities” that seem to be defined as narrowly and shallowly as possible, MetaFilter is a beacon of what the “social web” can be.