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Communities

When everything becomes a Social Network, the name of the game becomes, “how do I build a vibrant community?” How do I get people to care about my service? How do I stand apart from every other “profile site” on the web? While every community is different and no one set of rules will bring yours to life, here are a few features that many of the best share.


Community Features

The hook. Who are you attracting, who are the core users that will keep the system moving even when no one else cares? For Facebook, it was college students. For MySpace, it was bands. For Twitter, it was marketers and early adopters. Without these evangelists, it will be all the harder to reach critical mass.

Circular logic. How does your network feed in on itself? A great example is Facebook’s Photo Gallery. After a while, you realize that most, if not all, of your pictures are on the site. Since it’s much easier to keep using one photo album than it is to spread yourself out across many, all future pictures end up being put Facebook. Now, even if you could care less about any other widget or dodad that Facebook turns out, it’s still your photo album.

Generalization. While all great communities have focus (it’s what draws in the initial user base), the one thing you see as you watch them mature is that after a while the people matter much more than the topic being discussed. Why are “General” areas on Forums so successful? It’s because it’s hard to discuss Medieval Chamber Music all day, every day. If you give people an outlet to do other things — it keeps them coming back.

Scores. People love to measure themselves against their peers. Any mechanism, from friend count (in the case of Social Networks) to post count (in the case of Forums), encourages use. While your best users may be the ones in the shadows, making sure everything stays in order — your absolute strongest users are going to be the ones fighting for every point.

Empowerment. Give your network the tools to control the development of the culture. Second Life did this (arguably to an extreme), Wikipedia does this and Forums do this (through community moderators). Giving people the power to change their world will help them become vested in the community. When people feel like nothing they say or do really matters, they are much less likely to come back.

Inside and Out. The best communities are those that provide value for those inside of them, as well as those just watching. Consider the fact that only a tiny fraction of registered users on Social Bookmarking sites actually ever submit stories, only a tiny fraction of people who use Wikipedia ever make a change. If you want your network to appeal to people outside of this small subset of the population, you need to make it easy for unregistered users to view and disseminate content.

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