blogging.vc

Next week, I’ll have the pleasure to speak at Sinner Schrader’s birthday event here in Hamburg. I’ll have the opportunity to spend 15 minutes talking about “community” in the context of Web 2.0. As I was sitting down to think about what I might have to say, I thought it would be a good idea to outline a few of my preliminary thoughts and see if any of my readers would have comments. Here you go:

Statement #1: Great communities indirectly generate value for the community by offering a compelling value proposition to the individual.

When you sign up for del.icio.us, your motivation is almost always to find a better way to manage your bookmarks. Tags are a great means to do so, and del.icio.us is a nice and simple implementation of a web-based bookmarks manager. That’s the value proposition for you as an individual. However, by agreeing to make your bookmarks and the tags you used publicly accessible, you generate value for the community in two ways. For one, other readers can browse your collection of bookmarks and discover sites that you may have tagged with something that is of interest to them. Secondly, del.icio.us slowly becomes an index of the Internet constantly updated by its readers - if you click on the Web2.0 tag at del.icio.us you get a great selection of relevant links for this topic. That’s what I mean by value being generated for the community with no extra effort for the single user (other than making his data public). Similar examples are flickr, where people can discover other users’ pictures of the same event since they may have the same tag, or many of the music rating services such as last.fm where the individual’s rating helps to build a database of recommendations for all users.
All the above is something that has always been somewhat of an element in Internet communities, but I think it has only recently become the centerpiece of many communities. Tagging certainly plays a key role, as it is the mechanism that combines personal utility (organizing your data) with utility for the community (building a “folksonomy”).

Statement #2:
Social networking and utility/entertainment are often blended in one service.
Early social networks were focused on discovery. Take sixdegrees.com, where it was fun to connect to new people. The same model was revived with friendster, and since digital cameras had come around it was a bit more interesting to discover new profiles and became a great way to get a date. At the same time, services that focus on reviews such as Tripadvisor had only very limited social networking functionality, and the reviewer did not typically interact very much with other people on the site. Most of these communities had the issue that after sometimes terrific initial uptake, users never came back. After the initial discovery phase, there was less value (and fun) in staying an active user. Figuring out a lasting value proposition that will motivate people to not only use a social network for initial discovery, but for long term maintenance of their relationships is something that many new communities do well:
Yelp blends local reviews with social networking - why not meet the people that seem to always hang out at the same restaurants as yourself? The review content is the utility that makes people come back to the site. MySpace blends social networking for the young with music. That’s entertainment added to social networking. Facebook blends a directory service with social networking - that’s utility. Since Lars Hinrichs from OpenBC will be speaking with me at the event, I am sure he will explain how retention in OpenBC revolves around a clear value proposition. While OpenBC and LinkedIn could look like networking for networking’s sake, in this case networking is the value proposition - it has utility for your business life.

Statement #3: Openness, APIs and Plugins help build a passionate user base

One of the things that made flickr so successful was undoubtedly its API. It allowed you to post your most recent photos automatically on your blog, to create “mashups” such as mappr and so on. Both the ability to “take your data with you”, as in the example of displaying your latest flickr pcis on your blog and the ability to build applications “on top” of other services typically contributes tremendously to the success of a certain service. Think of all the plugins the Firefox developer community has come up with…true success for such projects is people coming up with extensions that the original developers would never have thought of.
Many people have understood that opening their data to the web and 3rd parties will actually increase the loyalty (and therefore value) of their user base as opposed to the traditional “lock in” strategy that many others have pursued. Another example is MySpace allowing users to use 3rd part tools to post content on their member sites….everyone started using YouTube to post their videos on MySpace and even though YouTube is probably getting a tad too popular for MySpace’s taste, the ability to integrate video content on the MySpace page has prevented users from running away to a new social network that would “natively” include video hosting. Exceptions however validate the rule…Skype’s tremendous success was not hindered by its closed approach and the pain to “migrate” all you buddies to a new tool such as GTalk is one of the strongest user retention factors for Skype.

These are my initial thoughts on the topic….however, I am sure there is a lot that I have forgotten and it would be great to get any feedback. It’s your chance to prevent me from ridiculing myself in front of a very educated audience…comments, please!