From time to time I ghost write blog posts on the subject of communities. Recently requests have grown for reviews of community based applications and as a software developer by trade these are the kind I like most.
The “social phenomenon” is a big community driver. Places where people like to meet are definitely treasure troves, at least as far as investors are concerned.
My own belief is places such as digg and facebook are doomed to failure. Why? Well not because they are not useful or because the attract large communities, they are both good at that. I believe they suffer from the same problem early web site builders ran across at the beginning of the 90’s. That is, how do you make people pay? All to often web sites fall back on the age old web-disaster, aka Advertising.
facebook face the largest negative profits in history and have little to show for it apart from a clueless and somewhat depressed founder – other than a community. And what if that community turns on them? Would facebook and digg be as popular if they sold to Microsoft? That would be as damning for them as allowing perverts free access to their membership.
As a keen member of both communities I don’t like to think of them under threat, but herein lies the conundrum. How can they make them commercially viable. facebook’s revolutionary and functional advertising implementation is encouraging. To put a dent in their negative equity will need more than that. As a user I am reluctant to invest too much time in facebook as it’s unlikely they will survive the test of time. Quite how Zuckerberg’s backers take it when he shrugs of yet another $150m loss is hard to imagine, and digg are in a similar position.
Self built communities will work for the common good. That is we will join communities of specific interest that are not encumbered by the generalisation of sites such as digg and facebook and that do not need a commercial reason to exist.
In the Internet gold rush all kinds of crazy ideas were backed but it’s those that had done well offline that really excelled online. The weird ideas remained exactly that, weird and mostly not profitable.
The age of the community is coming, it will be in every aspect of our lives and advertisement will be replaced with real information, possibly even fact. Bill board and media advertisers will lose their grip.
I have believed for a long time that as radio lost ground to TV so would TV lose ground to the web but never did I think it would happen so fast.
