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Online Communities Endure as Platforms Come and Go
By Andrew Goodman, April 28, 2001
"There is something agreeable even in the weakness of
friendship and humanity. The too tender mother, the too indulgent father, the
too generous and affectionate friend, may sometimes, perhaps, on account of the
softness of their natures, be looked upon with a species of pity, in which, however,
there is a mixture of love, but can never be regarded with hatred and aversion,
nor even with contempt, unless by the most brutal and worthless of mankind. It
is always with concern, with sympathy and kindness, that we blame them for the
extravagance of their attachment."
- Adam Smith, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments (1759)
What exactly is online community? Is it
dying?
Much has been written about the general decline of community in
modern life. Yet we are bombarded with commercial messages that suggest that
everything is hunky-dory.
Years after AT&T launched its famous "reach
out and touch someone" campaign, critics pointed to the irony: at the same time
as families became more dispersed and distant, images of togetherness were
promoted in unrealistic TV shows (The Brady Bunch, which seemed to prove that
divorce actually led to togetherness) and in the advertising for a large phone
company, which sought to make a virtue out of the very distance that seemed to
be undermining our personal relationships.
A
quick look (http://www.drarndt.com/slogan.htm)
at slogans for major products and major corporations confirms that nearly all of
them attempt to convey the fact that there is either (a) something "real,"
physical, or substantial in the product or service, and/or (b) that "real"
people are providing the good or service. It's a nearly universal strategy:
you're in "good hands" with Allstate; reach out and touch someone (through a
phone line); an airline calming your fear of flying by reassuring you that these
are "friendly" skies; a major motel chain promises to "leave the light on for
you"; American Express reminds you that you shouldn't be "leaving home" without
traveller's cheques, and so on and so on. With all of this effort put into
convincing us that the personal touch is still intact in a world of rapidly
advancing technology dominated by huge multinational corporations, the only
logical response is to suspect that it can't possibly be true.
In recent decades, cultural critics like Robert D.
Putnam [author of an influential academic essay "Bowling Alone: America's
Declining Social Capital," later turned into a book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse
and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000, with updated
statistics - http://www.bowlingalone.com)] trotted out
statistics to prove that people are now less inclined to be involved in local
community organizations, volunteer groups, and even bowling leagues.
In spite of it all, however, community always seems
to endure. Just as one form of community seems to dry up or succumbs to the
unrelenting forces of progress, social dislocation, war, or technological
change, other manifestations of community emerge.
Given our apparent
thirst for community, and the challenges facing it as we attempt to maintain
connections in an urbanized, commercialized, globalized world,
online forms of community have borne a huge burden to replace
what critics like Putnam feel has been lost. For every story about Internet
addiction leading victims to ignore their families and become withdrawn,
anti-social, and depressed, there is a countervailing example of a person who
has found a support group, employment prospects, or a community of like-minded
topical enthusiasts through the 'net.
Because of the potential for some forms of online community
to replace, supplement, or even reinvigorate some of those clubs, bowling
leagues, causes, and families we don't connect with as often as we (supposedly)
once did, is there cause for concern as so many platforms for the development of
online community are going belly up? If there is nothing to replace them, then
maybe so. If broadcast, run by large entertainment companies, takes back some of
the mindshare that had been gained by interactive media, we risk a tilting of
our focus back towards the mindless television watching that threatens to turn
our brains to sauerkraut.
Watching trends, and trying to make sense of them all, is almost
impossible - although this never stopped pop sociologists like Faith Popcorn, or
pop political scientists like Robert Putnam. Take Yahoo, for instance, and try
to read its tea leaves. Yahoo is a major starting point for millions of Internet
users. The Yahoo experience contains a healthy dose of interactivity. At its
worst, there are the stock chat boards on Yahoo finance, where "shorts" and
"longs" trade insults in a feeble attempt to influence the direction of the
stocks in which they hold positions. Yahoo! Geocities is another supposed
manifestation of community, but is mainly just a platform for people without
design skills to put up a personal web site quickly. The citizenship aspect of
Geocities was always exaggerated, and since the Yahoo acquisition there has
seemed to be little "there there." Yahoo! Clubs, on the other hand, seem to be more like hives of intimate activity: anyone can
set up a Club, which is like a private (or public) intranet for people who want
to take advantage of a variety of interactive capabilities including
message boards, photo posting, member profiles, etc. Yahoo! has also recently
acquired eGroups, a full-featured email list management service which has been
renamed Yahoo Groups. Word has it that Clubs will be merged with Groups. For
anyone wanting a free "listserv" with many added bells and whistles, Yahoo
Groups is as good as it gets.
Of course, not everyone wants to
go into Yahoo's house to run their topical club, vertical portal, or online
support group. Not everyone searching for serious topical information likes the
atmosphere at Yahoo! Experts or Yahoo! Finance chat boards. And so there is
unsurprisingly a considerable demand for alternatives. Users have flocked in
droves to "networks of topical sites" such as About.com, or off-the-beaten track
"edited topical communities by real people for real people" such as that at
Suite101.com. Budding authors have joined with self-publishing venues such as
Themestream. Volunteer editors have
signed up with the Open Directory Project and Zeal.com to maintain directories
of topical resources.
A surprisingly common theme in all of this,
especially when talking with those who create and maintain these types of venues
for community, is the perceived importance of creating a good "platform" to
allow community to flourish. Depending on the type of community it is, a good
platform might mean interactive features (message boards, chat, email groups);
resource creation facilities (a way of posting links or creating one's own
directory of important resources); content; collaboration facilities (the
ability to run a project or publish a web site using a content management system
allowing for different levels of access for a geographically-dispersed team of
employees or enthusiasts); and so forth.
While it may be true that a
great platform is vital to the flourishing of human connections and the
management of knowledge in an online environment, however, a good many "online
community platforms" are being crushed by market forces these days.
As reported in a recent edition of
Cashel and Shafer's Online Community Report (http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com/), a shocking number of topical-community platform builders
have gone the way of the dodo in the first quarter of 2001. Most recently, we
have witnessed the demise of Themestream, eCircles, Rivals.com, SourceXchange,
Clip2, and numerous others.
Community members are
getting pretty good at recovering from such minor displacements. They pick
themselves up, dust themselves off, and quickly reassert their presence in
another location. [See "Where Have All the Go Guides Gone?," Traffick, Feb. 28,
2001,http://www.traffick.com/story/2001-02/go_guides.asp; LookSmart Plays Community Trump Card with Zeal Acquisition,http://www.traffick.com/story/10-2000/zeal.asp.]
At the same time as a lot of community-fostering
platforms are being put on the shelf, many are just ramping up, and a few
pioneers are bravely soldiering on. Let's take a glimpse at a couple of case
studies that emphasize the peril and promise facing those who build the nuts and
bolts underlying online communities of interest.
Suite 101: Real People Helping Real
People
Suite 101 (http://www.suite101.com) was a true
'net pioneer - a topical community founded on the premise that the Internet
could provide the ultimate venue for "self-expression," particularly for budding
authors and topical enthusiasts. Its founders began with a simple vision: a
place where ordinary people could go to learn about a topic from like-minded,
well-educated volunteer editors. The end result, a roster of human-edited online
subject areas, looks quite a bit like the better-known About.com (formerly, The
Mining Company, and now, "About - The Human Internet). Suite 101 has run on more
modest (but still substantial) funding, and operates in unassuming fashion from
its HQ in Vancouver, British Columbia. (About.com, recently acquired by offline
publisher Primedia, is based in New York.)
Suite 101's co-founder and
current Managing Director, Julie Bradshaw, is passionate about what online
communities can do for the "real people" who frequent Suite 101. Who are these
people? Suite 101's demographic profile is interesting in itself. The service's
users are over 60% female, with a high proportion of university-educated users.
The average age is 35, and over half are married with children. Many users have
connected with people in similar situations as themselves, supporting one
another on a huge range of real life issues.
Bradshaw's topical examples
tend to convey the unique flavor of this site - far from the techie-dominated
discussions that seem to dominate the net. She frequently mentions French
Literature, which was her university major.
Stumbling into Suite 101 is,
at first blush, a bit like stumbling into an elementary school library: its
subjects are organized using the Dewey Decimal system. This is actually a pretty
decent way to go about it. Bradshaw points out that most online directories -
most notably Yahoo - were started by people with technical backgrounds in
software and engineering. The Yahoo classification system was developed on the
fly by Yang and Filo, who knew little about library science or linguistics. "Why
would they?," Bradshaw wonders aloud. At least systems like Dewey and the
Library of Congress classification system inject some notion of standardization
into the task of classifying online resources; too often, as with the ambitious
but unwieldy Open Directory Project, this can be a game of
taxonomy-by-amateurs.
Still, those of us who secretly suspect that some
cutting-edge techies may have something over those librarians can't help but
wonder if the Dewey Decimal approach is the right one, especially as the
developers of XML and related "semantic web" specifications work on advanced
technologies to classify every possible type of resource or object that could be
accessible online.
The main purpose of Suite 101 was to inject a human
element into the online search for information. Search engines, as we know, are
often too good at digging up mountains of information. Expert guides and editors
add a needed layer of filtering ("it's like making a good cup of java," says
Bradshaw); they can recommend resources, produce content, and structure
information so that users can access the vital material without having to slog
through irrelevant junk.
In building a team of contributing editors,
Suite 101 wound up with a large "publishing community." Over time, the process
became more routinized and professional; today, managing editors vet the work of
contributing editors to ensure that it is of high quality, and volunteer copy
editors keep things neat and grammatical.
Bradshaw points to the
importance of a strong "back end" platform to facilitate collaboration and
administration of such a large site. The task of managing close to 1,400
contributors and volunteer copy editors is no small one. While proudly extolling
the virtues of Suite's some 80,000 pages of unique content, at one point she
seemed to suggest that the Suite's business model in future could revolve around
developing its content management and collaboration platform to offer its robust
features to large enterprises.
Given the value of the community itself,
one hopes that both sides of the equation can prove economically viable and
sustainable. Suite 101 has time to make up its mind on this one; unlike many
companies facing a tight timeline to profitability, it has the luxury, according
to Bradshaw, of having "a couple years' worth of cash left in the
bank."
Suite could easily be written off
as a quaint place where people come to talk about their pets (http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/242/64259). Maybe so; but it's worth pointing out that quaint places
are in demand,
and facing shortages of supply. Suite 101 may be unassuming,
but like a small Welsh village, it has an enduring and picturesque quality to
it.
The EZBoard Caper: Sometimes a
Message Board is Just a Message Board
The quintessential interactive online app is the message board or
bulletin board. There must be a hundred companies that make message board
software. One of the most popular is Ultimate Bulletin Board, made by a company
called Infopop. Infopop has increased the power of its software over the years
and has apparently taken advantage of the strong demand for its products by
increasing prices and courting a business clientele. The least expensive option
for "lite" users is a hosted message board solution for $28 per month (and up,
depending on usage).
A company
called EZBoard (http://www.ezboard.com) entered this
market in the heady days of advertising-supported online services. Its message
boards are high quality and software upgrades are frequent. Best of all for many
users, the software was free. Then they hit the wall as the advertising market
collapsed. So EZBoard dithered over new revenue models. Given that many UBB
users (see above) pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year for similar
software, it looks as if EZBoard dithered a bit too carefully. They came up with
the idea that users (not publishers) of the message boards could turn off the
advertising by
paying a $15 annual fee. And they clung to the advertising
model for those site owners who refused to pay for a no-ad option. This latter
was announced later: a further $30 year would be charged to give "Gold"
subscribers a higher service level which would include no ads.
In the
process of evolving its pricing model, EZBoard unnecessarily antagonized many
message board administrators. Until they got around to paying for an upgrade,
message board owners were treated to forums with four
kinds of advertising: a text link reminding them to upgrade;
multiple banner ads; Sprinks (sponsored links tacked onto the bottom of
discussion threads); and to really rub it in, popups.
All rather
unnecessary. Given their competition's pricing for comparable products, EZBoard
could have introduced a $50 or $100 per year Gold option some time
ago.
So in frustration over this dithering and in a fit of excessive
interest in the logic of someone else's business model, yours truly had a short
tiff with the President and COO of EZBoard, Steve Demello. One point made by the
EZBoard brass in response to member concerns over the new fee structure is that
without subscription fees, "these communities will simply go away." Demello and
Goodman agreed to disagree over the small points, and the brouhaha
passed.
One thing that sticks in my mind from the incident is the notion
that communities will go away if their platforms shut down. But very often this
is not the case. Communities often roam in nomadic fashion until
they find a suitable landing spot. I participate in several online
communities whose main feature is message boards. Some of the messaging is
built in-house; other sites use software from providers
like Infopop, EZBoard, Boardhost, etc. None of those communities will
disband if the software maker folds or institutes an unreasonable balance
between price and service. The community will simply pick up its marbles and
move.
They'll move to any place that can keep the community intact while
they search for a better option: to an email distribution list based on
someone's Outlook Express address book and a lot of cc:'d messages, to a private
web site with in-house software development, or even to Yahoo Groups, if
necessary.
It seems as if some makers of community-facilitating products
get so caught up in the idea of community that they begin to see their work as
if it were in fact community development. In other words ("reach out and touch
someone"), they start believing their own advertising. But isn't software best
conceived as software? While Nortel Networks, which specializes in networking
technology that powers global telecommunications, cunningly used the Beatles'
"come together" in its television advertising campaign, one assumes that Nortel
is not literally in the "hug" business.
At the end of the day, we kept
our EZBoard instead of switching to Infopop. The main reason was that the
software is a very good deal for the price. Had EZBoard continued annoying us
with popups and Sprinks, we would have been forced to change
providers.
The point: we didn't send money to EZBoard in order to
"support" communities or community in general. We just wanted some decent
software. When we mulled it over, we realized that EZBoard's new price structure
was very fair.
So You Want to Build a
Vortal?
It gets dizzying trying to keep up with the
many available platforms and packages for people wanting to build topical
community web sites with various bells and whistles. Some cover the whole gamut
of needs, while others specialize and offer only a couple of very specific
pieces of the puzzle. (For a discussion list about this topic, join our Portal
Builders Discussion List:
http://www.topica.com/lists/portalbuilders/ ).
Bill Fisher, co-founder of one new
vortal infrastructure provider, Bellevue, WA-based Spoke.net (
http://www.spoke.net), walked me through his
company's unique offering recently. The service addresses many of the key needs
facing the builders of online communities. Its greatest strength appears to be
administration and content management. Different team members can be assigned
different access levels so that advanced site management functions can be
performed by administrators, while writers can post articles without needing any
HTML or programming knowledge, and have the site's navigation automatically
build in logically-organized links to those articles. Forum moderators can also
be given access to manage interactive areas of the site.
Spoke.net has also taken the trouble to
build its own email newsletter feature for site owners wanting a robust solution
in this area.
Some of Spoke.net's functionality piggybacks on a sophisticated
open source content management platform called Zope, which is becoming better
known to serious hackers and tinkerers.
Perhaps what was most impressive
to me about the demo of Spoke.net was that it staked out that middle ground
between entry-level free or nearly free services, and prohibitively expensive
corporate portal platforms. For a few hundred or a few thousand dollars
depending on the needed functionality, a site administrator has a powerful
content management, team collaboration, and vertical portal/ online-
community-oriented platform at his or her disposal. Many competing vendors only
really do one thing well, leaving the site owner to shop around for other needed
functionality; Spoke.net offers a broad range of features without compromising on quality or customization options.
Leaving aside
everything else, sophisticated content management systems aren't cheap. One of
the leaders in this field, Allaire, charges $75,000 and up. If more
modestly-priced solutions like Spoke.net can get the word out, a lot of online
community builders can say goodbye to their days of labor-intensive site
management and awkward handling of content.
An Oversupply of
Technology? There are good reasons for us all to be
vocal proponents of the continued fostering of online community. The drawbacks
of the online phenomenon, it would seem, are clearly outweighed by the social
and economic benefits of group forming. Those who succesfully build open,
interactive networks stand to benefit economically (Reed's Law,
http://www.reed.com/Papers/GFN/reedslaw.html; see
also The Cluetrain Manifesto at
http://www.cluetrain.com; and also Seth Godin,
Unleashing the Ideavirus,
http://www.ideavirus.com); those who unnecessarily restrict the flow of communication are
limiting the potential benefit to their own enterprises and to society (as
argued by Jakob Nielsen, "Metcalfe's Law in Reverse,"
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990725.html).
It may well be that the huge
benefit to society promised by online group formation, and the vast global
thirst for a continued rapid buildout of forms of online collaboration and
community, are what attracted so many community platform builders to enter the
fray so hastily. In spirited discussions about discussions and the platforms
that make them possible (see
http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-jan19-01.html#email), it looks like there could be more of this "community interaction
technology" than we might ever want or need. The market is
currently dealing with the oversupply.
Online Community is Like a Haunted
1958 Plymouth The death of a few entrants into the field
of online-community-empowering software and services should be seen as a normal
adjustment to overinvestment in particular technologies and services. We've
observed many communities being displaced as corporate strategies change or as
the service providers go out of business. But like Christine, the haunted 1958
Plymouth Fury in Stephen King's novel, the pieces of displaced online groups
seem to knit themselves back together quite readily. Before long, the engine is
revving again, the radio playing the same song as it was before she was thrown
on the scrapheap. And these signals travel in all
directions.
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