Good portals don't create communities. Here's why that's a good thing.
by Steve Tsuida, March 4
Just a quick thought on communities. Great tech never creates communities. It corrals them. (That only sounds bad.)
I've heard a fair bit of talk about the power of portals to create communities. Industry communities, association communities, professional communities, political communities. But here's the thing, any community worth being a part of already existed. Our technology didn't form those sports leagues, or those social bonds between executives. What we do is build a way for those communities to talk faster, more frequently, more inclusively, and ultimately more effectively.
That's better than creating communities.
Why? If we were in the business of creating communities, you'd almost have to ask whether these new communities were contrived and exclusive things where only those in the know made it in. That's why portals have to grow on top of, and serve pre-existing communities. They gather those people to a place that's both personalized and collective, where they can enjoy an easier time of being a community. (This may cause community growth so intense that it's mistaken for community creation.) In any event, rather than sound all airy and academic with words like gatherings and a confluence of thought, I like to say we corral people and give them a place to do their thing—and do it better. Because that's what we do.
Appendix A: Contrived communities vs. Pre-existing ones given a portal.
Think of Digg. A news site where Digg readers tell other Digg readers what they ought to go and look at on the web. It's billed as a news site, but the headlines hardly read like a typical newspaper would. "Gary Gygax, creator of D&D has passed.away at age 69". Exactly. Digg was a community that evolved inside of Digg rather than overtop the overall news-reading community, and so it's content reflects—not surprisingly—the tastes of a very small subset. You and I aren't necessarily any better informed by Digg even though Digg is enormous (and of course, vulnerable to replacement by the next better thing).
On the other hand, look at StuffOnMyCat.com. Stop laughing. Before this absolutely ridiculous site cropped up, there already was a community of strange and lonely people who liked to take remarkably dumb photos of their cats dressed as robots or buried in laundry. StuffOnMyCat.com came along and gave that community a central hub for their… behavior. Virtually everyone who's into weird pet photography has run over to Stuffonmycat.com and their new dog site too. They're all there, talking, buying branded shirts, making friends, and being a community and no one can drag them out to the next better thing. I said stop laughing.
Here's a question. Odds are you belong to one or more communities. In your industry, in your social circles, even in your workplace. You can probably name more than a few Digg-type sites thrown at your community that gathered a small subset of your peers; specialized little digital cliques that have hit a plateau and stopped giving as much as they take. Now, are you ready to give your comunity it's StuffOnMyCat.com, where everyone in the preexisting community can go, and do their thing? Are you ready to stop creating, and start coralling?
