What Makes a Community?
By Tim
How do you define community? I know how I do, and I love what Adam Fields has to say on the topic.
There’s really only one rule for community as far as I’m concerned, and it’s this - in order to call some gathering of people a “community”, it is a requirement that if you’re a member of the community, and one day you stop showing up, people will come looking for you to see where you went.
How many of you want to be involved in places that would miss your talents, input, thoughts when you departed? Adam addresses this question and goes to discuss the loose ties that bind a lot of us online. Like water, we all can flow into Flickr, participate, and then leave - not to come back for weeks or forever, for that matter. I can’t remember a social networking or any website for that matter, that has contacted me via email asking me where I’ve been or why I’ve been lax in my participation. That sure sounds creepy and everyone pretty much knows that would just be automated emails, but maybe there needs to be work done in this area and less done in the funny or cute Server Error messages. Twitter, looking at you on this one.
Sphere: Related ContentThis entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 10:00 am and is filed under Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on May 22, 2007 at 12:18 pm Steve wrote:
agree, twitter is a good example. There are so called community sites though, like classmates, that keep bugging you to upgrade, not really a call back to the community if you ask me
on May 26, 2007 at 7:48 am Adam Fields wrote:
Glad you liked the piece. While I think the owners and operators of these communities can provide better tools and guide this process (and should!), it’s ultimately about the interactions between the users themselves.
I don’t want the site to send me an automated email asking why I stopped looking at their ads. I want my interactions with the other members to be meaningful enough that they miss it when it’s not happening. We have one side of it - people keep coming back because they want to see what’s new. But the other side is, for most people, too disparate, too faceless, and too fluid.