commercial brands can work well with community, but they tend to play more of a supporting role. You have to be careful, however, not to try to take the easy route to building something that looks like-but really isn't-what you want. There is even a name for attempting to create community by faking it: astroturfing, which means trying to create fake grassroots support Creating applications presents different challenges for startups companies. Small companies might lack the money and the staff to do 05: big things, but they can be flexible in terms of approach and have plenty of commitment. Larger companies might have more resources and an established name, but they will have existing working practices and many other products to look after The Distributed Nature of Seemingly Everything One surprising aspect of the Internet is the ease of information flow. The now former Domino's Pizza employees who posted a video of themselves doing unpleasant things to customers' pizzas on You Tube didn t realize how small the world has become Privacy is slowly evaporating, but you should make sure user expectations for privacy are clear within your application The Internet moves information quickly, but it also encourages distributed services The traditional model for a website is a centralized server and software. More services are becoming distributed, such as music and video file distribution via peer-to-peer (P2P) services such as Bit Torrent. Source code storage using tools such as Git and Mercurial has become increasingly popular for open source software. This same model can be applied to people. My music tastes are on Last. fm, my traveling habits are on Dopplr. my longer thoughts are on my blog, and my shorter ones are on twitter Several services, such as FriendFeed and the Activity Streams project, are trying to aggregate these fragments, recognizing this distributed nature can be turned into a strength. If you see the Internet as a place where people come to you, you will lose out If you see the Internet as something that you integrate with and propagate your content and services through, you can take advantage of its distributed nature Real-Time Services In addition to the social web, users are making a slow move toward a real-time Web Real-time services are one of the main themes emerging on the Web in 2009. There are still blog posts, photographs, and longer writing, but being able to deliver content as it happens is becoming an important service. Twitter leads in this area, but news services http://mashable.com/2009/04/15/youtube-fired/ 4 Chapter 1: Building a Social Application
commercial brands can work well with community, but they tend to play more of a supporting role. You have to be careful, however, not to try to take the easy route to building something that looks like—but really isn’t—what you want. There is even a name for attempting to create community by faking it: astroturfing, which means trying to create fake grassroots support. Creating applications presents different challenges for startups and big companies. Small companies might lack the money and the staff to do big things, but they can be flexible in terms of approach and have plenty of commitment. Larger companies might have more resources and an established name, but they will have existing working practices and many other products to look after. The Distributed Nature of Seemingly Everything One surprising aspect of the Internet is the ease of information flow. The now former Domino’s Pizza employees who posted a video of themselves doing unpleasant things to customers’ pizzas on YouTube didn’t realize how small the world has become.* Privacy is slowly evaporating, but you should make sure user expectations for privacy are clear within your application. The Internet moves information quickly, but it also encourages distributed services. The traditional model for a website is a centralized server and software. More services are becoming distributed, such as music and video file distribution via peer-to-peer (P2P) services such as BitTorrent. Source code storage using tools such as Git and Mercurial has become increasingly popular for open source software. This same model can be applied to people. My music tastes are on Last.fm, my traveling habits are on Dopplr, my longer thoughts are on my blog, and my shorter ones are on Twitter. Several services, such as FriendFeed and the Activity Streams project, are trying to aggregate these fragments, recognizing this distributed nature can be turned into a strength. If you see the Internet as a place where people come to you, you will lose out. If you see the Internet as something that you integrate with and propagate your content and services through, you can take advantage of its distributed nature. Real-Time Services In addition to the social web, users are making a slow move toward a real-time Web. Real-time services are one of the main themes emerging on the Web in 2009. There are still blog posts, photographs, and longer writing, but being able to deliver content as it happens is becoming an important service. Twitter leads in this area, but news services * http://mashable.com/2009/04/15/youtube-fired/ 4 | Chapter 1: Building a Social Application
and similar businesses are also involved. Building a real-time service doesnt suit everyone and can be an enormous endeavor. APls and Their Importance To effectively create services on the Internet, you need to create an APi-a means of distributing your content and system behaviors across the Web. APIs let users connect to your application without working through your web interface, allowing them to build new applications on your work. Some companies fear people not coming to their site, resulting in lost ad banner revenue, but it is far better to reach out via an API and create long-term active users than to make transient income from a few click-through ads. The more someone uses your services, the more you can learn about him. Making otherwise, your company will not thne e planning and sound web operations this work demands good infrastructu Collective Intelligence: The New Artificial Intelligence Many of the newer web applications start out with community at their core, acting as collective intelligence gatherers. Built on an architecture of participation, they encour- age individuals to enrich the site for themselves, and through this, engender a network effect that shows the richness available to all. a classic example of this is tagging adding a tag helps an individual find information again, but it also labels the item for someone else to find. Community is a core part of these collective intelligence appli cations. The design process to make these work well covers much of the same ground as discussion-led community sites Summary Designing your application and its role on the Internet is a start. Successful applications gather data, make it useful, and offer services based on it to the rest of the Web(as well as offering a fun place to hang out). A successful application is a combination of a small number of useful tools and a mechanism for social exchange among friends Summary5
and similar businesses are also involved. Building a real-time service doesn’t suit everyone and can be an enormous endeavor. APIs and Their Importance To effectively create services on the Internet, you need to create an API—a means of distributing your content and system behaviors across the Web. APIs let users connect to your application without working through your web interface, allowing them to build new applications on your work. Some companies fear people not coming to their site, resulting in lost ad banner revenue, but it is far better to reach out via an API and create long-term active users than to make transient income from a few click-through ads. The more someone uses your services, the more you can learn about him. Making this work demands good infrastructure planning and sound web operations— otherwise, your company will not thrive. Collective Intelligence: The New Artificial Intelligence Many of the newer web applications start out with community at their core, acting as collective intelligence gatherers. Built on an architecture of participation, they encourage individuals to enrich the site for themselves, and through this, engender a network effect that shows the richness available to all. A classic example of this is tagging— adding a tag helps an individual find information again, but it also labels the item for someone else to find. Community is a core part of these collective intelligence applications. The design process to make these work well covers much of the same ground as discussion-led community sites. Summary Designing your application and its role on the Internet is a start. Successful applications gather data, make it useful, and offer services based on it to the rest of the Web (as well as offering a fun place to hang out). A successful application is a combination of a small number of useful tools and a mechanism for social exchange among friends. Summary | 5
CHAPTER 2 Analyzing, Creating, and Managing Community Relationships Building any sort of community site entails creating and managing many kinds of social relationships that are tightly bound to the context of their creation. In this chapter, we'll explore how individuals develop into communities and how this affects the kinds of relationships we can create. We'll also look at how companies and markets have changed such that now we need a new approach to managing and interacting with the people who form our communities, an approach that brings us closer to these individ uals and creates less of an"us versus them"situation between customer and supplier. Analyzing Your Users' Relationships Perhaps you do not already have a space on your site for the people you interact with but whether they are customers, readers, or viewers, they probably feel some sort of relationship with you. Developing social software will help you to deepen this rela- tionship and allow these people to interact on a one-to-one basis with your company Their relationship with your company is only the beginning: enabling the people who come to you to form relationships independently should also be a goal. If you already have a community space, you are probably thinking about updating it and also need to consider these possibilities The realization that there are several different types of people you can interact with is important and, perhaps, obvious. It has a definite impact on the types of communities you can foster. Age is a strong factor; younger people have a more immediate and personal relationship to technology than older people(i'll expand on this topic later in this chapter). However, this does not mean that older people are never going to become active members of your site-you just need to approach them differently
CHAPTER 2 Analyzing, Creating, and Managing Community Relationships Building any sort of community site entails creating and managing many kinds of social relationships that are tightly bound to the context of their creation. In this chapter, we’ll explore how individuals develop into communities and how this affects the kinds of relationships we can create. We’ll also look at how companies and markets have changed such that now we need a new approach to managing and interacting with the people who form our communities, an approach that brings us closer to these individuals and creates less of an “us versus them” situation between customer and supplier. Analyzing Your Users’ Relationships Perhaps you do not already have a space on your site for the people you interact with, but whether they are customers, readers, or viewers, they probably feel some sort of relationship with you. Developing social software will help you to deepen this relationship and allow these people to interact on a one-to-one basis with your company. Their relationship with your company is only the beginning: enabling the people who come to you to form relationships independently should also be a goal. If you already have a community space, you are probably thinking about updating it and also need to consider these possibilities. The realization that there are several different types of people you can interact with is important and, perhaps, obvious. It has a definite impact on the types of communities you can foster. Age is a strong factor; younger people have a more immediate and personal relationship to technology than older people (I’ll expand on this topic later in this chapter). However, this does not mean that older people are never going to become active members of your site—you just need to approach them differently. 7
Relationships with Baby Boomers to Gen-Cers Over the past 20 years, we have seen rapid changes in terms of what people can create. However, unlike the turn of the 20th century when the gentleman scientists were the only people who had the knowledge and financial means to experiment, today these abilities are open to many more groups of people, and cost is much less of an issue. This newest cohort is sometimes referred to as Generation C. The Represents content creationcreativitycontrolandcelebrityasdefinedbyhttp://ww.trendwatching com, a large consumer trends firm-with a network of 8,000 trend watchers--that issues monthly reports on new trends. Generation C is not defined by a particular birth date, though most were born in the 1980s and later and are considered to be digitally native. They have been immersed in technology since at least their teenage years and so have very different expectations from people born in the 1960s and 1970s. For in- stance,rather than wishing a broadcaster would make a documentary on the plight of some group, they are likely to grab a video camera and make the documentary them- selves. This urge has always been present, but it is now much more in the mainstream than it was in the days of analog tape and cameras People's expectations are often set by what was possible while they were growing up For example, if you were born in 1971, you saw the arrival of music CDs. If you were on in 1985, by the time you were thinking about buying music in the late 1990s iTunes had arrived and you were downloading music through the Internet. The music industrys plan to migrate from CDs to DVD-Audio or Super Audio CD wasnt a great success. Both of these higher-resolution physical disc formats languished in player and disc sales. Consumers started to demand individual tracks as opposed to entire CDs, and they wanted music that was free of digital rights management(DRM)schemes(not what the music industry hoped would happen when the cd was launched). Digital access to music encouraged people to think about reusing music and to break out of the album model for listening to it. People wanted to be able to listen to songs on the device of their choosing and in the order they preferred this was possible in the 1980s with mix tapes, but with digital music, the record companies tried to lock the formats down tightly. Over the past decade, Generation C has won, as most music is now sold DRM free” Generation C is making a profound impact on how companies forge relationships with their customers. Until the late 1980s, other than a few people on the edge, consumers took a more passive role in society. Even the term consumer describes this"sit back mentality. The process of creating content and even of forming opinions, as well as the distribution of the content and opinions, was in the hands of large organizations run- ning television or print media. Now, with access to the Internet, increased computing power, and digitization of the media capture and production processes, consumers are taking a more active role Apple and others have been quick to recognize this new type of individual, sometimes called the prosumer( coined by Alvin Toffler in 1980)or the pro-am movement(coined 8 Chapter 2: Analyzing, Creating, and Managing Community Relationships
Relationships with Baby Boomers to Gen-C’ers Over the past 20 years, we have seen rapid changes in terms of what people can create. However, unlike the turn of the 20th century when the gentleman scientists were the only people who had the knowledge and financial means to experiment, today these abilities are open to many more groups of people, and cost is much less of an issue. This newest cohort is sometimes referred to as Generation C. The C represents content, creation, creativity, control, and celebrity, as defined by http://www.trendwatching .com, a large consumer trends firm—with a network of 8,000 trend watchers—that issues monthly reports on new trends. Generation C is not defined by a particular birth date, though most were born in the 1980s and later and are considered to be digitally native. They have been immersed in technology since at least their teenage years and so have very different expectations from people born in the 1960s and 1970s. For instance, rather than wishing a broadcaster would make a documentary on the plight of some group, they are likely to grab a video camera and make the documentary themselves. This urge has always been present, but it is now much more in the mainstream than it was in the days of analog tape and cameras. People’s expectations are often set by what was possible while they were growing up. For example, if you were born in 1971, you saw the arrival of music CDs. If you were born in 1985, by the time you were thinking about buying music in the late 1990s, iTunes had arrived and you were downloading music through the Internet. The music industry’s plan to migrate from CDs to DVD-Audio or Super Audio CD wasn’t a great success. Both of these higher-resolution physical disc formats languished in player and disc sales. Consumers started to demand individual tracks as opposed to entire CDs, and they wanted music that was free of digital rights management (DRM) schemes (not what the music industry hoped would happen when the CD was launched). Digital access to music encouraged people to think about reusing music and to break out of the album model for listening to it. People wanted to be able to listen to songs on the device of their choosing and in the order they preferred. This was possible in the 1980s with mix tapes, but with digital music, the record companies tried to lock the formats down tightly. Over the past decade, Generation C has won, as most music is now sold “DRM free.” Generation C is making a profound impact on how companies forge relationships with their customers. Until the late 1980s, other than a few people on the edge, consumers took a more passive role in society. Even the term consumer describes this “sit back” mentality. The process of creating content and even of forming opinions, as well as the distribution of the content and opinions, was in the hands of large organizations running television or print media. Now, with access to the Internet, increased computing power, and digitization of the media capture and production processes, consumers are taking a more active role. Apple and others have been quick to recognize this new type of individual, sometimes called the prosumer (coined by Alvin Toffler in 1980) or the pro-am movement (coined 8 | Chapter 2: Analyzing, Creating, and Managing Community Relationships
in 2004 by Demos, the UK-based think tank). Products such as Garage Band (see Fig ure 2-1)are a good example of the fruits of this recognition. Garage Band offers a simple means for creating music, and allows people to create professional-sounding demos for hundreds of dollars, rather than the thousands a music studio might charge. Garage Band is also very useful for putting together(video)podcasts. These media changes are perhaps not directly relevant to traditional community software, but purely text-based communication is no longer the sole means for interacting online. Larger companies are not the only groups that can create an audience. Any motivated group of individuals an create quality content and attract an audience. 四 O+>oA11.1001 Figure 2-1. Garage Band, which enables both amateur and professional musicians to create high quality music recordings Behavior and Interaction- Based relationships The media landscape has changed with the rise of the citizen journalist. The derivation of this term is hazy, but it was popularized in the 2004 book We the Media by Dan Gillmor(O Reilly). The term refers to the idea that anyone can set up a blog, or shoot video and post it to You Tube. Media production is no longer the preserve of the large newspaper group or broadcaster. What relevance does this have if you are not in the media business? Your customers are now less likely to passively wait for you to respond to their desires. The Cluetrain Manifesto, by Rick Levine et al. Basic Books), describes his change succinctly: " The end of business as usual. Analyzing Your Users'Relationships 9
in 2004 by Demos, the UK-based think tank). Products such as GarageBand (see Figure 2-1) are a good example of the fruits of this recognition. GarageBand offers a simple means for creating music, and allows people to create professional-sounding demos for hundreds of dollars, rather than the thousands a music studio might charge. GarageBand is also very useful for putting together (video) podcasts. These media changes are perhaps not directly relevant to traditional community software, but purely text-based communication is no longer the sole means for interacting online. Larger companies are not the only groups that can create an audience. Any motivated group of individuals can create quality content and attract an audience. Figure 2-1. GarageBand, which enables both amateur and professional musicians to create highquality music recordings Behavior and Interaction-Based Relationships The media landscape has changed with the rise of the citizen journalist. The derivation of this term is hazy, but it was popularized in the 2004 book We the Media by Dan Gillmor (O’Reilly). The term refers to the idea that anyone can set up a blog, or shoot video and post it to YouTube. Media production is no longer the preserve of the large newspaper group or broadcaster. What relevance does this have if you are not in the media business? Your customers are now less likely to passively wait for you to respond to their desires. The Cluetrain Manifesto, by Rick Levine et al. (Basic Books), describes this change succinctly: “The end of business as usual.” Analyzing Your Users’ Relationships | 9