As I started planning this post, I read over my notes from the last day of the expo, expecting to write a similar summary to the one I wrote on day 2. But I started boring myself, and I don’t do bored. Instead I decided to take a step back and look at Web2Expo from a more generalized position, forget the specifics. If you want to see the keynotes check out http://web2expo.blip.tv/.

So what did I notice when I took a step back? I noticed a massive progression towards exactly the type of localization of web communities and software that I wrote about in my post “When Bigger Isn’t Better“. Anyone who walked the floor of Web2Expo was overwhelmed with salesmen pitching their platform as a service model. At first all I could think was market dilution but then it hit me. With the growth in numbers of platforms for cloud software, comes massive if not exponential growth of the communities and applications that can be developed and deployed. The more communities and the more applications we see on these platforms, the more localized and niche-specific all of these applications become.

I made the prediction in previous posts that as the internet revolutionizes itself for what some are already deeming “Web 3.0″, we will see an influx of personalized applications tailored for more and more specific needs of the customer. The days of gargantuan all-encompassing web communities and applications are over, and I couldn’t help but feel this was the theme of Web2Expo.

Booth after booth that I visited on the show room displayed how their product met the specific needs of a specific client, and they were never shy on displaying their minute differences from the booth 5 feet down the isle. The sponsored sessions I sat in on constantly brought up concepts like bootstrapping, failing cheap, finding your niche, and simplifying your business model. All of these concepts lead to smaller more specific applications that are able to meet the needs of a customer far more efficiently than previous all-encompassing applications.

The web 3.0 wave if you will, is just gathering its force, and I cannot wait to see its crest. Expect higher quality more useful and efficient software than we have ever seen before. Now the question is, who will surf the wave and who will get lost to the undertow.

The Problem

“Communities” seems to be the buzzword of the year as we see more and more “social networks” and large scale online communities begin to dominate the marketplace. We’ve watched as Facebook went from local university community, to national college-based community, to world-wide software giant-in-the-making, but who is really benefiting from these communities?

Isn’t it the point of a community that with each new participant the power of the community as a whole grows? Why does it seem more and more that the only one’s benefiting from the growth of these communities are the business people reaping the ad-revenue behind them? It’s because that is exactly what is happening. The online web communities we have come to know and love are becoming less and less useful to us and more and more useful to the people who run them.

When Bigger isn’t Better

We need to move away from our infatuation with these over-inflated communities and towards a respect for smaller more specialized communities. When your talking about large scale communities like Facebook, the potential benefits for local communities are dwarfed.  How much do you actually care about Facebook when your using it? I bet you barely even give it a second’s thought, you’re just looking to see what you’re friends have been up to. We as web developers need to begin developing communities for smaller localized groups that actually care about the community as a whole.

If we begin to develop smaller communities with a larger focus on physical presence we can develop communities of people who actually care about the group as a whole and actually want to put forth effort to improve it. (I’m avoiding examples here on purpose, I want you the reader to apply these thoughts as you see fit but I have presented many examples in past blog posts).

We’ve seen this trend many times before. Take corporate America for example: Big companies are full of people who work for money and care/know little about the larger entity they are a part of, while small companies are full of people who work passionately day and night for the growth of the company itself. Our obsession with big in the past few centuries has left us with less and less people who actually care about what they are apart of.

Large communities in turn are not able to offer the sort of specialization or quality of service that a more direct and localized community can offer. There is still an important role these large communities will play in our future, however, it will be the large communities that are built on a network of smaller more specialized and localized communities that prosper. Facebook’s social cause and donation applications have shown us how the massive size of a community can be harnessed for powerful positive influence on our society, but without the smaller focus of localized communities the larger community is nothing but bloated hype.

A system that could properly integrate smaller communities with one another to develop larger more powerful communities could be one of the most influential pieces in the puzzle we call our future.

Technology has become the catalyst for the world civilizations undergoing a slow but vast revolution in thought, ideals, and practice. We are moving from a proprietorized world where money defines the amount of information we have access to, towards a democratized realm in which information is as free as the people who use it.

As technology takes over more and more of our life it is important for us to take full advantage of the benefits it can provide. Not only as individuals, but as a society as a whole. Wikipedia is the perfect example of people taking advantage of the power of technology for the benefit of society as a whole. Each individual contributor is taking part in something bigger than themselves, an organic growing collection of information for us by us.

Proprietary Information - Print-Based Dictionaries, Encyclopedia, Newspapers, etc

• All written by a collection of authors chosen by a select group of “qualified” individuals

• Information was limited to the knowledge of a handful of “experts” and mass distributed to millions

Organic Community Based Information - Wikipedia, Digg, etc

• The power of information is taken from the handful of “experts” and placed in the hands of millions

• Regulation comes in the form of a community, constantly updating and adding input while checking and balancing the information provided by others

• There is a direct correlation between the number of users and the quality of information, the more people using the more viewpoints, perspectives, and ideals are incorporated

• Effectively takes the power of information from the “experts” and “qualified” individuals to the people

All of this is nothing new. Long before the likes of Wikipedia and Digg open-source advocates preached the power of collaboration and freedom of knowledge. But it is not until we saw widely accepted implementations of this sort of collaboration did the possibilities become evident.

Why can’t we apply the same techniques and ideals of open source ideology and organic community based information stores and apply it to the education system. I have been outspoken on my bitterness towards the education system in America and its growing obsoletion as any of my colleagues or friends will tell you. Over and over again I finish my lecture on my beliefs, and I’m met with both faces of intrigue and confusion, but the resulting question is almost always the same — How can we do it better?

My inability to answer this question confidently often nullifies my argument in the eyes of the listener and leaves me in a state of deep thought pondering the very question. I have come up with several theories and ideas, but they were often incomplete and/or impractical.

Recently my partner introduced me to a new project in which we will apply the ideals of Digg/Wikipedia and organic information growth to education. After a brief period of meditation this morning my thoughts and emotions on the projects fell into place in the form of a vision for the future of our education system.

Combine the social integration of Facebook with the informational collaboration of Wikipedia and the community style regulation of Digg and you get our new concept (for development purposes I’ll call Project Ed). I will write more in regards to the specifics in the near future but for now I’ll keep it general for the purpose of conceptualization.

The initial goal of Project Ed is to supplement the educational system by offering a set of collaborative tools integrated with a social network to enhance your educational experience. Our underlying greater vision is to replace the educational system (at the risk of sounding too Dr. Evil, or Bill Gates, I say this loosely with a tinge of humor).

The project begins as a supplemental educational community, but just as Wikipedia has shown, the more users we are able to attract the greater the potential of the community. By collecting and organizing information from classes and universities we can kick start the growth of a virtual organic wealth of information geared towards students. Want to learn Calculus but can’t understand your teacher’s broken English, or just plain can’t stand him? Or maybe you really just don’t get it and your 60 year old teacher can’t fathom your perspective to even begin explaining it to you… why not turn to hundreds and thousands of students just like you for help?

Lets take the power away from the teachers and put it in the hands of the students where it belongs. Take the power from the few and give it to the many. I believe this will be an ideal we will see more and more of in the future.

Expect to hear much more about Project Ed in the near future, for now — Peace.

Web Communities

Anyone who spends more than a few hours a week on a computer has been bombarded by the overwhelming presence of community driven web sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The concept is far from new, communities have been developed to bring people together for centuries from 4H to Future Business Leaders of America.

The nature of our culture and society states that we prefer to be surrounded by people of similar beliefs and interests and the Internet has been the single most influential tool in our history for bringing people together in that exact fashion.

Web communities have demonstrated a substantial ability to bring together people of all backgrounds and beliefs. We’ve all seen web communities bring together entire towns during times of despair such as the tragic Virginia Tech shooting. Families have reunited after years without communication all because of a newborn baby picture posted online.

It is exactly this sort of power that makes community software unique from the rest of the breakthrough Internet technologies. It is exactly this sort of power that will be responsible for the future of the Internet as we know it.

Types of Communities

There are hundreds of thousands of communities out there and an infinite amount of variations, but for simplicity sake I will categorize them into 3 main types of communities: Social Networks, Supportive Communities, and Research communities.

Social Networks are perhaps the most familiar communities to the average computer user. MySpace, Facebook, and PureVolume are some of the larger examples out there that serve the purpose of bringing people together. MySpace and Facebook bring people together with the intention of networking and feeding people’s desires to be in contact with their friends. PureVolume also serves a more specific purpose of delivery an environment for musicians to be heard.  In the end these communities are developed from the ground up to be a social experience for its users.

Supportive communities, unlike social networks, are web communities that have been developed around an already existing community. This type of community may be as simple as the forums on which the local Rotary Club chapter frequents to discuss upcoming schedules and events, or as interactive as Amazon.com’s user review system.

Research communities are the least popular of the community types I will discuss, however quite probably the most important. These communities range from tech discussion forums for technical products and services to medical diagnosis and treatment repositories such as WebMD.

Potential

Each of these three communities has a tremendous amount of potential for its respective purposes. The first type of potential output is the most obvious; financial. Social networks especially have shown a considerable amount of potential for advertising revenue, the bread and butter of Web 2.0 if you will. The potential lies in its user base, the more users the more valuable advertising space within the content of that community is.

Google’s proven ad revenue model is a perfect measure of how effective web advertising per audience actually is.  In the case of Google they rely on complex algorithms to determine the most effective displays for specific advertisements. So for example, when a user searches for “soccer cleats” they will find advertisements relative to soccer and or footwear, not advertisements for home improvements.
The beauty in advertising through web communities is that by nature of the network the demographics are predefined. So when a web community for home improvement enthusiasts wants to offer adspace they will be able to provide the perfect demographic for a company like Lowes, and a not so ideal demographic for a company like Disney.

There are far more benefits than just financial from developing web communities. Supportive communities can offer their existing communities a level of interaction and development not previously available. Amazon.com is a picture perfect example of this sort of implementation. Amazon had a proven business model, and the development of a community around that model has been paramount to its success.

Amazon created a community that allows its customers to write personalized product reviews and recommendations. The system gives its customers a whole new level of interactivity making their shopping easier, and their experience smoother. Other retailers can develop and strengthen their customer base through this type of supporting community at very little cost.
Discussing the potential for research based web communities is where things get really exciting. Research communities can provide a level of collaboration and cooperation that would be physically impossible if not for the power of the Internet. Imagine a community exclusive to qualified medical professionals, where they can discuss medical treatments, diagnosis’s, and future research.
The core of the community could be something as simple as a message board based for specific topics but its surrounding features would be crucial. Doctor’s would have their own personalized profiles including education, honors, awards, and degrees and may even go as far as their own personal beliefs and ideals. Personalization at this level serves not only as a verification tool, but also as a means of strengthening the bond the user feels with its community.

This type of bond is the essence of forming the community in the first place. Once a user feels truly a part of the community they are that much more likely to act towards the benefit of the community as a whole. Adding that level of personalization may be what existing research communities need to take it to the next level. The breakthrough medicinal discovery of the next decade could very well be the product of web community collaboration.

Developers

I expect the next few years will lay wake to an explosion of community software and social networks. As these networks continue to develop and grow dilution is going to be an obvious issue. The more communities out there asking for users’ loyalty the less likely any one user is to actually commit to a community. It is that rationale that should fuel community developers to make the process of joining and partaking in a community as simple and painless as possible.

For example users aren’t going to be interested in recreating their personal profiles for each community they wish to join. We’ve already seen companies begin to address this issue such as Google’s Open Social and OpenID.  These services plan to address the issue of standardization across multiple communities for the benefit of its users. Under these new systems a user can have a single profile that can be imported into any community that user wishes to join without the need to recreate his/her profile per community.

Developers need to spend all of their effort designing their communities to offer as much to the user as possible while asking for as little as possible in return. Generally the more commitment a community requires from a user the less likely the user is to commit. Anything from registration forms to community bulletins need to be as short and concise as possible while offering the most to its users. Ryan Singer from 37 Signals gave a conference speech on this exact sort of theory of implementation for web developers, you can check it out here.

Well I think that’s enough for today, I’d hate to write a conclusion because I’m not finished. It’s a blog, so I’m sure I’ll pick up where I left off sometime soon, until then… Thanks for listening!