Advice for young entrepreneurs dealing with older experienced business people. 

Walk a Mile in their shoes

The single most crucial step to networking and meeting with new people is doing your research. Going into a meeting with a solid background on who you are meeting with, their accomplishments, their failures, and their goals is your most powerful weapon for leaving an impression. You need to do your research with the intention of seeing through their perspective.

• Why did they agree to meet with you? 
• How do they view you?
• What do they ultimately want to achieve?
• What can you do to help them get there?

If you know the answers to these questions your meeting is that much more likely to be a success. 

Friendship First, Business Second.

If you are a 20 year old entrepreneur speaking with a 55 year old business advisor you might feel like the two of you are on different planets, but the fact is he was 20 years old once, and most likely he’s already been in your shoes. If you’ve done your research it shouldn’t be too hard to find some thread of commonality. Once you find something you have in common, explore it. But make sure to listen first, and speak second. People love the sound of their own voice and would rather hear their own than yours.

Here’s an example:

A few months ago I met with a 50 something business advisor and financier. My ultimate goal was to interest him in our business enough to raise potential funding. However during the 40 minutes we spent together, we spent 30 minutes discussing surfing and different breaks we had surfed in California, and only 10 minutes discussing my business. The end result? A friendship was forged, and the advisor left the meeting with the intention of “helping a friend”, instead of “raising funds for a local startup company”. The difference is astronomical. No matter who you are, what age you are, or what your experience is, you are more likely to help a friend than a stranger.

That said I’m not saying you should babble at the expense of pitching your project, but crafting a friendship can be just as, if not more, important than your pitch. 

Body Language

The second you walk into a meeting with experienced business people, the first thing they’re going to do is make a first impression based off the way you present yourself. To most of these old-timers your body language is everything and they’ll decide whether or not your someone they are interested in working with within seconds. Here are a few tips to help improve your body language:

1. Dress appropriate to the scenario. So don’t show up at a lawyers office wearing jeans, and don’t show up for a saturday lunch meeting at Starbucks in a suit.
2. Walk tall and confidently, don’t slouch or drag your feet.
3. Make sure you firmly shake their hand while looking them in the eye. Show them you mean business and you’re not here to waste their time. 
4. Speak clearly and concisely, do NOT mumble. It is quite possibly the quickest deal breaker for a lot of older generations.
5. Smile! Dale Carnegie often comically blamed the entirety of his success on his smile. There is nothing more inviting than a warm smile. 

1.     Act Big But Embrace your size

The first rule of business is that if you want to sit down with the players you have got to act like a player. Do your research. You need to be as fluent in your industry as you possibly can be.

While admitting that you run your company out of your dorm room may not be the best play, don’t be afraid to show the more humble side of your company. Being a small fish has its advantages too. Figure out what they are and present them proudly.

2.     Never Eat Alone

Networking, Networking, Networking. Business is just the culmination of a series of conversations between human beings and the financial transactions that proceed. Master the art of conversation and you’re a step closer to mastering the art of business.

Include others in your business operations as much as possible. You may be more valuable than you think, when you meet people you need to constantly be thinking  “who can this person benefit from knowing in my network, or who can benefit from knowing this person” not “how can I benefit from this person”.

3.     Embrace your elders

They’ve already done it. They’ve been there, and no matter how smart you are or how solid your plans are you can’t predict the future but you can always learn from the past.

The older you get the more you loving reminiscing, and the older you get the more time you have to do it. Pay your dues and give an ear to an elder whenever you can, I guarantee you’ll learn something. At the very least, if you’re kind and respectful with an open ear they won’t forget you.

4.     Make Mistakes!

Entrepreneur by its French definition means “risk taker”.  Your not here to play it safe, or you’d be working for someone else. Don’t be afraid to follow your gut and take the chance you want to take. It’s the people who take the chances other people won’t who reap the rewards other people can’t.

If you make a mistake and you screw up big time, oh well, keep moving, learn from your mistake and find a way to fix it. Own up for your mistake and deal with the consequences, that’s how you learn.

5.     The Secret

The secret ingredients are perseverance and faith in your self. The combination of those two qualities is the most potent cocktail for success. If you want to run your own company and you want to do your own thing than you have to be able to continue on no matter the obstacle or the mistakes you’ve made.

Along your path to success you are going to find that the more successful you get, the more haters you have. Mo Money Mo Problems. Use them as your fuel. If you truly believe you can and will accomplish your goals and meet your dreams, then you CANNOT be stopped.

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 Devnuts team invaded Web2Expo in NYC yesterday. We got a chance to meet a lot of cool people and see a ton of really cool products. We registered for the “Expo Hall Only” pass, aka the free one, which we were reminded of quite harshly as we tried to enter a conference by 37 signals that was outside our track.

After our rejection we headed down to the “Sponsored Sessions”. The sponsored sessions are conferences offered by various sponsoring companies open to anyone. When I first read about the sessions I figured they would just be bloated advertisements disguised as conferences with free giveaways. Boy was I wrong. We’ve been able to catch 2 sponsored sessions thus far and I was overwhelmed with the amount of great ideas and information we’ve received.

Seven Habbits of a Successful SaaS company

The first session we attended yesterday morning was Seven Habbits of a Succesful SaaS company hosted by Mark Trang and Kirk Krappe. Mark is with Sales Force and Kirk with Apttus. They both have a ton of experience in traditional software development so hearing their perspective on the switch to software as a service and everything related was very fulfilling.

Their talk covered topics such as developing your software as a service business model, customer success (customer satisfaction), customer retention, and growth. I have requested the slide show from Mark and I will share it when I get my hands on it.

Measuring ROI around Web 2.0

The second talk we heard this morning was Measuring ROI around Web 2.0. This was the session I was really looking forward to hearing because I’ve always tended to have my hands more in the business side of our operations than the development side, and the idea of accurately valuating our communities and applications is baffling to me. The talk was held by Dave Carter of Awareness Networks. Dave was really accurate and detailed with his concepts and lessons so I learned a ton. I plan on writing a followup post on this topic so I’ll be brief with my summary. Dave covered a variety of topics including Measurement Tactics for your web 2.0 company, knowledge management, and acting on the data you collect.

Overall the conference was extremely educational. His points were backed by years of experience and painted with real life examples. Check back for more on what he spoke about shortly.

The Expo Hall

Entrance to the Expo Hall

After spending the morning attending the sponsored sessions we hit the Expo Floor. The expo floor is full of a ton of booths showcasing everything from new development platforms, social communities, collaboration applications, to Microsoft Surface and O’Reilly reading materials.

Platform as a Service seems to be the running theme, talk about a bloated market… more than half of the booths here must be showing off their new platform. One company in particular caught my eye, http://www.octopz.com/. I got a chance to interview the guy running the booth, I’ll post the video as soon as I get a chance to edit through it.

The Mobile Business Expo is also being held here in the Javits Convention Center, which is really cool because we’ve got to see a ton of cool mobile technology. I even got a chance to play with the BlackBerry Bold and the new BlackBerry flip phone. Can you say AJAX Enabled mobile-browsing??

Ajax Enabled Mobile Browsing!

The Keynotes

Well we accidentally overslept the Keynotes today, oops. So no update on Thursday’s keynotes, but yesterday we got a chance to sit in on the keynote and it was a great time. We got there a bit late and missed the history of New York’s web industry. In all honestly we were really only looking forward to hearing Jason Fried from 37 Signals speak.

We arrived just in time for Deborah Schultz’s keynote on the “Death of the Grand Gesture”. Her speech was long and drawn out, and it took her forever to get to the point, which was very evidently turning the people around me off. But once she got to her point I was very intrigued, her concept was very interesting. The concept is that from a marketing standpoint the “Grand Gesture” has become a tool most often used ineffectively. Too often businesses use the grand gesture of something like SuperBowl Ads but forget the ongoing small personal efforts required to maintain customer base. She made it clear that one gets lost without the other, and one without the other is ineffective.

Deborah Schultz during the Keynotes

Once Deborah finished Jason Fried made an “interesting” appearance. You had to be there to understand, but don’t worry you didn’t miss much, just an F bomb or too. Jason’s theme for his keynote was “saying no to the customer”. He stated, “Your product isn’t good because it has everything, you need to learn to say no, be a curator, keep things simple”. He went on about how you need to curate your piece of software and keep specific regulation on the growth of your software to avoid becoming bloated or losing your specialty.

He also suggested that you attach cost to as many things within your company as possible. Costs beyond just monetary such as time and things that aren’t getting done. So when your employee comes to you and says “We gotta have text message alerts”, assign a value to that task. How much time is it going to take, what aren’t you going to be working on because you’re working on the alerts, and how much is it going to cost? Assigning these values allows you to prioritize more efficiently. This is something we at Devnuts have been implementing at every corner. It is really a great tool for properly organizing your efforts.

After Jason finished I bounced out of the keynotes early, but as I went to leave the conference hall I made eye contact with a familiar face. A tall slender, almost celebrity like appearance with a face I knew I recognized. After a second’s glance I realized it was Jay Adelson. He was just chilling in the back of the hall watching the keynotes like any of us. Its odd to me how I know he’s just another nerd just like me and yet I can’t help but look at him as a celebrity. Regardless I thought it was pretty cool that I got to see him in person.

Ok back to the expo floor for a bit, I’ll have another update shortly.

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.

I just finished reading Josh Kopelman’s blog post on the Implicit Web, and it got me thinking. This is probably the third or forth article I’ve read on the subject, and not surprisingly it comes from another VC. It seems the VCs are all hyped up about the possibilities behind using our Digital Footprints to better organize our life on the web.

Josh lays out some pretty nice examples of how we can take advantage of the Implicit Web. He uses the example of creating a profile for your Facebook account. Every thing we do on the web from buying Mother’s day gifts on Amazon to signing up for a social network leaves bits of information about us on the web, or in the clouds. When Facebook asks you what are your favorite movies, books, and music, instead of having to answer the questions Facebook should simply ask Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes what you’re favorite music is.

Now I see exactly why the VCs are getting so excited. Someone who could provide either a way of organizing the data from all of these different locations onto one massive database, or provide a way to properly organize and categorize the data from the other locations could really disrupt the way we currently browse the web. Not only the web, but technology tracks and records our actions everywhere in our life. Every time you use your credit card, the store you used it at and your bank has detailed records of those transactions. Organizing this sort of data for benevolent use could make our lives a lot easier.

Note the word benevolent there. For all of the good that can be done by organizing our digital footprints, twice as much bad can be done. And this is where I really start to get concerned. I still can’t understand Twitter, why do I want people to know what I’m doing all the time? I don’t know how I feel about such vast amounts of information about my personal life being organized into a way in which large companies can access it. Do I really want Facebook knowing what my favorites are, and what I purchase the most?

Along those lines, I think it is going to be absolutely crucial for the companies who step up to take advantage of the implicit web to have proper privacy implementations. The ability for the user to control what companies can and can’t record about themselves will be crucial to the success of said technologies. Without such control, we’re talking some major Big Brother issues.

A few days ago I posted a video of Eric Schmidt answering the question “what is Web 3.0?” during a Q&A session at the Seoul Digital Forum. After making a crack at the phrase by calling it a marketing term he went on to discuss Web 3.0 as a “different way of building applications”. He goes into greater detail and his explanation is very concise and elegent, take a look for yourself.

I think that Eric Schmidt hit it right on the head. For years the technogods the likes of Larry Ellison have claimed the desktop is going to go virtual, killing the operating system entirely. This is something we are going to see take place at an extremely fast pace in the very near future. Applications are going to be gradually ported from desktop to web based, as the natural trend through the past year has shown us. I know personally, 3 years ago I was nothing without my desktop, and now I’m almost entirely virtual. Everything important to me is in the cloud, and I can access it on the go, wherever I’m at (with a few small exceptions).

Windows is going to be a thing of the past.  Web based platforms like Facebook have potential to virtually replace operating systems like windows. I’m not sure about you but If you’ve ever heard Mark Zuckerberg talk he sounds a lot like fellow Harvard dropout, Bill Gates. I don’t think that Zuckerberg will every be able to create the same type of dominance Gates was able to because of the infinite nature of the internet. Where Gates made people NEED his product, Zuckerberg will never be able to create that sort of demand. There will always be another startup that can offer an alternative to Facebook, and unlike with Windows the Internet makes it easy for the everyday user to take advantage of these options. This will promote good old fassion capitalistic competition, which will constantly force companies to offer their users a better product. Whoever can provide the most comfortable, convenient, and easy platform for its user will retain the biggest market share.

I think another trend we will see in the next wave of web technology will be a much larger presence of open source technology. Open source frameworks like Asterisk really open the door of possibilities for pioneering major industries such as the future of telephony infrastructure. Open source implementations in major infrastructure industries will eliminate a ton of the problems we currently deal with. The hassles of dealing with the phone company will be a thing of the past with proper open source implementations.

Imagine if MaBell made an effort to progress its technology for the sake of progress, and not financial gain. Maybe we wouldn’t be relying on the same exact telephony infrastructure our grandparents did. Open source communities have shown tremendous potential for advancing technology. I think it will be interesting to watch the progress of Asterisk, it could have some pretty profound impacts on our future.

I think in the immediate future we are going to see some pretty crazy advancements in the way of web-based video capture/conferencing. I remember watching movies 10 years ago where the actors communicated face to face via laptops and it was considered sci-fi and futuristic. Now my 15 year old sister video chats on the norm. iChat has already shown us some pretty amazing implementations of such technology, but I think we can expect a major shift to web based video conferencing software. Check out the Red5 project, it should make some considerable progress in this area. Sebastian Wagner has posted a really  promising piece of software that utilizes the Red5 framework called openmeeting on Google Code. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some Google/Yahoo aquisitions in the way of web-based video capture/conferencing/streaming in the near future.

I just picked up a copy of PC Magazine for the first time in years, and I was very very surprised. My memory of PC Mag is a bloated review magazine full of some great reviews, but impossible to navigate to the point of giving up. I have to be honest with you, when I read through this magazine I skipped the reviews, and instead headed straight for the columns. John C. Dvorak was cover material on the special edition “Green Issue”, and my purpose for picking up the magazine in the first place, so I headed straight for his article “Turn off the Lights!”.

I’m a huge fan of Dvorak so I was a bit biased going in, but after reading/loving his column I skimmed through the rest. First was an interesting article by Lance Ulanoff titled “Can We Stay Green?”. The article discussed the problem of not going green, but staying green. Once the media stops pumping us full of this newest fad we call “Going green”, are we really going to stay green, and follow through in our every day actions? It was a great read that really got me thinking about our culture today. Images of PC Monitor rivers, and landfill-slides like from Idiocracy stained my brain. But more importantly I was hooked, so I read on.

“Whats our 75-Year Tech Plan?” by Sascha Segan was the third article I read. It first proposed the issue of planning ahead by comparing our metro system with the French’s metro system and quoting its President saying something like “you need to plan more than just 5 years ahead, you need a 50, 75, 100 year plan!” Segan then lays out his ideas for an Infrastructure, Wireless, Transformative Technologies, and of course Energy Plans over the next 50-100 years. I love his thoughts, and I definitely recommend you check the article out yourself to avoid me rehashing.

The whole time I read the article I kept thinking about Obama. The things Segan talked about were the exact type of things Obama brings up over and over again. Obama has embraced the need to plan ahead, and the need to overhaul our technology infrastructure as is to ensure a better and more efficient future. Check out his one on one with Eric Schmidt from the @Google Talks. You think McCain knows what wireless spectrums are? Oops, enough political bashing, back to the point.

Those three articles alone was worth the price of purchase. I guess I always knew in the back of my head that Dvorak was a writer at PC Mag, and I guess I could have deduced that that meant PC Mag had some good reads, but I never gave it a chance. Magazine isn’t my medium of choice, but PC Mag just gained a new loyal web customer.

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!