The changing face of online communities
Time was when a company, seeking to build an online community around it’s product or service, simply set up a bulletin board.
Bulletin Boards morphed into discussion boards and chat rooms. Today however, with the focus on contextual community, and Web 2.0, the rise in online population is matched with the increase in complexity to form and sustain an online community. While social sites such as Reddit or Friendster or Wikipedia showcase one side of online communities, discussion boards and forums gaining prominence are those of the single threaded type provided by Yahoo! Answers or Answerology. These, I am coming to realize, are more effective for niche content and ecommerce sites, which want to promote a community rather than going the typical discussion forum route. One member simply posts a query, and other members answer. This is closer to the motivations that were presented by Peter Kollock in The Economics of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace and by Mark Smith in Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons.
* Anticipated Reciprocity
* Increased Recognition
* Sense of efficacy
* Communion
Other Reads:
The Virtual Community by Howard Rheinold
Filed under: Digital culture, Ideas & Innovations
[…] Google’s social networking site Orkut has recently launched a new feature, called Ask Friends, which allows users to pose questions to friends and receive answers from them. While asking questions the users can either direct their question to specific friends or allow the system to automatically route the question to a subset of friends who have answered similar questions before. According to Orkut, the new feature will be of particular benefit to users who are seeking personal suggestions, recommendations, advice or private information from their friends. This idea is not new, as other social networking sites such as LinkedIn already have similar features. However, it does point to the growing popularity of such forms of social interaction as I had mentioned in a previous post. […]
I agree, a single threaded forum seems so much more usable.