The 37Signals blog posted part one of a great conversation about community between 2 of the founders from each Vimeo and Threadless. If you didn’t already know, Vimeo is a spin off video sharing site from the founders of CollegeHumor.com and Connected Ventures. I highly regard Zach Klein of Vimeo as one of the most creative and innovative young entrepreneurs out there. He has a great eye and mind for building community focused websites. Jakob Lodwick (Vimeo), Jacob Dehart (Threadless), and Jefferey Kalmikoff (Threadless) are the other excellent participants

With all the buzz around social networking and online communities, I’m not surprised that many large corporations want to get in on the action. Unfortunately, many just don’t get it. Social Networking or an online community is not something you can just “put a few good people on it for a couple months.” There is no easy “if you build it, they will come” solution. Furthermore, building a community from scratch, is a much different beast then trying to integrate community into an existing product or service. Too many companies (partially including my own,...

I took the time to watch the CommunityNext presentation from the Threadless founders. While the video has a lot of good things in there, there was one point that I thought was above and beyond the rest. An online community is all about fun. When dealing with consumers, if using and interacting with your website and community isn’t fun, then people won’t stick around. Take a look at some of the most successful online communities. Myspace is a piece of shit, but users have fun making their profiles look like pink barf, posting wacky pictures, and setting Celine Dion as the music...

In my last post I discussed the importance of ignoring the common total registered users statistic, and paying attention to a couple different active user stats. When evaluating the value of a community, it definitely doesn’t stop here. For me, I place extra value on site activity ratios. Why Ratios? Site activity ratios are statistics such as average posts per user, or average comments per user/post, etc. But why ratios? Just like total registered users, total numbers for different activity points on a site are useless. A site that has 10,000 posts in a given time frame with 20,000...

This is the first of hopefully a few posts about different stats that social networks, investors, and entrepreneurs should pay attention to. While a lot of the value in a social network is subjective, I personally believe there is a lot to be said for close tracking and analyzation of an entire range of statistics and numbers. For the first post, I wanted to discuss the most basic, but probably most important statistic, Active Users. Many social networks publicize/boast how many total registered users they have. Unfortunately, this is the most misleading statistic of them all. There are many...

One of the most valuable online professional communities out there has only 400 members and is barely known by anyone. Recently the VP of Products and Marketing at ZoomInfo told me about Creative Good. The community reminded me of one of my previous posts, An Inefficency of Professional Social Networking. I was impressed by Creative Good due to the number, and quality of responses to a thread that was forwarded to me. The question posed by a member: “We are looking for a tool to measure the end-user experience of loading a web page. Can anybody recommend specific tools to accomplish this?” The...

Well…I survived some incredible adventures in Honduras and Belize. Unfortunately it looks like my server didn’t survive my trip. At some point during the past week my server was shut off for no apparent reason. I apologize for an inconvienence. But everything is back up and running. I’ll be spending the next couple days catching up, so my posts might be a little slow coming.

Just wanted to let all of my readers know that I will be on vacation until Feb 12th with out computer access. Unfortunately I will not be posting anything over the next week, but I promise to have plenty when I return.

Fantasy betting sites around pop culture have been becoming a popular new social networking niche. These types of sites let you bet with friends or others of the communities around things like “How many people will Jack Bauer kill in season 6 of 24?” or “Another Paris Hilton sex tape will be released by June of 2007.” I think these types of sites which include Fafarazzi.com, PicksPop.com, and GottaBet.com have interesting potential. They cover topics that draw in the average person and appeal to the masses. But the most promising aspect is that most open the door to...

Everyone knows that YouTube recently announced that they will soon be sharing revenue of in-video ads with users. While most people think it is a bad move for YouTube, I think it could be great if they execute it correctly. Yesterday I talked about how Money As A Motivator is ineffective in building a dedicated community. However, YouTube already has built the community to a critical mass. Just as we have seen with Myspace and Facebook, as long as you have critical mass, you can implement features that piss off your users (aka Facebook feed), and still be fine. Despite this, I think the smartest...