11th
Community is Organic, not Manufactured
I appreciate Mo’s insight below and think it is worth re-blogging. I also had some thoughts shared in the comments on Mo’s blog that I’ll paraphrase here:
In some ways, Google has the most ‘organic’ community of all - one that is a dynamic and natural outgrowth of my email communication (still the most primary unit of modern communication). And I believe there is a very tight link between my email and my community. Those with whom I email most frequently are generally those with whom I am most close - personally or professionally. The right application could do a great job recreating my social graph and appropriately weight my connections (as close or more distant relations) by an analysis of my email patterns.
I am not suggesting that I want my community to reside in my email. I don’t want this at all. I am, however, pointing out that my social graph can be dynamically abstracted (with a fairly high degree of accuracy) from my email usage. And this is pretty powerful…
(A big shoutout to @scratchiti for first formulating these thoughts four years ago on our bschoolers.com blog - long before Google Buzz;)
We’ve seen a lot of the web giants attempt recently to move into growing areas dominated early by young upstarts.
Google Buzz has of course been all the rage these past couple days, with it’s Twitter/Facebook-like feed integration into Gmail. Prior to that it was Yelp taking a swipe at FourSquare with their check-in addition. Even Yahoo launched Meme recently to compete with the likes of Tumblr.
All of these recent moves reflect a desire on the part of these larger companies to incorporate more of a sense of community into their already successful platforms. The inherent problem with this is that community (like entrepreneurship — more on that another time) can’t be manufactured. True community is organic, and it usually builds around a very simple, clean premise. And once it begins to tip, it has a life all its own usually very difficult to stop.
Bijan has a great post today on Google Buzz and trying to do too much. What’s so powerful about the simplicity he espouses is that it is precisely that initial use case simplicity that generates natural community.
For many years, when looking at acquisitions or building businesses, I worried about the likes of Google, or Yahoo before that, and their ability to move into the market we were going after and destroy us.
While this fear is grounded and often a very real threat, it is usually only so in the cases where the area you are playing in is fundamentally strategic to the respective 800 pound gorilla.
Community is something they all want, but not fundamentally strategic to what they currently have. Google is a search and advertising business. Yelp is a user-generated content and advertising business. Neither of them begin or end with community.
Communities are natural. They have a power all their own. Tumblr, FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook — they are who they are because of the power of their communities, not the other way around.
So while Yelp and Google may finally have some success with their attempts at community, to think that they can uproot or halt the growth of natural, social, viral communities is just not right.
