LOGIN | REGISTER NOW | SUBSCRIBE
 
 
News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>


   

 
 
Download Current Issue
ISSUE 3/15/2010 PDF

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Receive the print Edition?


 
blogs tab
Google Code turns 5
Google Code Turns 5, and adds a Paxos Algorithm to make the system more stable and reliable.
03/17/2010 11:16 AM EST

Test your Visual Studio 2010 know-how
Microsoft is offering free beta certification exams for Visual Studio 2010.
03/17/2010 11:08 AM EST

Microsoft lifts the hood on IE9
Microsoft is previewing IE9.
03/16/2010 01:10 PM EST

 

Events calendar tab
EclipseCon
3/22/2010 to 3/25/2010
Santa Clara, Calif.
The Eclipse Foundation

DevConnections
4/12/2010 to 4/14/2010
Las Vegas
Penton Media

MySQL Conf. and Expo
4/12/2010 to 4/15/2010
Santa Clara, Calif.
O'Reilly Media

High Performance Computing Linux Financial Markets
4/19/2010
New York City
Flagg Management

Informix User Conf.
4/25/2010 to 4/28/2010
Overland Park, Kans.
IIUG


 
print Printable version 
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Mono brings .NET to Android
At Microsoft MIX, Mono will unveil the ability to port .NET applications to the Android op...

Does Windows cost Microsoft opportunities?
Microsoft's decision to focus .NET on Windows is stifling innovation due to the specter of...

Going 'all in' on .NET as default runtime
Programmers for Windows Phone 7 will need to use Silverlight and XNA for development

Digg!  Digg
Reddit  Reddit
Slashdot  Slashdot
Share on facebook  Facebook
Share on Twitter  Twitter

Zeichick's Take: Secrets of social site success


By Alan Zeichick
March 30, 2009 — 
SANTA CLARA — You’ve got to trust your community to do the right thing, but also make it easy to clean up after people if they misbehave.

That’s a major point that I took away from the opening keynote from EclipseCon, held here last week. The speakers were Jeff Atwood, famous for his Coding Horror blog, and Clay Shirky, author of the insightful book "Here Comes Everybody," about the power of social groups in public life.

The topic was “The Social Mind: Designing like groups matter,” and Jeff and Clay found patterns in the success from their creation of StackOverflow, a user community for developers, and from successful communities like SlashDot and Wikipedia.

You should read Clay’s book, subscribe to Jeff’s blog and visit StackOverflow. But before you do that, here are four best practices that Jeff and Clay offered regarding creating a successful community site (the headings are theirs, but the descriptions are mine):

1. Radically lower the bar for participation. Don’t make prospective community members jump through hoops to participate or make them demonstrate specific expertise. Look at what makes Wikipedia successful: It has contributions from the small number of experts who really care about a specific subject, and also smaller contributions from the huge number of people who have a smaller commitment. Anyone can start a Wikipedia page; anyone can change a page; anyone can add to a topic or correct a mistake. Make everyone welcome and let everyone participate, as much as you can.

2. Trust (some of) your users. While you want a lot of participation, not all participants are equal. Some folks contribute more, some are more dedicated, some add a huge amount of value. Other folks contribute less. How do you decide who is more valuable and more trustworthy? Find ways to let the community decide, whether it’s through rankings, karma points or whatever. Then provide the means for those with more trust to lead the community.

3. Life is the world’s biggest MMORPG. Successful massively multiplayer online role-playing games mimic real life. People work hard if they can see that they’re making progress… and if they have goals to achieve. Those goals might be to slay dragons, win karma points, accumulate gold pieces, or whatever. Build those mechanisms into your system to encourage and reward behavior that you’d like to see in your community.

4. Bad stuff happens. Some people paint beautiful murals, others spray obnoxious graffiti. That happens in the real world and online too, as you can see by the abusive comments left on many online communities. The more general the community, the more people just like to go by and spray graffiti. Accept that this will happen, but also make sure you have ways to quickly delete community-destroying activity. Look at how easily Wikipedia contributors can "revert" malicious content. In the virtual world, you can make it easier to delete graffiti than to create it.

Jeff and Clay suggest starting small and getting really good at what you do, then letting the community grow in a scalable, sustainable way. Think about how Google, eBay or Facebook started. That’s the recipe for success in a community, both in the real world and online.

Alan Zeichick is editorial director of SD Times. Read his blog at ztrek.blogspot.com.




Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33378
 

Comments

03/30/2009 05:24:04 PM EST

Great post. Too many sites make it difficult to to leave comments by asking users to register. Social communities can only form when there is a relatively seemless process to join in and collaborate. In a prior life I worked at a SAAS company building presentation software. We found that between 40 and 50% of users wouldn't even fill in a simple guest book collecting user name and e-mail address, image the losses when you require them to do more. Keep up the great writing, it is always enjoyed. John Moore http://johnfmoore.wordpress.com

United StatesJohn Moore


Add comment


Name*
Email*  
Country     


  • Comment
  • Preview
Loading