Community rules rule communities: Part 2
Scrapbooking with feedback or the crochet of trivia?
Over the last 5 years we have seen the emergence of a new generation of community sites, the more formalized social networking site. The key structure that sets the tone of these sites are the short list of rules and premises that define entry and continued participation. Let’s compare some of the more notorious social networking sites and see how they approach it, and how that affects the tone, growth & kinds of participation.
In Friendster and MySpace, you can surf as many pages as you like. Leaving a message, chatting or looking at photos or videos requires a log in. Logging in requires registration. This means creating an account and stating your age without any meaningful verification, which is then secured by an email loop to the gmail account you created moments before... A very simple system, and one that has become a baseline for most social sites despite the obvious flaws. As a construction activity, it is the descendent of making your own web page on the internet, but with a simple Content Management System to make it easy and closed group browsing and searching.
Contained Loops
Facebook initially distinguished itself by allowing only people with .edu email addresses and limiting surfers ability to see participants details by school and region. This tiny change in the ruleset is fundamental to the kind of community that Facebook has created. Making access exclusive to students, it establishes a baseline credibility that leverages the brand loyalty mythologies constructed by the academic system. For instance, which school you attend usually creates a class structure and forms cliques of exclusion.
The general benefit is a level of comfort that is not felt on other sites, a dramatic difference from MySpace & Friendster.
This has a profound effect on how these sites grow. There are initial cultural triggers, but real growth appears when groups begin to cluster. If three of your friends have joined the site, then probably you and your other friends will join the same site. IM services work the same way.
The success of clustering is linked to how the sites are administered. Facebook devised an exclusionary context because of lessons it learned from Friendsters collapse. As with all online communities from AOL on, miscreants troll for innocence on the internet & these sites facilitate pedophiles. How the sites react to these behaviors and the threat of these behaviors sets a tone in the community.
Friendster became known for overreacting to this threat and damaged the impulse to join a cluster. The primary demographic for these sites are teens & young adults who are not fond of authority. In fact they are typically online to try and escape it, so Freindster seemed at worst a bully at best a pill.
MySpace capitalized on the disaffection with more robust servers and much less control. You could personalize your space more, add illegal music files and write pretty much anything you wanted. While there were still levels of access controlled by a log-in, the feeling that a participant could vandalize their own page through various hacks was a powerful loyalty builder. But both strategies leave questions unanswered and MySpace is currently being taken to court by both victims and alleged pedophiles.
Over the last 5 years we have seen the emergence of a new generation of community sites, the more formalized social networking site. The key structure that sets the tone of these sites are the short list of rules and premises that define entry and continued participation. Let’s compare some of the more notorious social networking sites and see how they approach it, and how that affects the tone, growth & kinds of participation.
In Friendster and MySpace, you can surf as many pages as you like. Leaving a message, chatting or looking at photos or videos requires a log in. Logging in requires registration. This means creating an account and stating your age without any meaningful verification, which is then secured by an email loop to the gmail account you created moments before... A very simple system, and one that has become a baseline for most social sites despite the obvious flaws. As a construction activity, it is the descendent of making your own web page on the internet, but with a simple Content Management System to make it easy and closed group browsing and searching.
Contained Loops
Facebook initially distinguished itself by allowing only people with .edu email addresses and limiting surfers ability to see participants details by school and region. This tiny change in the ruleset is fundamental to the kind of community that Facebook has created. Making access exclusive to students, it establishes a baseline credibility that leverages the brand loyalty mythologies constructed by the academic system. For instance, which school you attend usually creates a class structure and forms cliques of exclusion.
The general benefit is a level of comfort that is not felt on other sites, a dramatic difference from MySpace & Friendster.
This has a profound effect on how these sites grow. There are initial cultural triggers, but real growth appears when groups begin to cluster. If three of your friends have joined the site, then probably you and your other friends will join the same site. IM services work the same way.
The success of clustering is linked to how the sites are administered. Facebook devised an exclusionary context because of lessons it learned from Friendsters collapse. As with all online communities from AOL on, miscreants troll for innocence on the internet & these sites facilitate pedophiles. How the sites react to these behaviors and the threat of these behaviors sets a tone in the community.
Friendster became known for overreacting to this threat and damaged the impulse to join a cluster. The primary demographic for these sites are teens & young adults who are not fond of authority. In fact they are typically online to try and escape it, so Freindster seemed at worst a bully at best a pill.
MySpace capitalized on the disaffection with more robust servers and much less control. You could personalize your space more, add illegal music files and write pretty much anything you wanted. While there were still levels of access controlled by a log-in, the feeling that a participant could vandalize their own page through various hacks was a powerful loyalty builder. But both strategies leave questions unanswered and MySpace is currently being taken to court by both victims and alleged pedophiles.
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