The Construct of Communities

The initial version of Blogger enabled communities only through comments. And it did enable it quite well, as my other blog would validate. A lot of the people who comment there have been doing so for years now, and some of them are not bloggers. These days, I’ve been noticing a lot of people utilising the ‘follow‘ function that a recent version of Blogger had introduced. Of course, there were many entities that were providing this service, but the official Blogger add on is still a help. What pleased me much was the inbuilt feed mechanism, which would get people to use RSS more.

Twitter of course, is built on a follower/following concept. But I’d say that Twitter/Facebook/Orkut/LinkedIn are not built around one entity as much as a blog is. The groups on these (except Twitter which still hasn’t got groups outside Japan) can be considered communities.

I saw a list of fastest growing social networks a while back, with Twitter leading (in terms of growth), not surprisingly. But what i was surprised by was the appearance of Ning at #3 (despite the note that in the survey, it did not meet the minimum sample standards). My surprise had perhaps to do with the fact that, though i am a member of a couple of communities, i have not been active there. Both the communities I am part of are centred around shared interests.

It made me wonder about the construct of communities that individuals would prefer to build in the future. Would it centre around blogs, would it centre around microblogging tools like twitter, which I know a lot of bloggers now prefer. Would it be a customised version of twitter, that’s made possible by tools like Shout’Em or Twingr (via Mashable)  or even something like the Prologue theme of WordPress. Would it be based on lifestreaming services (self hosted like sweetcron or otherwise like storytlr) where they can aggregate activities that they do all around the net. Or perhaps a tangential version of this like Friendfeed which also builds in the community feature. Will iGoogle become more social? Would at some point of time, individuality merge into communities, as discussions around topics become more important than introduction of the topic in a personal space? Or would both exist (as it does in the current form) side by side, depending on subjective likes/dislikes without any commonality in evolution?

until next time, social circles into social web