Yet Another Community...

Hi...

in the past few weeks I heard so many people talking about new ideas all around community in the web. It seems like you only have to find something which humans tend to do in groups or at least two share an interest in (any kind of sports, hobby, whatever and no matter how strange it seems), register a website for it and start a community, make some room for an ad and get rich...

SOrry, this time is over...

My guts feeling is that it is about time for the meta community. The little communities specialized on a specific topic are about to fade away. Why? Because it is getting boring to log in to different communities just for one thing...

I am pretty sure that concepts like facebook are a thing of the future. It is some kind of meta community which is at first so generic that you can project anything on it. So the critical mass of people are in there but no need and no hassle with different logins or URLs or whatever. Also facebook delivers the necessary ingredients like messaging, forums etc.

Certainly the user interface of facebook needs a little update ;-) but who can do this any better than those guys.

It somehow remembers me on the operating system market. When it all started there were lots of different systems for different usage scenarios. Today it consolidated down to a few players with still some niche systems (think in the embedded market). So facebook and others (yes, now I mention MSN...be honest, you waited for this) are the "operating systems" for communities by having a large user base and offering services on top.

Certainly there must be a partner story on top of it. And there is... but not the one with build your own wooden shoe dance community and get rich by others providing the content and you providing the bank account for the ad revenue.

CU

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