OPW — Feb 21 – On Saturday 10th February I attended Community Next in Silicon Valley, CA. Here are a few keypoints I picked up from the day of speakers which included the founders of Dogster, Hi5, Mychurch, PlentyofFish, HotorNot, and Userplane. – Mark Brooks
People will gather online around 'social objects' i.e. pictures (Flickr), bookmarks (Delicious), friends (Friendster).
Loopt offers location based services on phones. Mark suggested that the mobile platform is more appealing than the PC because it's 'Always Available.'
Threadless makes $15 million a year from community designed tshirt sales. One of the secrets of their success is they listen to members and make changes quickly. Side projects include ExtraTasty, NakedandAngry and IParkLikeAnIdiot. Start your site with minimal rules and then add rules to the community later on. Be evolutionary. Make frequent small incremental changes.
The Dogster Founders recommended choosing appropriate advertisers and building campaigns around them that truly engage users. Don't be deceptive, ever! Write your advertisers copy. Offer something special to users.
Currently MyChurch has 2700 church groups signed up. There are more churches than schools in the U.S.A. (300k) and Americans donate $88 billion a year in tithings. There are 88k Christian groups on Y! groups, and 82k on MySpace.
Danah Boyd was not a speaker but was quoted as follows… "Community is a garden, tend it well."
From the final panel:
The Suicide Girls name was inspired by a book written by the author of Fight Club. Presently, their fastest growing revenue generator is from merchandising.
PlentyofFish contrasted executive opinion on the final panel on two points. Markus believes that advertising is actually very important in building an online community. Other speakers (HororNot, Fark, Hi5, Slide, Suicide Girls) did not. Markus stated that 'passion' is not as important as 'cold hard analytics skills.' Other speakers believed that passion for the site was their primary success factor.
James Hong of HotorNot suggested that being an entrepreneur was like volunteering to be bipolar.
Fark was started when Drew Curtis put up a photo for 18 months of a squirrel with big nuts. Fark nearly ended up as a curry recipe site, but Drew decided to focus it on to focus on listing 'things you're ashamed you laughed at.' He's still the sole employee and maxim sells advertising for the site now.
Slide has 50 employees and is not profitable yet. It's founded by Paypal co-founder Max Levchin.