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A L S O__T O D A Y
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THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD | PAGE 1, 2, 3
What kind of community is there for members who do stick to one company's service? Most of these services, to be sure, have bulletin boards, chat rooms, scheduled events, thematic interest areas -- and of course millions of "members." But the vast majority of the people who come and build their homes are not doing much interacting with the others in their community. Pay a visit to the forums of GeoCities and you'll find a couple thousand posts -- nothing compared to the millions of members the service boasts. The posts are sporadic and repeat visitors are rare. On one recent evening, I was the sole person logged on to the entire Tripod chat server; although there were also member chat rooms, hosted on Web sites, only 30 or so people were chatting in less than a dozen active rooms. "Publishing to each other could be part of community, but it isn't sufficient," explains Howard Rheingold, a veteran community-builder on the Web and author of "The Virtual Community." "And putting up message boards and chat rooms is a step towards community, but online community does not automatically happen just by throwing the tools at people. It requires thought." And that's not all, he adds: It also requires talented hosts, log-in requirements that reduce anonymity and shared interests that will engage members and keep them coming back. And, of course, members have to actually want to get involved -- and many don't. Amy Jo Kim, author of the upcoming book "Community Building on the Web," spent much of this year researching community at GeoCities. "Lots and lots of people at GeoCities couldn't give a shit about community," she says. "I interviewed hundreds of members, and most said, 'I don't know why you're contacting me. I just have a home page there because I want a Web space.'" There are, of course, some members who are interested in community and actively participate in chats. Richard Jones of FortuneCity estimates that a quarter of his members actively participate in member areas. Theglobe.com has hopping chat rooms, especially in the Romance area (the member home pages, on the other hand, are mostly empty -- the company is still best known for chat). And in the member chat rooms at Tripod, it's easy to find assorted teens and older Net novices who are perfectly thrilled to be participating in the incoherent conversations. The community that does exist in the free Web page services, explains Kim, usually emerges from "community leader" programs. Community leaders, sometimes called liaisons, are essentially enthusiastic volunteers who patrol their designated "neighborhoods" on behalf of the company. Their duties are typically to watch for inappropriate content, eliminate sites that have not been updated, e-mail new members and encourage them to build out their Web sites and invite members to participate in planned events like chats or contests. Certainly, these volunteers form a genuine community of sorts, with a shared sense of responsibility and regular interactions with other community leaders. They even serve as mutual support groups -- witness the heartfelt memorials that the GeoCities community leaders put up last year when another leader, Bev Crowley, died. But how well can these volunteers serve as catalysts for real community? There are, for example, 1,600 community leaders at GeoCities, who are collectively responsible for 3 million Web sites. Do the math: Each leader has to keep on top of nearly 2,000 members. At theglobe.com, 400 leaders serve more than 2 million members. Their task is nearly futile -- although many sites insist that the community leaders track non-participating members and take down outdated sites, it's still easy to find ancient unfinished home pages, and it's obvious that there are a lot more people who don't participate than there are those who do. And most hosts don't receive any training from their companies. Says Rheingold, "These companies that have gone public have the resources to do it right. It doesn't cost that much to get the right kind of software and training programs for hosts, whether you pay them or not, compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars in capitalization these companies have. One can only conclude that they're interested in the eyeballs and using the word community, but that they're not really interested in fostering community." Some of the services, of course, come closer than others to the community ideal. And some services make no bones about their lack of interest in community-building: Angelfire promotes the fact that "We won't blather you to death ... cause you just wanna make pages." And Xoom's founders say they are more interested in direct marketing to the site's members than in fostering communication between them. Explains CEO Laurent Massa, "If you think about community and affinity groups, there is a limiting factor down the road for this concept, because you are gathering a core of purists ... We're not in the business of building art colonies." As Massa rightly observes, there will always be a tension between the needs of a "community" and the desire of a big Internet company to reap profits. The market enthusiasm for sites like GeoCities or Xoom or theglobe.com is directly tied to the number of members they can boast and the number of ads they can serve to those members. Communities, on the other hand, tend to be strongest when they are small and tightly focused. So it's little surprise that business needs are often coming ahead of community visions. Tripod, for example, stopped producing its magazine-style content after the site was purchased by Lycos: The special-interest features and polls that used to give members a meeting point have now been replaced by forbidding lists of topical home pages. GeoCities also reorganized its site last year, forcing its metaphorically named "Neighborhoods" to fit 14 generically labeled "Avenues" -- a decision that may have made the site more appealing to advertisers, but that also created a strange categorization system (the "Area 51" paranormal area is now filed under Entertainment), longer member site addresses and utterly confusing navigation. GeoCities press releases said the redesign was intended to "ease site navigation and improve access to user-published content." Author Kim explains it differently: "GeoCities really backed off from the neighborhood thing, and did the topic thing instead. That's all about business model -- topics and avenues." The increasingly commercial nature of the "Web community" companies is most evident on the home and top-level pages of their sites. To become a member of many of these services, you have to click through page after page of commercial solicitations. The GeoCities site is particularly crammed with ads -- from the pop-up windows on the top of member pages to similar pop-up ads on the main site to the astounding array of animated ads in all sizes that fill every square inch of the main site. The front door to Fashion Avenue, for example, is so chockablock with solicitations and banner ads and co-branded links that it's nearly impossible to find the two tiny text links and one pull-down toolbar that will lead you to the neighborhood chat rooms, forums and home pages. GeoCities has always led the field of the free Web page companies -- it's arguably the oldest and biggest and has the best performance on the stock market. It's also consistently the most commercial. If what you find at GeoCities is what's commercially viable for this kind of site, the future of free Web page services may not offer much hope for the ideal of community. Micro-communities can exist within an enormous, profitable service -- just look at some of the successful interest groups at AOL -- but they require baby-sitting and attention, which in turn require staffing and training and hosting. That's not as easy as it looks. Will the commercialism of free Web page companies stifle their community-building aspirations? Describing FortuneCity's strategy, Lady Kythera Ann lays out the alternatives: "It's the difference between the feeling you get in a small town when you go the grocery store and everyone knows you, or when you go into the masses of suburbia -- you can live there for 10 years and never know your neighbor. Both are called communities, but which one really is?"
Are collections of free Web pages "communities"? Come to Table Talk's Digital Culture discussion area and weigh in. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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