From the category archives:

Building Community

Facebook issues mea culpa

September 8, 2006

We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to [...]

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Facebook faces community wrath

September 6, 2006

Congrats for the milestone, Facebook. I think that it happens to all communities when they get big enough. In every online community, there are people who complain. In some cases, like Slashdot, they do it all the time. Running a community website is hard. Sure, users are basically creating all the content for you, but [...]

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Wednesday Links

September 6, 2006

How to be a Net video hitSF Comical..err… Chronicle documents how to become a net star. Apparently, all you need is a cell phone. Learning from your referrersPronet documents how to use web metrics to get to know your audience. Two words – Google Analytics. Seriously tho, stats are the name of the game if [...]

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Small Business and Social Media

September 5, 2006

A very good friend of mine is relaunching her seasonal store in San Francisco this fall. It’s a really great non-profit business that sells items made by local artists. I talked to her the other day and was trying to convince her that even though the store is local, she should try to use some [...]

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Reputation Systems and Gaming Epinions

August 23, 2006

I want to look a little more at the Yahoo! Answers story and add what I’ve learned about gaming a system. When you look back at the history of Epinions, the site made a big bang when it debuted because it offered to pay writers for their product reviews. The idea was the company would [...]

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Is Yahoo Answers being gamed?

August 23, 2006

The WSJ is reporting this morning that people are asking and answering inane questions on the Yahoo! Answers service to boost their point scores. Here is the WSJ’s explanation of the system: “A points economy is like a regular economy, except the currency is points, not currency. Even though you can’t exchange these points for [...]

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Epinions Lesson #1: Let them talk to each other

August 17, 2006

One of the things that stunned me when I joined Epinions was that they had no formal message boards. Before I joined, (in my mind) the very definition of a Web community was message boards. I had spent countless hours either lurking or actively participating in many message board, Usenet, and BBS communities even before [...]

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