As I wrote at the end of yesterday’s post, I had barely got off the phone with a reporter from the New York Post when I looked again at the provisional Ning site I’d put up. I was astonished: there were already 10 people waiting to get in, and there wasn’t even a site.

Ning is powerful and easy to use: within a half hour, I had what I called Park Slope Kids & Parents—or PSKids for short—up and running. Now, just 36 hours later, there are 60 new users.

Meanwhile, two new listservs have come online to replace the soon-to-be-$25/year Park Slope Parents. Both, unsurprisingly, are Yahoo! Groups, just like the original Park Slope Parents. For both, their raison d’etre is the fee: they don’t want to pay it even though they obviously believe moderators are at very least needed.  One of the groups theotherparkslopeparents already has moderation and rules in place; the other, FreeParkSlopeParents, is getting there.

Listservs: powerful, simple—and weak

From the start, my reaction was not only to the fee but to the very form of a listserv. Listservs are decent for  connecting in real time with a large group of people, but they have obvious problems. Read as individual postings, they clog up your mailbox with each reply while as a digest, they become insufferably long, forcing users to read or skim the entire contents to reach an individual post or reply. Since they are plain text, they also eliminate the possibility of photos and videos—the only connection outside the senders is via html links, and those are by and large copy-pasted.

I realized that a good part of my disinterest in PSP had to do with it being a listserv. With my kids (twin boys) now four years old, I’ve become more confident as a parent, and haven’t felt like skimming every posting to find the nugget of neighborhood news I need. I needed a threaded solution, and moreover, more interaction than ASCII affords. With a list, there’s the list and then there’s face-to-face contact, and not much in-between. My experience with Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc., have convinced me that I really want more from the communities I belong to. I want to meet and learn from other parents, not just read their occasional messages. I want relationships. I want to create subgroups without leaving the community (French speakers or Greenmarket chefs!) I want to post pictures of stuff to sell or videos from the last Dan Zanes show. I want to chat in real time with other parents struggling through the pre-K lottery situation.

As I’ve said in other posts, I don’t believe these relationships need to be moderated; in my 20 years working in digital community, moderators have seemed essential only in commercial contexts. In self-organizing communities, the community is what matters, and moderation is really just an outgrowth of membership, culture, and the passions of the folks who are there in the first place. Self-assembly is self-policing, if you do it right.

But what does right mean here? There’s no guidebook to community that reckons how various cms and software packages apply their “opinions” to user interaction. None that tell you how to engage and irritate the user base so they’ll post. The recipe is in the relationships that pre-exist, covertly and overtly. The foundational days of electronic community in that respect resemble almost any other ecosystem of relationships, with hidden (sometimes not so hidden) hierarchies, relationships, and different layers of followership and leadership. I can’t figure out whether listservs flatten or exaggerate this hierarchy and these relationships; likewise, I don’t know what Ning will do to them.

However I can tell you that Ning seems well suited to the task at hand, replaced PSP. Ning has threaded discussion groups and you can set your mail options to get just the content you want whenever you want it. If you want to read and reply to all topics and all readers, you can do that; if you want to read just things about 4 year olds or high schools or selling cars, you can do just that. Ning has live chat and “friend groups,” blogs and photos and videos, and even a shared calendar, so you don’t miss a thing. Ultimately, Ning is closer to  Facebook than a listserv: you only see and read what you want to; you post photos and videos; you blog and add status reports; you have real time chats and make small “friend groups,” etc. Getting the day’s email is just a part of it. How this plays out in user interaction and behavior is another question, but if Facebook is any guide, it does seem to be relatively self-policing.

Fragmentation is annoying. We now have three groups—together nearly 200 people—but there’s a long way between these 200 dissenters and the 6000 (give or take a few thousand) who are part of the PSP listserv. What surprises me in the end is the strength of listservs—as well as the opinions they create among their users. I can’t predict what will happen to the 6000 when the fee starts. Will they go to another listserv, or will they, like me, look for a different solution, a different kind of community? The only thing I know for certain is that I’m not in charge.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Nings as Social Networks (nylady.edublogs.org)

Greg Verdino’s Twitlash today comparing Twitter’s popularity—and potential future—to Second Life’s, hit home for me. Both are geeky, avatar-driven, overhyped, buggy marketing magnets. And, as Verdino says, both will soon be “last year’s story”:

If your social media consultant is telling you that you absolutely must have a Twitter strategy, you need to have security escort them out of your building.  Immediately.  You don’t need a Twitter strategy.  You didn’t need a Second Life strategy.  In fact, there is no such thing as a Twitter or Second Life strategy.  Both of these things — along with the dozens of other emergent media options marketers can choose from — are at best tactics.  At worst, they’re just enabling technology platforms.  They might have a place in your marketing strategy, but none of these things are the strategy in and of themselves.

As marketers, business people and just plain old people, we need to look beyond the story (”hey everyone, shiny new thing here”) to find the story behind the story (”we are staring into the eye of a significant new truth.”) …Twitter itself doesn’t matter (at least it doesn’t matter much.)  What matters is the rising propensity of people to publicly share even the most minute details of their daily lives, the shift from the asynchonous connectivity of traditional social networking to the real time connectivity of presence, and the rising expectations among even a relatively small subset of consumers that everything from information to service to support to access can (and should) be delivered instantaneously.  The real story lies somewhere in that rambling sentence, I think.  Try not to miss the tworest for the twees (sorry – see point #5.)

Bravo: finally, another Twynic (Twitter cynic) who’s not falling for hypey Twitterrhea. (I’ll stop with the cornball Twitter vocabulary now.)

What Second Life and Twitter have most in common, as Verdino says, is that they are both

built around the concept of virtual presence. Sure, they approach presence from entirely different angles, but they are both presence-oriented applications and really only come to life when they are populated by people having real-time conversations.  Looking at this through a business lens, when H&R Block began dispensing tax advice on Twitter and offering people the opportunity to ’sit’ with a tax advisor in Second Life (both programs were piloted in 2008), they were really just testing two variations on the same theme — the ability of a company to use new technology to have real-time conversations with its customers.

And here’s where I think Verdino (who I agree with), and most of the Twitterati (whose enthusiasm bites me), run off the rails. Twitter is indeed part of a revolution of real time communication (see also Nick Carr’s nice piece on this last week after Zuckerberg announced that FB was now embarked on a realtime mission).  As I see it, Twitter is simply the bleeding edge of a tsunami of realtime technologies that are about to hit us. It’s  elementary  “presence technology.” Pick your time frame (3/5/10 years) but soon, ubiquity-based IP-based communications will be part of every appliance and datastream. That microphone you speak into at a panel: think of it as having realtime embedded IP communication abilities. Your every utterance will be instantly (or near instantly) communicated and scraped to the massive web-enabled audience. Every dictum that leaves your mouth will be scrapeable and mineable, hashtags or not. (Hashtags being nothing more than author metadata.)

Ubiquity rocks

Now think of other appliances that will get realtime, ubiquitous communication ability. (Sorry, RFID doesn’t count.) What about your toaster-oven, water faucet and refrigerator, estimating the caloric realities of your food intake (and letting you know when you’ve exceeded your daily limit of carbs or haven’t drunk enough water)? What about your car, capturing speed and fuel and driving habits, (with instant feedback on mpg, better driving skills, and directions)? What about your guitar, capturing your rhythmic and harmonic aptitude, (and letting you know different rhythmic shapes and chord alternations as you play)?

And now what about your software: Movies that can be scrubbed scene by scene, and metatagged (word by word or by character or scene—I saw a demo of this at BRITE last week). TV news that can be mined and tagged. And of course your voice mail. (Ooops, that happened today.)

The revolution of presence technologies isn’t about pure disintermediated information, but rather, as John Seely Brown said in The Social Life of Information, information that simply and completely incorporates the “social periphery.” This is already happening, albeit only through software right now: For example, Hulu announced new social networking tools this week that, according to the WSJ, let users “create online profiles and share videos with each other. For example, the Hulu “Scorecard” will let users track their activity.” (Kind of meh but what do you expect from NBC/Fox?) What you’ll want is all that good Twittability here, plus instant voting for trust, credibility, relevance, etc., —not to mention total integration with other web-based data. (You get some of this today on Boxee.) One of my first tweets was “Can haz friendbar 4 TV?”—I want two way real time commnications with all my networks at once, with no distinction between IP and cable TV—and daily I’m beginning to think it’s on its way, and a lot sooner than expected.

The key takeaway here for marketers and product developers is to develop tools with an eye towards helping realtime groups do what they already do in real life: what John Seely Brown (in his terrific The Social Life of Information) called the “social periphery”: all that edge stuff that people do in conversation that usually gets swept under the rug—simple talk, gesture, and informational nuance conducted through the cloud. Twitter is the beginning of that real time, real life social periphery as a mass movement, but it’s just the beginning of the story. As Verdino says, Twitter, like Second Life, may be “last year’s story” very soon now.

Related articles by Zemanta

• redefining innovation : 2009 (jburg.typepad.com)
• Communities vs network of practice (egrommet.net)