Building Real Communities Online
Affinity is the name of the game for communities and social networking tools can really help to keep a community focused on shared values. People like to live near people that are like them, this is a social norm.
But does this norm extend to online communities as well? My basic observations say yes, as I evaluated my own online communities I found that the people I engage with are very much like my friends and neighbors of the physical world. As a matter of fact, some of them are the very same people.
Facebook is a great example, no matter how vast and diverse the universe of Facebook users is, my micro online community is very much similar to my physical community. Sites like Facebook make building a customized social network that caters to our basic community building needs easy. So the work of building online communities is more than half done by the users.
You build the online social networking sites and let the community do the rest. People will find affinity with each other and micro communities will begin to spring up.
So big question, how for can these communities extend, how vast can they become?
Can you create a social platform for elections that help to tie entire countries together?
Check out these attempts at online political community building, from Google and Yahoo.
Google launched Google India Elections Tools to help India’s several 100 million voters make a decision about who to support in its upcoming national elections.
Now this is community building on the largest scale possible.
Honestly Yahoo India is doing a much better job at this with much less attention, (in the interest of full disclosure, I am an Ex-Yahoo.)
Check it out and decide for yourself.
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