I’m still working through sources to define community (see earlier discussion). Tara Hunt posts recently:

Community is not a buzzword to describe a monolithic mass of marketing data. Communities are made up of people with endless motivations, hopes, dreams and goals and all have unique personalities.

Click through to her post… more of a mantra than a definition… and I’m interested.

But in starting to build my own theory on community, especially defining how emerging technology (and communication tech specifically) influences how a community looks and operates, I’m headed towards very specific and more well-defined communities to start. It’s easier to grasp all the working parts if I do that. My initial launch point is “Cultivating Communities of Practice.” The book’s authors are knowledge management and organizational design experts, which makes the book much more practical in defining the means, ends, and value of a community. The “practice” part of a community really changes the context. I think online community designers (and moreso marketers) think about the social and connective part of communities — but rarely focus on the output, the value, the practice of a community.

I’m rereading the book now and marking up notes and thoughts. More to come.

I was truly interested and excited about what Apple announced yesterday. But after that glow faded, I’m left with questions and concerns:

1. What protects that screen? Imagine using this thing. I have an iPod now that I have the lockdown on with a protective cover. Only the controls can be accessed when it is protected. How do you protect the iPhone when the screen = the controls. You can’t just slide it into a protective case. Think about all the phone design of late… flips, sliders, etc… all built for protection and ease of use. That big beautiful iPhone screen will be a mess after a few weeks of use.

2. What keeps the screen clean? Anyone who has spent time using touch kiosks knows how disgusting they get in a short period of time. With me dragging and fat-fingering onto an iPhone I’m going to need to clean it constantly.

3. Where do I carry it? Is it big enough to fit in a pocket? Part of my last choice in phones was influenced by the need for portability. Thin isn’t everything. To me the ultimate factor of portability is if the device is obtrusive or not in my front pocket. iPhone isn’t going to fit. So then what? How do I carry it around? I don’t want to haul a manbag around everywhere.

4. How long will it be exclusive with Cingular? In any market (geographical area) one provider may provide better coverage and clarity than another. iPods are ubiquitous and require no extra layer to provide the content and connection (unless you count iTunes as the syncing mechanism… which is limiting to say the least). What happens when I buy an unlocked version? How much of the firmware is built for a specific carrier?

5. What do I do with my old phone? When I got an iPod it didn’t really replace anything. I had stopped lugging around my discman… In the case of the iPhone it replaces something that is usable for me. What do I do with it?

6. What do I do with my iPod? I currently have 30+ GB of music (no video) on my iPod. I like having all that at my fingertips. I don’t want to pare down my collection in smart lists to sync with the iPhone. Which means, even with the iPhone, I’m caring around the iPod still…

7. If I’m listening to music on iPhone how do I know I have an incoming call?

8. How does the device comply with FCC E911 Phase II requirements? Or more simply — how does the iPhone determine location of the user?

9. Will the multi-touch scroll be usable in lists of 1000 artists? Even the current iPod dial UI is reaching the limits of usability. I really think this one of the biggest weaknesses of the device. In the Smart Phone category the thumb wheel and scrolling orb are about as simple as it gets. The only thing you could add to them them is a “fast-foward” style feature–shift the scroll into different gears… especially when navigating lists and many pages.

10. How usable is the multi-touch keyboard? Those keys look pretty small. I guess not much different than a Blackberry… Just no tactile difference between the keys…

11. Am I really going to spin, flip, and zoom web pages like the NYTimes to read them?

12. What’s the global rollout plan?

13. What are the specifics of the Google, Yahoo, and Cingular partnerships?

I’ll add more if I think of them or run across good questions from other people. No matter my concerns, this should be real progress for users. Hopefully Nokia and Motorola come back to table with something better, different, more focused, etc. Lot’s of ways left to innovate.

And the more I think about this — at least from the US perspective, I imagine if we had this much innovation and competition among the carriers… and not marketing, sales, pricing competition, but innovation around the experience. If anything limits iPhone adoption it will be unsupportive or archaic carriers built to squeeze as much revenue out of their exisiting taxing of users model.

Where do I want to put my money? New innovation around protocols that circumvent the circus that is the US carrier network industry.

Lots of interesting noise around the “size” of Second Life. And it’s bizzare that there is so much noise when the actual signals can be published at any time. The debate steams from the Shirky camp that believes Second Life doesn’t rate all the press it’s getting (due to the overinflated population/usage numbers) and the reaction of anyone who has a vested interest in Second Life defending its value (where value can diverge beyond the topic of size/usage).

I came across this from GigaGamez:

Linden CEO Philip Rosedale suggested retention was 10%— a percentage so low, it shocked me. (“[A]bout 10% of newly created residents are still logging into Second Life weekly, 3 months later.”) When I checked with Linden Lab last week, Philip and Marketing Director Catherine Smith reported back a slightly higher percentage, this one gauged by returning users from over the last 30 days (but not those who created an account within that period)— “12-15% and has remained steady over the last year… we know churn will be high, but the difference is a network effect and constantly changing content that people do come back to see. ”

The stats above are going to be the crux of some back of the napkin calculations I’ll throw out later (need to verify some data sources first). But there’s probably an easier quick litmus test on the hype factor — the concurrency data. How many people are online at a single time. Let’s assume the following are generally accurate (sourced from Linden’s feed once a minute) — (see graphs). Eyeballing it, it looks like 10-12k concurrent users is the average — with spikes up to 20,000 or so during peaks. If we go back to Shirky’s statements about marketers and press not asking the hard questions to parse out “cool story” versus “does it matter”, it seems to me that in terms of scale, this is a non-story. Especially when you look at this:

So this, as it turns out, is where to set the Second Life bar: of the 2,000,000+ registered accounts now, roughly 240,000-300,000 are regular users, residents in both the colloquial and literal sense. Clay is right to call for the media to stop reporting that very top number without caveat. Shirky is further correct to wonder if all the big companies recently promoting their brands in Second Life (NBC! American Apparel! Adidas and Toyota!, etc.) count as news, since it’s not clear if this is just a gimmick, or if they’re actually getting any measurable return from their promotion dollars.

But even in the Gigagamez post, Wagner James Au admits that measured on scale alone, this isn’t so newsworthy.

So here’s my take:
Second Life, in itself, is never going to reach the mass adoption or generate the impact MySpace and YouTube have. The wild assumptions on Second Life adoption and growth will never materialize without dramatic changes — incremental improvement won’t do it.

However, Second Life is worth looking at, watching, and playing in. Even if you are a marketer. I think it’s definitely a Faint Signal on the Fringe — what is happening in terms of:

Design for user-generated content
Design for user-generated commerce
Community Design
Rights of digital content and creation
Rapid prototyping and immersive design
Government regulation of global virtual property and content
3D social application design
Etc

There are lots of newsworthy elements of Second Life… but in typical hype fashion, money, size, and sex sell.

I’m doing some research to add to the Greenberg and Shirky conversation. My slant is going to be different — and hopefully I can bring some other disciplinary lenses to the theory buidling. But, to be properly steeped in community, I need to reference the books I have (I’ll add them to the Now Reading library as I do — I think they are in my office, rather than at home, so that’ll have to wait unti Monday evening).

Additionally, I’m doing a search/survey of the thoughts on community. The first link I found, which looks like a good starting point, is from Jake McKee of Big in Japan. I’m starting with this link.

I recently threw out a question to a few of the smartest community marketing minds around (as well as here on the blog). The question was simple, the answers were not.

If you had 5 minutes with an inquisitive marketing manager, what would you want to make sure they learned about working with fans/community?

I’ll add to this post as I build the link list (once I reach critical mass I’ll provide a delicious link as well).

As a tactic, this seems perfectly reasonable, and even effective. But as a strategy? This same tactic, as described by BusinessWeek, seems like it could easily become as useful as all those chain letters and joke forwards you get via coworkers, family, and friends. Those are “peer-to-peer” as well. Yet again, so is a virus. Sometimes it’s useful to take a term literally (Viral Marketing).

I’m a little over a hundred pages into Marvin Minsky’s The Emotion Machine and came across this gem:

To understand how our thinking works, we must study each of those “very different things” and then ask what kinds of machinery could accomplish some or all of them. In other words, we must try to design — as opposed to define — machines that can do what humans do.

In my words, he’s taking about Designing to Define. I think that is an apt way to describe an interesting philosophy of doing to learn. In the software community the closest thing is rapid releases, rapid prototyping, etc. But what I’m talking about isn’t designing to improve — it’s designing to learn. That is something I’m not sure that product companies do intentionally. Maybe I’m wrong. But even if they’re not doing it now, they will (and those that are – you’re a step or two ahead).

Marketers, especially those of the direct variety, have always done this to some degree — if they do it right. On a very basic level they understand the values and motives of consumers through emergent design — the audience, the offer, the creative, endlessly reformulated in small increments, a plodding evolutionary approach. What makes that world complex, however, is 1) the spectrum of sophistication (or lack thereof) of other companies’ approaches and 2) the pure volume and breadth of direct marketing communication. Very few marketers actually take into account what else people are getting in their mail as a part of the audience, offer, creative equation. They don’t completely define context.

It is the proper atomization or disaggregation into component parts that is the difficult part of Designing to Define. I don’t have to understand all the workings and innards of a complex system, but rather I want to design a system that elicits the outcomes I desire in the appropriate contexts. Therefore:
1. I must be clear about my intended outcome(s)
2. I must understand the relevant components of context
3. I must be able to break the design features into mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive parts

Doesn’t seem so easy when broken out that way. But the fourth element of DtoD is iteration. The outcomes, context, and design components must all be quantified and measured — then coupled in iterative ways that improve outcomes, are either specialized for specific contexts or rigorous enough for most contexts, and reduce time and cost of design and production.

I know. You’re thinking: this isn’t anything new. This is the scientific method. And I agree. But instead of designing experiments, just design products and services that are emergent and experimental while delivering value. Make the emergent qualities part of the value and assets of the company. You’ll get closer to actual “use contexts”, shorten the time to learn, reduce R&D costs in the long run, and make competively differentiated products and services that people use and will increasingly value.