Analyzing Virtual Communities

What is a Virtual Community?

The term Virtual Community is used to describe a wide variety of social groups that interact via the internet. This interaction may or may not develop strong bonds among the community members.

Howard Rheingold mentions that virtual communities form when people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships. Rheingold also pointed out the potential benefits for personal psychological well-being, as well as for society at large, of belonging to such groups.

To a certain extent I see the logic in his statements and agree with them. However, I don’t believe that personal relationships are the only reason virtual communities are formed. I believe they can be formed in many different ways and for many different purposes.

For more information or to read my disuccion about the virtual community, click on the following links and sit back for a good read.

• Virtual community discussion - My thoughts on Howard Rheingold, Virtual Communities and detailed personal opinions of both.
• Virtual community examples - Examples of virtual communities that were formed because of the desire to share information with others, not because of personal relationships as Rheingold suggested.

My definition of a virtual community:

In my opinion, a virtual community is a group of individuals communicating and interacting with each other. The word community comes from the Latin word communis, meaning "common, public, shared by all or many".

The definition of the word community is as follows:

• An assemblage of interacting populations occupying a given area.
• Sharing, participation and fellowship of a population.
• A region occupied by a group of interacting organisms.

Notice how all of these definitions suggest an interaction in some way between the members of a group. This is what I believe a virtual community is, a group of people interacting with each other, holding conversations, exchanging information, and participating in discussions.

These are all attributes that I think are necessary for a community to be called a community. I don’t see how someone could say they are an active member of a virtual community, yet they never get involved in or participate or interact with other members of the same group.

Virtual community review:

I chose to review a social networking website at random to see weather or not it was formed from personal relationships. The site I chose was Flickr.

While researching the website I stumbled across an interview with Flckr's Eric Costello, the Client Development Lead for Flickr and a prominent web developer. In this interview Eric explains how Flickr started and how it developed into the Flickr of 2007. Click HERE to read the entire interview.

During the interview, Eric explains that Flickr initially launched in February 2004 as a Flash application called The Game Neverending with real-time photo sharing, live-chat, and message board capabilities.

The intention was to build a web-based massively multiplayer online game that you could play from any web-browser wherever you were. Because of the social network aspect of it, users were able to build neighborhoods within it, and began voicing their opinions of what could be changed or better.

The development team opened their ears, listened to their users and made changes based on user feedback. People responded well to these changes and The Game Neverending slowly started to develop into Flikr. Their success is due to acting on the opinions and suggestions of their users. Flickr turned out to be a great platform for sharing with the masses, not just with small collections of friends. Flickr is all about facilitating sharing however the user wants, whereas other sites are more about uploading photos so you can easily print them.

From an initial standpoint the website seemed quite simple. A place you would go to upload your photos for later use. But after delving deeper I realized that it was more than just a photo storage website. It was a photo storage and sharing community. Along with sharing photos, is the ability to choose which people or groups are allowed to see your photos. This is an interesting feature and adds a sense of security to your picture domain. It also adds an element of control over the user’s pictures that some find very helpful and secure.

In addition to photo sharing, Flickr also has what they call groups or communities of people that can communicate and interact with each other via message boards. Each group has user statistics which I found quite helpful in my review of the website. One group reported having 5064 members, another reported 9499 members. The group with 9499 members had 245,126 shared photos! That was just one group.

Finally, Flickr has a nice search feature for the groups. You can enter specific queries and their search engine will return all the groups that fit your search criteria. A good feature when looking for something in specific.

Sources:

• Adaptive Path Publications - Interview with Eric Costello
• Wikipedia - Virtual Communities
• Howard Rheingold - Virtual Communities: Homesteading on the electronic frontier