Building Social Web Applications

Chapter 1. Building a Social Application

“Why are you building a community?”

If you cannot answer this question after a few seconds of thought, the odds are good that no one coming to your site will be able to, either. The elevator pitch should be about value for them, not for you. What will make them stay around?

Social applications come in three main types: those that focus on products, those that focus on content, and those that focus on activity. You need to decide what will be a good fit for your community or the community you want to attract, as well as understand what is happening in related communities and sites.

There are many ways to visualize this. As an example, Figure 1-1 shows the areas of photography captured by various imaginary websites. The lefthand side represents the act of taking pictures, and the righthand side represents the act of viewing photos. Different sites sit at different places in this process. A–D represent companies that each have a single and different product aimed at this market. Perhaps B is more focused on technical advice about taking photos, while C and D are more focused on viewing pictures.

Figure 1-1. Flow of activity and corresponding web applications; each box represents a potential social application for photography

A new company might want to offer something different—perhaps E positioned as shown in Figure 1-2. At one level, noting where ...