[Guest Blog] Building the Future of Online Communities

This is a Guest Blog by Vincent from giffgaff, who are hosting Building the Future of Communities, 10th Feb, 1 – 4pm.

When looking at communities and how they’re set up today, we can see a lot of what could be called ‘singular communities’ in a sort of honeycomb set up, where each individual community is an entity in its own right, with its own group of users, its own set of rules and its own sign up process, but part of a larger web structure, although none or hardly any integration is taking place.

Often knowledge is not shared across different communities or platforms and the status you reach in one does not transfer over to any subsequent community you visit. There are some Social Platforms/communities such as Facebook, Twitter, Ask Yahoo, Wikipedia etc. which span large areas of either knowledge or integration in daily lives and span many countries and boundaries to connect people, but even these have been set up as singular communities of the same platform. And within these social platforms there is often no status attached to your contributions nor is there an acknowledgement of your expertise of certain topics, which could help people find likeminded people or even help from others in areas where they are not apt.

When we look at the future, out of many possibilities, there are two clear paths of community development which stand out.

Either we continue down the honeycomb structure route or we will gradually move to a single platform, which most if not all services connect to.

How could this play out? A honeycomb structure of communities sees new social platforms and services develop and if people take to it, we could continue to try and build communities for our brands there. Some of us will try and integrate these into our existing communities and others build and engage their customers on these new platforms. Whichever route you choose, there will likely be more integration of technology within these platforms to take advantage of new technology or information platforms.

Presently we use such clunky devices as smart phones, which use a honeycomb structure by having a variety of applications to help us navigate through life. Help us find out where we are, the right restaurants, review products on the go and give us tons of information about areas where we find ourselves. On top of that, we can continuously feed our social world with information on where we are and what we do. Constantly communicating outwards, about achievements made within games, the things we do on Facebook, the thoughts we have on Twitter and the places we visit on 4square. There are many more examples of this of course.

However on a singular platform level, we can foresee devices becoming smarter and more integrated in our lives, new technology already allows us to stream information directly onto our retinas through the use of AR (Augmented Reality). This technology superimposes computer generated images on the real world through the use of special glasses or even lenses. As technology allows you to recognise restaurants, points of interest, display nearby ATM’s, or the closest tubestop, etc, combine that with customer reviews of that business and you have a very powerful tool at your disposal.

We could move forward into a time where more and more of what we do socially on the web gets integrated into our daily lives, with the use of new technology and information platforms. When we look at this future, is it likely that whole communities will combine themselves into one giant platform? And is this desirable or even avoidable?

As more and more important institutions hook up in some form or another, the ability to get paid, receive medical help, get a job, connect to others, or even to pay for food, clothes, etc. might simply force you by circumstance to sign up to a singular platform.

Although unlikely to happen overnight, the possibility of integration of the many different platforms out there could well be inevitable.

If you’re interested in building communities, come to the first Community Cove unconference on 19 Feb 2011. Find out more at www.meetup.com/communitycove