Community In a Box (or building niche communities)

Community out of the box

About 3 weeks ago, Kerry Parkins got together folks from Dulles and MV to brainstorm around creating "niche communities", If you think about AOL, we've had some great experience building communities - look at peopleconnection and you'll see a range from Pets to Photos to Message Boards on all subjects. But I don't think any of us believe we are at the center of any one community - and we can be.

Looking forward to 2007, the idea is to build some of these communities. First off is "Ficlet" that Kevn Lawver is spearheading. I won't go into this much, but keep an eye on ficlet.com. He is using Ruby on Rails to prototype (something I think we should use a bit more).

Shawn Carnell is creating a "message board, comments" combo that can be placed on any web page. This allows a message board or forum to be placed anywhere - and to syndicate this board. He's made great progress in 2 weeks on this.

A few others came up: how can we make "Polls" a cool destination and syndicate them ? Why can companies like Catster and Dogster exist and why isn't AOL doing these niche communities? And how can our toolset allow easy creation?

If you have ideas - or a passion on a community - see if you can put it together using our products.

I started "alley cats" - right now ultra simple aimpage that uses the comments module. I just go in their each day and add photos and videos on cats. Simple. Rather silly, but that's how cuteoverload.com started too.

Check out the Alley Cats

Comments

Anonymous said…

Whatever happened to the old chatrooms that drove AOL's growth in the early days? Are they not popular anymore?

And does AOL have any personality-led services like Tom of MySpace?

December 26, 2006 at 9:46 AM

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