This year I will chair a roundtable on social network sites and online communities together with Lewis Goodings. Other panelists include Nancy Baym, Malene Charlotte Larsen, Amanda Lenhart, Raquel Recuero and Jan Schmidt. I am happy that we have been able to gather these great people and hope for an interesting discussion during the roundtable session.

Here is an extract from the roundtable description:

Life On The Move: Social network sites and online communities

Social network sites (SNSs) like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace are rapidly becoming a popular area of research investigating online ‘communities’. This immediately raises the question of how new SNSs can be understood as a descendent of the ‘virtual community’ that was popularized in the 1980’s (Rheingold, 1993). [...] The purpose of this roundtable is to further discussions on the present shapes of online communities in light of the current trajectory of social network popularity. In particular, to what extent are online communities tied to a particular site? And consequently, how can we rethink notions of community in line with recent trends in SNSs?

[…] The underlying premise is that ‘life on the move’ produces a certain problem for academic researchers as to how we locate the individual (or the community) in such a dispersed social landscape. Therefore, how can we understand community involvement when users are members of a number of different community sites and SNSs and move regularly from one site to another? A further problem here is how we as researchers resist the mundane assumption that inherently complex online communities are only recognisable in terms of the users movement in and out of them, surely there is much more to it than that.

The same scenario has been displayed in many other online communities and social network sites. Every time LunarStorm changes its appearance you will find members reacting with frustration and every time Facebook changes some of its features there will be complaints. Online venues like Bilddagboken must continue to develop to keep up with what’s happening around them and it seems reasonable that they will have to change the design sometimes. But wouldn’t it be nice to involve the members in the design process? After all they invest a lot of their time and energy in the community and they want to feel that they have some kind of influence. When the software environment suddenly changes it is somewhat similar to redecorating their living room without asking them. No wonder they get mad.

If you spend a lot of time in online social spaces you need to remember that these environment are privately owned and that you most often do not know anything about their further development or how the conditions for spending time there might suddenly change. If you are managing such a place, remember that the members want to have some kind of influence. They are not merely “users” but co-producers creating an attractive environment. If you want to have a thriving community you need to let go of some of the power and invite the members to participate in the process of developing the site.

[Also posted in Swedish on my Umeå Live blog]

It is too early for me to say anything conclusive about my experience of Twitter, but I think that I will like it. I’ve been on Facebook for a while now and have always felt that my friends’ status updates have been one of the most interesting features of Facebook. Twitter appears to be a refined version of the Facebook status updates. You can write a little bit more, but still only short messages. It seems to be somewhat easier to manage and people tend to update it more often.

I’ve been thinking a lot on why I find it so interesting to watch short and simple status updates from friends. I think that it has something to do with creating a narrative and making me a part of it. When I read about the things my friends do it becomes a description, almost like a story, about their everyday life and I get the feeling that I am a part of it. I can comment on it and react to it or just watch it evolve like a real life drama. Also, even though people of course can write fake messages about what they are doing at the moment, it feels more like the real thing than many other kinds of online interactions. Twitter messages are typically short and snappy and have a spontaneous and unstructured flavor to them.

Anyway, I hope to see more of my Swedish friends on Twitter soon so that I can really get a feeling for its pros and cons. For all of you not yet familiar with how Twitter works, there is an excellent video on Common Craft that explains it all.

I’m not sure about the parallel to nightclubs, but I do agree with Mindpark that the size of Facebook has become a major threat for its further existence. When a community grows too big people start longing for something smaller and more exclusive.

Both Mindpark and Bisonblog argue that one strategy that should be adopted by community owners is to allow for sub-communities inside the large community. These sub-communities can be smaller and topic-specific, attracting dedicated members. This is very true and probably one of the key factors to why for instance LunarStorm has been such a lively environment for so long. (However, LunarStorm also seem to be loosing steam nowadays.)

I think that you could put this in another way by saying that if you want members to stay you’ll have to offer them an environment that does not only give entertainment but actually allows for a real community to develop. I get the feeling that many so called “community sites” don’t really have that much “community” going on. No wonder people eventually get bored and move on.