Jon Mountjoy's Blog

July 20, 2010

Facebook to severely wound LinkedIn and foursquare?

Why do folk use Facebook? To look at photographs of their friends, to connect, to chat, to interact with people (and brands), to establish relationships, to provide an identity for themselves, and yes, to do business too.

Why do folk use LinkedIn? To look at profiles of their colleagues, would-be colleagues, to establish relationships, to provide an identity for themselves.

These are all social networks. They all let me engage with others, with LinkedIn having a more business orientation, with Foursquare having location orientation, and Facebook having a bit of everything. At the heart of all of these are (simple) relationships.

Facebook on LinkedIn

Facebook is the elephant of course, though LinkedIn is reasonably sizeable too. But Facebook has the relationships. Not all of the business ones, not yet, but announcements like this may change some of that:

BranchOut launched this evening, a new Facebook application that makes career networking a snap. The application unlocks massive amounts of career data about my friends and friends of friends that was just impossible to get to before.

Search on a company name and see which of your Facebook friends work there (or used to). If those friends have installed the app, you can also see how many of their friends have worked at that company. You can then reach out to them for an introduction if you like.

via techcrunch.com

Drives like this, together with the slow realisation in work places that humans are multi-faceted complex animals with a private and public life, are probably going to result in more folk using Facebook for "work" relationships as well as "friend" relationships.

Facebook on Foursquare

Similarly, while Foursquare is king of the block, Facebook has more of the relationships. If they add location, as promised by the following article, well....

Information has leaked that Facebook is set to roll out location-based features for users and brands as soon as this month. According to Advertising Age, users could see location options any day now.

These features include the ability to check in at various locations, including retail spots and restaurants. We’re unclear as to whether users will be able to add or customize their own locations, but we are fairly positive that this move will put Foursquare, Brightkite, Gowalla and other location-based services in an uncomfortable position.

via mashable.com

Foursquare are brilliant at what they do. Gowalla is cool. Glympse is innovative. But the more of my network the have, the more useful they'll be.

The Power is in the Network

Network effects make these things useful. I installed BranchOut and found it somewhat useful, even though none of my friends are on it. (If a friend doesn't join, you don't get "friend of a friend" data). If Facebook records our business data with a semantic edge, as they're doing with Like buttons, movies and IMDB for example (when you Like a movie on IMDB, Facebook notes that you liked it, but also notes that it's a "movie" and not just a "page" on the internet), then what's to stop it swallowing LinkedIn?

Likewise, if they add location check-in, Facebook will immediately be more useful (to me) than Foursquare - the more people who use it (and there are more on Facebook) the better. Network effects.

I don't know how you can compete in the face of a monopoly on our social graph. We need competition, but the right now the power is in the network, and we don't own it.

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Filed under // Facebook foursquare LinkedIn semantic web social network

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March 29, 2010

It's Okay to Be You Most of the Time, Surely?

These issues are so confusing. I see value in being transparent, in being public, yet I value some aspects of my privacy. I care for some aspects of my reputation (my professional life) but not others (my poor taste in music). I imagine we're all like that to some degree. As more and more of us use Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and so on, what is being said about us is increasingly not under our control. We need better privacy, but perhaps also a better acceptance of publicity.

Privacy

As danah boyd eloquently argues:

Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows.

The disturbing "inversion of defaults when it comes to what's public and what's private" that we're seeing (see Facebook May Share User Data With External Sites Automatically for another example) appears to be growing, and I can't do a thing about an acquaintance tweeting that they met me at a restaurant. So of course I want privacy when I want it, and I want controls to enforce it when I want it.

But in other cases I don't mind. I don't mind if I am pictured in a pub with a beer (I prefer wine), or that my religion (or lack thereof) is known, or if you know what books I'm reading. Not right now. We're all open and public to varying degrees, and that's also okay.

Publicity

I've argued before that while we do need to consider privacy, we also need to consider publicity. If I perform well at work, should my manager care that I had 3 hours sleep after a ski trip, and that the pictures of that event are publicly available? Probably not.

While we're used to hear-say and gossip about individuals, social media and search (and permanence of medium) takes this to a different level - and while we need more control over privacy settings, we also need society to be less concerned about public information. Michael Arrington feels the same way:

Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming increasingly difficult. And much like the fight by big labels against the illegal sharing of music, it will soon become pointless to even try. It’s time we all just give up on the small fights and become more accepting of the indiscretions of our fellow humans. Because the skeletons are coming out of the closet and onto the front porch.

Culture Change

We're all human. We have philandering monarchs and ex-pot-smoking prime ministers - and it's beginning to matter less and less. Thankfully. In the context of their jobs, what matters is whether they can do the job. (The philandering may matter in the context of their family life of course - context is key.) Arrington continues with:

We’re going to be forced to adjust as a society. I firmly believe that we will simply become much more accepting of indiscretions over time. Employers just won’t care that ridiculous drunk college pictures pop up about you when they do a HR background search on you.

As the younger Facebook generation move into HR positions, perhaps the change will be accelerated - but this is a culture change, and I wonder how long it will take.

What I'm concerned about are those that hide, that block public access to all their activity, yet want to be public. I have friends that do this - torn between wanting to be transparent about their lives (to some degree), but fearful that such transparency would lead to their downfall (in some other context). We shouldn't need to hide that which we don't feel the need to - we should have license to be human - and that's a change in society and culture. None of these issues are new - they're just more profound in an online environment where indiscretions from 10 years ago can persist and be collated.

There are so many fascinating moving parts to this. The Internet is forcing these changes in our culture. At some stage fairly soon we're probably going to have to figure out answers to hard questions. Just what public actions of mine are "acceptable" in which contexts? How much should a CEO's public life filled with indiscretions affect his company's brand? To what extent are we "representatives" of the company for which we work?

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Filed under // culture privacy public life social media

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March 7, 2010

Edge 313: Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously

27. Returning to our fundamental riddle: if this is the information age, what do our children know that our parents didn't? The answer is "now." They know about now.
28. Internet culture is a culture of nowness. The Internet tells you what your friends are doing and the world news now, the state of the shops and markets and weather now, public opinion, trends and fashions now. The Internet connects each of us to countless sites right now — to many different places at one moment in time.

29. Nowness is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern age: the western world's attention shifted gradually from the deep but narrow domain of one family or village and its history to the (broader but shallower) domains of the larger community, the nation, the world. The cult of celebrity, the importance of opinion polls, the decline in the teaching and learning of history, the uniformity of opinions and attitudes in academia and other educated elites — they are all part of one phenomenon. Nowness ignores all other moments but this. In the ultimate Internet culture, flooded in nowness like a piazza flooded in sea water, drenched in a tropical downpour of nowness, everyone talks alike, dresses alike, thinks alike.

30. As I wrote at the start of this piece, no moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than "now." As we learn more about now, we know less about then. The Internet increases the supply of information hugely, but the capacity of the human mind not at all. (Some scientists talk about artificially increasing the power of minds and memories — but then they are no longer talking about human beings. They are discussing some new species we know nothing about. And in this field, we would be fools to doubt our own ignorance.) The effect of nowness resembles the effect of light pollution in large cities, which makes it impossible to see the stars. A flood of information about the present shuts out the past.

via edge.org

There are some fantastic insights in this contribution to the always fascinating Edge. Gelernter also talks about Life Streaming, and how we need to really starting thinking about the Internet.

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Filed under // culture privacy streams

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March 1, 2010

Blurring Boundaries in Social Media - How Buzz should learn from FriendFeed

Unless you're a rather single-minded in your use of social media, you probably do more than one thing online. You might share your photographs on Flickr, your presentations on SlideShare, your status updates on Twitter, your books on Goodreads. You may "like" items on Google Reader, recommend TED talks you enjoy or share your current music track. You get the picture. You are multifaceted. We all are. But are you interesting in "all of" someone else. Most likely not.

Weak Boundaries around your Identities

I can put weak boundaries around my social media interactions. For example, I have a Flickr account and occasional conversations take place there. I have a different set of friends there, than I do on Twitter. I don't tweet each photo I post either. So what we have are weak boundaries around my presences on each site.

The boundaries are weak because my identities are open and these particular social media sites support aggregation. Anyone could aggregate these two streams of activity if they wanted to.

Boundaries as Context

Another way to look at these boundaries is that they provide context. When viewing my photographs on Flickr, the context is obvious. You're expecting photographs, not rants about my lack of hot water. The context provides you with expectations, informs you, and lets you choose whether you want to be part of that part of me.

"But it's the Whole Me"

Aggregation sites (and even Facebook, but that's a discussion for the future) let you aggregate your content from any number of social media sites. I think there's something compelling about these services. After all, by aggregating these various aspects of yourself, you're giving would-be "followers" a much more holistic picture of yourself - and isn't that something we all want to do? "I'm not just the web site maintainer; I'm a budding book author and I take killer shots with my Canon...." See me for who I am! I'm human, not just a service machine. And so on.

Is this compelling feature of social media sites such as FriendFeed and Google Buzz really the right way to go though?

Think about those boundaries and context again. By aggregating disparate streams, what we're doing is blurring boundaries, and blurring context. Unless the aggregation is coherent (your photos are about conferences you go to, the books are about the conference topics, your tweets are about your related research), or unless you're aggregating in a context where that mashup is somehow expected (Facebook comes to mind, see above), then what's really happening with aggregation is a destruction of context.

It's noise. It's also likely to set you up for interesting aspects of privacy and hierarchy. Your manager may follow your Twitter stream (context = I tweet about work). Your Buzz stream may contain your Twitter and your Flickr photos though (you work weekends in nightclubs). Aggregating these reinforces your identity, but it also blurs the boundaries and contexts, and I suspect that's more often than not, not a good thing.

FriendFeed had a nice little feature, as Mike Coulter reminded me. You can, as a subscriber of an aggregated feed, ignore the photos say. That's a useful feature - it lets me cut out the noise if i like, and ensure that the input has a context I want. I can prune you :-) Buzz doesn't have that - I hope it implements the feature. However, I suspect the rest of the concerns here still hold.

Postscript:

There are some interesting protocols around aggregation - see RWW on Activity Streams - which make this even easier. Somehow I'd like them to build in "context" as well though. Perhaps we can tag the items being aggregated as a first step (personal, work, etc.).

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Filed under // activity streams aggregation boundaries context identity social media

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February 25, 2010

The Democratization of Intimacy

Isn't that a great phrase? - "The Democratization of Intimacy" I got that from Stefana Broadbent's talk at TED, How the Internet Enables Intimacy.

It has some great insights into how we have communicated with our family over the years. Imagine:

many centuries ago, you lived where you worked, whether in a workshop or on the land or roaming the savannah - there was family intimacy
in medieval cities you had boroughs named after the guilds and professions - again, you have intimacy here
after the industrial revolution, you have a clear separation of work and family. You clock in, you work, you give your work full attention, you clock out, and then your return to your family. Here, intimacy is lost
culturally, we sustain this. Kindergartens and schools all emphasise this behaviour pattern. Even when technology was available (ie. the phone), it was still taboo

And now? Now we have social media. We have chat rooms, Skype, Facebook, Twitter and more - unless your company is backward looking.

It's a very different perspective on social media (although Stefana doesn't frame the talk in these terms). Social media isn't just about being social, about conversations, about communication - it enables something a lot deeper - intimacy. Intimacy is leaking into our professional lives, and the change is for the better. Social media has made this a lot more acceptable.

While the technology barriers were lifted many years ago, the cultural ones often remain in place. The habits that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter engender, habits like real-time status updates, synchronous chatting, asynchronous emails, groups, multimedia and more - are now becoming everyday habits. I now expect and demand to work in an environment that lets me use Facebook for example.

This probably has many other implications on attention, and on notions of work/life balance, as well as privacy. But for now, I'm relishing in the cultural change towards a democratization of intimacy.

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Filed under // cultural change social media work/life balance

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July 15, 2008

Get better at soliciting explicit customer feedback

Do you solicit explicit customer feedback? We're all learning about using social media to mine implicit feedback (for example, by scanning twitter or blogs), but how about the explicit kind? My MacBook Pro died last week (fried logic board). Apple replaced it on the same day, and the next day I got this simple email from them:

No demands, short (and explicit!) time requirements, and a picture of what looks almost like the venue I was in (would be even better if it was).

Now look at the above picture (taken from the website). This was the first page I hit. There was no logging in, no tedious filling in of silly details. I'm a community member (okay, a customer) - they have all that recorded and integrated with this web property. Awesome. Now I want to fill it in - after all I just had to push one button to get here. Nice touch in having the Genius name there too.

As you can see the form is pretty straightforward, easy to fill in, reasonably clear, and short.

I like the addition of the free text entry. Sometimes you want to vent. Sometimes you want to praise. This lets you do it.

Finally the goodbye. Short and sweet. It felt good to take this survey. It was simple to initiate, simple to engage, and didn't look or feel like the spam we too often see these days. This was a great lesson for me - I'm now going to look at a few of my other ventures and ensure they have a way of providing this kind of feedback experience. An email address just doesn't feel nearly as good.

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May 26, 2008

Filtering the Blog Avalanche

What do you do if you have subscribed to a bunch of blogs and feeds, but now find that you are inundated with an avalanche of information, only some of which is really critical? How can you sort and filter this information and add some relevancy? Here are three techniques to consider:

Automated Manual Filters - online tools that help you filter blog posts by keywords
Aggregated Global Social Filters - online tools that rank posts in a blog by how the global population treats that post
Human Filters - online social tools that let you subscribe to posts filtered by friends

These techniques all offer a different type of filtering. Choose whichever suits your needs.

Automated Manual Filters

An obvious technique in adding relevancy is to filter out the irrelevant based on a keyword search. In other words, match each post within a feed against some criteria, and if there's a match, either keep or remove that post.

I sometimes use Feed Rinse to do this, though there are other filters on the market such as mySyndicaat and more. You can even use Yahoo Pipes. So what does Feed Rinse do? (Feed Rinse is the most intuitive for the everyday blog reader, though I've had a few problems with Atom feeds.) Essentially, it allows you to import your feeds (individually, or via OPML), apply filters to the feeds (only allow a post if it contains the words "Stephen Fry", or only allow a post if the title contains "Wilde" and so on), and it then spits out a new, filtered feed that you have to subscribe to. This new feed will only contain items that match your filters. This is an effective way to cut down on the extraneous material, and Feed Rinse tries to make it easy by allowing you to import en masse, apply filters to individual feeds, aggregate individual feeds into channels, apply filters to channels and so on. In other words, I could grab several feeds from various news organizations, add them to a channel, and apply a filter to the channel. The result would be a single feed that only contains items from across all the organizations that match the filter.

Aggregated Global Social Filters

A very different way to look at information coming from a feed is to filter it by ranking the posts within the feed and only viewing those posts that are "good enough". In other words, instead of consuming the entire feed, you can simply subscribe to a percentage of those posts.

For this kind of filtering, I use aideRSS. aideRSS uses what I call a global social filter - it looks at how the world is reacting to posts within a feed. For each post, it examines at least the following: its digg rating, how many folk tweeted the post, its del.icio.us ranking and how many comments were left on the post. You can then subscribe to a percentage of these posts by subscribing to the "good, great, best or top 20" posts within that feed. In other words, aideRSS filters the posts within a feed based on some ranking, and then presents you with a new feed that you have to subscribe to (that contains only those relevant items). It's a pretty nifty service, and though you may not want to use this kind of filtering everywhere, it's an awesome tool to have.

Human Filters

A few blog readers such as Google Reader let you apply the nous of your local social circle to filter posts. In this form of filtering, you let your friends tag or flag or "mark as shared" items that they read in blog posts, and you subscribe to this shared feed. It's not ideal: there's no way to rate an item based on multiple people, nor is there a way to share an item to a "shared feed" to which multiple people can post. Nevertheless, this can be useful if you have a domain expert reading the posts anyway. He'll be filtering, and if there's prior agreement as to what he's sharing and why, this can be very useful. See the "Settings/Tags" menu option to set up or change sharing options in Google Reader. (You could get into a more complicated scenario where you feed multiple human filters through a feed combiner, but that seems a little OTT. What we really want is a social aggregator.)

Postscript

I wish Google Reader or NetNewsWire supported additional features to help readers filter posts. For example, I can't highlight blog posts that meet certain criteria, which I thought would have been a basic need. In NetNewsWire I can create a "smart feed", but that's not quite the same thing. Neither can I automatically filter out duplicates, which is an absolute drag, especially as I subscribe to feeds as well as aggregations of feeds. There's still a long way to go in filtering the blog avalanche, and I've seen surprisingly few client side features to help. Hopefully these three techniques will help you out while our blog reader clients mature.

Technorati Tags: blogging, aiderss, feed rinse, google reader, netnewswire

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February 3, 2008

BarCamp Scotland 2008

I've just returned from my first BarCamp Scotland. It was great fun, and I met some interesting local folk. This included:

the kilt-wearing Ewan Spence who demoed Qik and seesmic. Live streaming from his phone was pretty cool.
hypernumbers, whose Erlang-implemented system allows you to assign a URL to each cell in a spreadsheet, which you can then surface wherever you like (such as on a web page). Think "spreadsheet cells as a service." Their website provides a little more details, but rather curiously doesn't have a blog.
Dave McClure, who gave a great talk on Startup Metrics and Business Models for [Scottish] Pirates, filled with solid advice. For example, don't build features for features sake - think conversion - does that feature increase conversion?; and build a trust relationship before you push for referrals. Lots more in the linked presentation.
Skyskanner, who were not only interesting because they did a splendid job sponsoring the drinks. Their website actually solves a problem I have: find me a flight leaving this city on this day across all airlines. Most travel sites can't solve that problem - they always demand a destination, which doesn't allow for much spontaneity now does it! And you've got to love their price isobar graph.

I also gave a talk on online communities and some of the ways in which to grow them. All in all, a good two days - thanks to the sponsors and organisers.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcampscotland, erlang

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December 13, 2007

Imagine Best Buy Without Any Shoppers Inside

Writing about the scarily named Blog Council, Robert Scoble says:

Visit a Best Buy store. Now imagine that store without ANY human beings inside. What do you have? A bankrupt store. So why when I visit BestBuy.com don’t I see any people? Hear any conversations? Is there any wonder why Amazon has a P/E ratio much higher than Best Buy?

While I'm giving this a different tack here, I think this is a great way to think about a community web site. In a recent talk I gave I spoke about the difference between managing a successful website (rising page views, etc.) and a successful community. They aren't the same thing. Many so-called community websites are simply websites. They are empty—devoid of life. Lacking any human beings, as Robert says. So:

If you're managing a community website, you need to surface that community on the website. Not only should you enable conversations, but you should highlight those conversations, and the people doing the talking. Show potential community members that you're a website with real people having real conversations.

How

Some ways in which this can be done:

Have the community manager call out great conversation that occurred that day/week on his/her blog/newsletter and so on
Select a few conversations to be highlighted on the home page
Provide mechanisms that allow your community members to flag great content, and highlight that
Go semantic. Some sites have great metadata. If a forum message on the forum called "TopicX" is related to blogs on "TopicX", and your community flags a message as 5 stars, how about highlighting that forum message in the side bar of blogs on that same topic?
Invest in MVP programs (Microsoft have an interesting MVP program)

Caveats

Sometimes you find websites that do surface the conversations on websites. However, the result is a webpage with dozens of topics and reams of writing. Nobody is going to read all of that. When doing some of this, keep a few things in mind:

Think about usability, about how people read websites
Provide some editorial. Have a community manager select great conversations, perhaps massage descriptions (to read better, shorter - not skew the message) and so on.
Don't overdo it. Think about the value you are providing to your audience.

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Filed under // community

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November 18, 2007

Android and iPhone and Building a Community

Google and others just launched Android. I'm more interested in how they bootstrapped their community though—it's obvious that they really thought this through and put a lot of effort into creating a viable platform on which a community can be built. This is in contrast to Apple and its iPhone Developer Center, which has no community support at all.

Android: Overview

Type of Community - This is a developer community, and they have an audience of developers.
Website - clean, clear, wonderfully free of annoying copyright, trademark and other company logos, a touch of graphics. Google is mentioned only once, discretely in the footer, and I think that's just because it's hosted on code.google.com. Emphasis is on what matters: Getting Started, the blog, the forums.
Features - website, documentation, APIs, code samples, videos, downloads, blog, multiple forums (with email subscription and feed support), some identity, SSO
Lures - a $10 million contest

iPhone: Overview

Type of Community - This is a not a community site, it's a resource site for developers
Website - clean, clear, a touch of graphics. Emphasis is on what they think matters: getting resources into developer hands, not on building community.
Features - website, documentation, APIs, code samples, SSO, "connect to the experts" tech talk videos
Lures - Listing in Apple web apps directory

Android: Purpose and Business Goals

The business goals are, I imagine, to support the adoption of Android among developers, and in so doing help the Open Handset Alliance Project succeed. The site has focus; it's purpose is clear. They obviously understand that developers want code, want HTML accessible API documentation, sample applications, SDK downloads and a developer forum.

iPhone: Purpose and Business Goals

The business goals are, I imagine, to encourage developers to write applications for the iPhone. There is already a huge audience out there scratching at the walls to do this sort of thing. The site is clearly a resource site. There is no hint of community here. I suspect they may be wanting to drive ADC registrations either - why else hide developer content links until you've logged in.

Android: Supporting the Audience

These guys have gone out of their way to support the audience: All the major operating systems are supported, with emulators, SDKs, code samples and IDEs. They're going out of their way to make sure there is no excuse. If someone is even remotely interested in this thing, they will be able to write their first application and deploy it to an emulator in 30 minutes. They've tried hard to remove any excuse for getting started and developing on their platform. They want you to succeed and have done a tremendous amount of work before the community was even launched to try and guarantee its success.

iPhone: Supporting the Audience

These guys have produced a rich set of resources that will allow developers to write web apps for the iPhone (SDK support is coming later). Since web applications are OS agnostic, they ostensibly support all platforms. In contrast to Android, they have not tried all that hard to remove any excuse for getting started. There's no clear downloads or suggestions of IDEs for example. They do have code samples, but little in the way of how to host them, how to integrate with other platforms etc.

Android: Content

The website has superb documentation. There's a "what is", getting started (including tutorials), developing applications, developer toolbox, reference information, sample code and FAQs. It's great to see the reference information online. Like most Java-based code bases, it's all available in HTML format. That means other developers can point to it in discussion. I see so many communities try and do this with PDFs, or worse, with documentation embedded in a download. That just doesn't work.

iPhone: Content

The website has great content and technical videos (delivered via iTunes). A full reference library documenting all the technologies and a set of sample code. The only other content is a set of iPhone Tech Talk Videos. I find the video delivery a little distracting actually. Because they're not embedded, I can't just "hit play" - it lacks immediacy and means I have material scattered over a website and my iTunes. Then again, I can play them on my future iPhone...

Android: Analysis

Here are a couple of things that may improve the community:

Integrated Identity - they have some identity. For example, David McLaughlin, who I suspect is part of the community team, has his ID surfaced as David McLaughlin, Android Advocate. That "Android Advocate" is a nice touch. The unfortunate thing is that I cannot click on David's name and read his bio, find out what else he has written - which will lend to immediately increasing his identity, reputation and history. In fact, I can view his profile via his newsgroup postings, but they're lacking integrated identity.
External Resources - while a community blog post does point to external communities publishing material on Android, they don't do a good job of surfacing this activity on the website. They could do with an article listing, perhaps community rated.
Content experts, evangelists - while they undoubtedly have them, I don't know who they are, where they're speaking, what they're doing or what they're saying. It would be great if these folk are blogging. Of course, it's early days yet.

iPhone: Analysis

It's rather odd that Apple haven't engaged the community in any way. Perhaps that will change going forward, but there's no support for blogs, externally authored articles, or even the most fundamental in a developer community: the forum. In other words, they certainly don't have the infrastructure surfaced on this site on which to build a community. They also demand registration before giving developers access to the most basic of resources. A strategy by a company confident in what it's offering and that this hurdle won't discourage potential audience members, and a company that obviously wants developers to sign up for their developer program. All of this may be coming later. Perhaps they're waiting for the iPhone SDK to come out (next year). Some may ask if it's even necessary. There's already hoards of developers chomping at the bit, healthy discussion in external blogs, and perhaps there is a forum hidden on ADC's forums. Having said all that, it's hard to believe that a forum and community would not help Apple, or more importantly, these external developers. Sharing expertise, knowledge, tips, best practices—these will all help Apple in the end.

Android: Interesting Developments

Single Forum, Later Split: The community is a week old, and they've just split the single group (I think it was single last week) into 5 groups - beginners, developers, internals, challenge and discuss (water cooler). What's great is that they started with a single forum, and split it later as demand rose. So many new communities make the mistake of starting with a bunch of forums, all forlornly empty. Stats: The beginner mailing list now (Nov 17) has 102 messages, and the developer mailing list 3791 messages. It was at 2900 two days ago - that's a lot of growth. Last update: 17 November Update: Carlos Perez has a great take on the two communities. Technorati Tags: apple, iPhone, community, google, android

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