Amateurs Lead Web Community-Building

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May 13, 1999 (9:44 AM EDT)

By Mo Krochmal,

NEW YORK -- Howard Rheingold, who pinpointed virtual communities long before they became a gold mine for Internet business, said the best communities are being built by amateurs -- not businesses.

Rheingold, who, in 1993, wrote The Virtual Community: Homesteading at Electronic Frontier, said Thursday at the new-media conference here in New York, Edgewise 99, the Web is operating on false assumptions about community.

There are three "Cs" for success in the Internet business -- content, commerce, and community, Rheingold said. Companies such as GeoCities and Tripod have been built on providing a place for people of like minds to gather online around a business plan based on giving away websites.

"Offering free Web pages is not community," he said.

But, clearly, it is profitable. In January, portal site Yahoo acquired GeoCities for stock worth $4 billion. GeoCities provides free home pages to more than 3 million members and makes revenue by posting advertising on member sites. It's a business plan many others are emulating.

That is the wrong approach, said Rheingold. The projections about this type of online business are off by several orders of magnitude, he said.

Building a community is a cost of doing business, not a source of profit, he said. And, online businesses that want to build communities between their customers, their suppliers, and others should be prepared to listen and act, he said.

"You have to ask if you are prepared to reorganize your people and your resources in response to what people tell you [online]," Rheingold said. "If you don't respond, they will go away, and then you are turning away somebody who was a customer and wanted to participate in your business."

Rheingold said high-quality communication, a registration process, and trust are keys to online community, as well as a technology that engenders a free flow of conversation, not just a bulletin board.

Sometimes, community building has unintended repercussions, said Rheingold, citing America Online and its battle with the 10,000 volunteers who moderate its chat rooms and help newcomers. Several volunteers have filed complaints against AOL with the U.S. Department of Labor, saying they should be receiving pay and benefits.

"If they had just sent them a lousy T-shirt, they could still use them as slave labor," said Rheingold. "Now they have [angered] them, and they have a problem."

You have to pay people who know how to make a lively environment, he said, and then you encourage a community to police itself.

There is a future for including community in an enterprise, he said. "But it is not about 10 times return on an investment in three years," he said. "It will take a while to grow."

The online communities that are growing around people who share similar experiences such as AIDS or caring for a relative with Alzheimer's disease are building communities on a online bulletin board or a newgroup, he said.

"For those people, it's a lifeline, and it's a serious business," he said. "But it's amateurs -- and will continue that way."