After Reboot

Last thursday I spoke on Reboot on the emergence of virtual gated communities and the way handle these. The reactions after the presentation and other speakers during Reboot brought me inspiration for some extension on my vision. I will address this here later in a post. As you see I write this in English for the possible readers of the Reboot participants.

Before going into the new views, I will shortly summarize my presentation. The slides can be find on slideshare.

The presentation can be concluded in four statements.

People will me more and more live in online communities in continuous state of conversation. The current publishing model for content will still exist, but the way we search and reach content will primarily through the conversation with our peers.

The online communities we live in will get more and more personal and enter our personal private space. It is therefor very likely that we will create 'virtual gated communities' where we choose our own friends and set more and more restrictions on privacy.

The providers of communities like Facebook and Twitter will have to develop a way to offer interoperability of the groups we create. The community is not the same as the provider, we want to have our community over different providers.

To reach the new online consumer living in the virtual gated communities the best recipy for success is an exploding strategy. You need to go out for the touchpoints where the conversation takes place and not expect the prospects will come to your own environment.

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It was good to hear during the sessions I was not the only one who was thinking about the subject.

Thomas vander Wal's talk stressed the role of groups in the success of social networks.

Jyri presented his vision on nodal points again, just like on The Web And Beyond in Amsterdam. The importance of the nodal points is in essence an exploding strategy; go to where your users are.
In the after math of his talk he added an even more interesting point that we will need audience management when the popularity of the social networks is growing. I think this is a great way to have a concrete translation of the vision of virtual gated communities.

Michael Jackson shows us some examples of the exploding website. He talked about it in another perspective: it is impossible to earn enough money with advertising model with a regular site; to earn the bannerspace you need to bring the functions to the banner.

In the thoughts after my presentation one question was about the different roles in a community. This is something I have been thinking about in the preperation of my talk, but couldn't complete in the short time there was. I will elaborate more on that later.