People get together for different reasons. Very different reasons.
Group platforms like Ning, Grou.ps, qlubb and others try to homogeneize these needs in a cookie-cut, one fits all solution.
The problem is that each group needs different tools to maintain the flow of participation.
In my specific case, I had a site that grouped Latinos by nationality and location. I had written custom code to be able to find people by country and city, befriend them and share information.
A couple of years later, a handful of users started to complain that they wanted editable profiles, widgets and multimedia offerings. They wanted to have a MySpace or Hi5 type of page to be able to express themselves better.
It would have taken me a long time to write this functionality, and I started looking at pre-built community platforms.
After a short time, I started to realize that traffic was dropping rapidly. People were not happy with the site. Dozens of people complained that they wanted the capability of finding people from their country in a specific city — many more users than the ones that complained about the colorful profiles in the first place.
I decided it would be a matter of time while the community would settle and get used to the Ning platform.
Six months later, traffic levels have barely increased. I have about 1/3 of the traffic I used to get, and mind you, it was growing on an average of 25% month over month.
I learned a lesson the hard way.
I am in the process of building a brand new site, which will be an enhancement of what the original site was. I now realize that it was a dumb move to listen to a few, very vocal, members of the community and just forget what the core functionality of Oyeme was.
In this competitive environment I might not get all those users back. Facebook is the threat that is breaking all other community sites.
But I believe Facebook is still missing some of the tools I’ll be able to offer to my specific niche.
I agree wholehertedly with Charlie O’Donnell: there will never be “One Ring to Rule Them All” in web services for groups.
