A few thoughts on digital tree-houses

The concept of online communities" is by now definitely mainstream, which hopefully means that the hype will finally die off soon. More hopefully, it's because the metric of "How much does this group accomplish in the real world?" will be more rigorously applied. Sure, folks like Guy Kawasaki can snort at people with few followers/tweets when they unfollow him for his redundant posting of the same link. Personally, I would rather withhold judgment until I see how gelled that person and their contacts are and what they do with that network of relationships. (And even then, I certainly wouldn't snort.)

As an example of what I mean by "gelled," the guy who owns Orange Computer in La Crosse--I didn't think to ask permission to name names, so you'll just have to check out http://orangecomputerlax.com for that--is hosting a Linux (Ubuntu 9.10) installation-fest this weekend. He's already following and being followed by several "techie" types in the area, so Twitter makes a natural medium for getting the word out. If the online and offline worlds of @OrangeComputer didn't overlap, the installation shout-out would be a complete waste of 140 characters.

It doesn't just apply to social media. For instance, folks with a number of skill-sets (programming, testing, documenting, building, etc.) can all roll the next iteration of Linux without ever meeting each other (much less Linus Torvalds) in the physical world. But they all have the secret password that allows them into the tree-house, because of their contribution to the software that ultimately powers real-world hardware for the real-world benefit of people and organizations.

The dot-com crash again tied the viability of a business to (gasp!) actual profits, rather than eyeballs or its prospects of being flipped to Yahoo!, Microsoft, whatever. Similarly, the more egregious abuses of Facebook, Twitter, etc. for spamming, virus-propagation, time-wasting inanity, and superficial "networking" will--I believe--place a greater emphasis on the offline value of an online community.

But there's the rub: How is that value quantified? How do you put a dollar figure to the amount (or lack) of trust that the members of a network have their alpha, betas, or each other? If I had a crystal-clear set of answers to those questions, I'd probably already be a millionaire with a viable shot at billionaire-hood. But I think one possible metric is this: How much is the community interested in their own numbers? Because a focus on the numbers is, in my opinion, an indication that there's no substantive vision there. In essence, the message being communicated to the outside world (i.e., would-be members) is the Web 2.0 equivalent of a chain letter.

Which, IMO, should be mere common sense. But every time I see someone swaggering online purely on the strength of her/his avatar-collection, I just cringe. Bottom line: Could you trust each and every one of your peeps to water the plants and feed the cats while you're on vacation? Do you even know them well enough to know whether or not you could make that kind of judgment in the first place? Because if you can't, you're basically expecting to pay the bills with Monopoly money. And we all know how well that worked out for Web 1.0...