Space Miner

Just re-ordered Moo business cards with a few new additions.

These first two are images I’ve shot since blowing through the first set at SXSW in Austin. The rest are the same, because I was thrilled with the print and paper quality of these recycled paper cards from Moo.

Notes on what we can contribute to the communities we belong to, in real-life and online.

Nothing makes you more keenly aware of community flare-ups than having lived through one (or several) from the other side. Inside the affected company, meetings are called, people argue about the best way to handle it, and productivity and morale hit rock-bottom. And there’s inevitably someone who mentions the Worst Case Scenario: what if this is it? The moment every community site staffer lives in fear of, when a sea change occurs and hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people leave immediately for greener pastures. (Help me out — has this ever happened that way? That suddenly?)

In watching Twitter and Tumblr flare-ups over the last couple of weeks, I’ve heard lots of opinions. Some people are leaving. Some people are furious and determined to get things back to the way they were. Some people have blogged that it’s now clear that social sites can’t take away features once the members have gotten used to them. Some people are upset that Tumblr added features. And some people just don’t think things are right and want you to know that.

I think we have responsibilities as community members. Forget the age of entitlement — we all have room to grow as people by looking at what we can do to contribute.

• Give feedback and offer guidance through our words and actions. In my opinion we’re better off doing that in a “adult writing a letter to our congressperson” tone than a “teenager screaming hateful things to our parents” tone. Even if you don’t believe in the “more flies with honey” adage, waiting for calm, rational thoughts usually brings better ideas and arguments.
• Encourage these organizations to grow, change, and try things. I can’t agree that social sites should never take away features previously offered. So, what, then they’d have a “loyal” fan base of their most vocal (and perhaps angriest) users but would have stagnated the progress and evolution of the site? I don’t see who wins there, except a potential competitor.
• Wield our power wisely, and when it counts. It can be tempting to release real-life frustrations on a virtual community. We need to consider who and what we are really angry with before potentially creating mob mentality in our peers. Each one of us has more power to create damage than we know.
• Remember that these are just people. Tumblr is not a huge corporation getting rich off of us. They’re just seven guys with venture capital to try this out. Just people like you or me.

These are just preliminary notes, and there’s definitely a lot more to add. If you have something to add, please drop me a line at lbrunow at gmail.com.

See also:

Community Whisperer

Twitter’s recent change to their reply function means we can use the site in a whole new way.

Let’s make lemonade out of lemons, folks. Some people are upset that Twitter has changed their @reply functionality such that you can no longer see replies to people you don’t follow (from people you do follow). One argument for this function is that it helps you learn about new things and new people through your friends. One argument against is that you end up seeing fragmented half-conversations. One major argument against is this one from the Twitter blog: “The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt—it wouldn’t have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever.”

Regardless of which side of the fence that you’re on, you can now use Twitter in a whole new way. We can now rig up “groups” through twitter accounts. For example, I’ve been wanting to tweet to my foodie friends about different foods and flavor combos I’ve been eating — but without spamming my whole list every breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I could use a hashtag so that other friends could play too, but we’d still be overloading the twitterstreams of our non-foodie friends who could care less. With the new @reply setup, I could register @well_fed (just did) and reply to it whenever I want to describe my food. And any friends who wanted to do the same could also follow @well_fed so we could see each other’s food tweets. (UPDATE: I’ve got these tweets feeding into a tumblr now: http://wellfed.tumblr.com/)

You could do this for any topic. Photography (yes please), cars, any subgroup. And if you think about it, Twitter would have to do something like this eventually. And I’m sure they’ve thought about it. Think about Flickr: They’ve done a beautiful job of creating a site where people of every imaginable subculture can co-exist (through groups, tags, etc.). Twitter is big enough that they have to do something to let people be people — and different kinds of people. They could create a more sophisticated version of this in the future, but until then we can play, experiment, adapt.

So why not? Let’s adapt! Spread the twitter word and use the hashtag #replygroups to do so.

See also:

About Me

Feels Like Spring (Saying goodbye to JPG Magazine)

Community Whisperer (Everything I need to know about community flare-ups I learned from my dog)