Comments on: Do all social networks suck at groups?

By: Jesse Richards

Jesse Richards — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 16:02:01 +0000

Hi everyone –
This is a shameless plug, but I work for Meetup.com, and our site helps with all the things mentioned above. If you organize a group, we notify you when new members join, and mark them as such on the site. We prompt you to welcome them. Group members can sign up to be emailed when there is activity on the message board. We also have many methods for searching for new Meetups you’re interested in, and we’re working on streamlining and making searching even better. So, unlike the social networking sites, our site explicitly focuses on the power of groups. Check it out. I’m biased, but I think it works well. And we’re eager for any suggestions you have, too.

By: mll

mll — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:34:53 +0000

Btw, group managemnt / tools / interaction is not better in Flickr.

By: mll

mll — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 07:26:13 +0000

I can understand too well what you mean Nancy… I’m thinking of a last.fm thread fallen into oblivion that only you and I haunt… :/

Yet, it might relieve you a bit to know that I learned the existence of the present post… through last.fm’s “Recommended reading” page. :)

By: M-H

M-H — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 02:28:36 +0000

The way the new knitting and crochet site, ravelry, works isn’t too bad, as these things go. You can see people who have shown an interest in the sme things that you have, so you can check them out. The discussion threads are well-designed and you can see in bold if anything’s been added to any thread that you’ve read in the past.

I think it’s more built for the long haul as it were – lots of opportunities to enter things into databases, and I would think that the engagement implied in doing this rather tedious task must predispose members to continue using the site. Over 40,000 members so far, and it’s still in beta.

By: Holly

Holly — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 01:52:09 +0000

My simplistic comment, as an old fogey, is that my most reliable, long-standing groups are the listserv email lists to which I belong: Canine-L, which began in 1991 and which I joined within a few months after its founding (so Web -1.0?) and loud-fans (for fans of the Scott Miller’s — not the V-Roys one — music and bands.) The Web 2.0 stuff is just not as clean, efficient, and user-friendly to me, and I have to work more to see what’s going on with them and keep up. Did I mention though that I’m an old fogey? I thought so. I do find that Web 1.0 (I guess that would be the proper word) iterations are a bit more transparent, especially of listserv lists that one can set to nomail and view on the WWW. Facebook groups, to me, seem to be more about fleeting affiliation and less about content, and I felt the same about LJ groups, but to a lesser extent. Because I have to be selective about my participation because of time constraints, remembering to monitor Web 2.0-type groups, and finding nothing going on in them, is kind of a drag and something I eventually stop doing.

By: Faith

Faith — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:27:17 +0000

It depends what you mean by social network groups but LiveJournal does offer support for groups through their community journals. Most social networks seem to focus on the one-one relationships that exist between people however the community journals of LJ allow for both a community space and for a one-many realtionship to exist similar to that which was seen on mailing lists, for example.

In my thesis (available at http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/kf03r) I looked at groups on LJ and there were distinct differences between groups of people who did not have necessarily have many shared interests and communities which had both a higher level of shared interests and were typified by the users clustering around one or more community nodes. Between this, the threaded comments and the ability to track those comment threads, LJ is noticably more geared towards community interaction than clusters of users interaction.

By: Ron

Ron — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:48:34 +0000

In my experience, they’re all pretty bad at group management. I’ve had groups on MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, and all those sorts of things, and maintenance/tracking were terrible.