Posts Tagged ‘communities’

4
Jul

The Power of Communities

   Posted by: Adam   in Internet, Marketing/Strategy, Technology trends

Note: I’m starting with games but this post is for all software developers.

In Gaming Software Development

Many computer games these days have online communities associated with them.  These most often take the form of forums with players exchanging advice, secrets, data, and braggadocio.  They also serve as a central communication point both from the game developer to the consumers as well as between the consumers.  Such communities can be seen as a hub-and-spoke model since a handful of the sites become the central connector for myriad smaller and more specialized sites.

Some communities are more actively fostered than others.  A software developer does not create the community separately from the software itself; it is on this step that many developers fail.  The software needs to be designed in such a way to generate a community.  For an example, I turn to  Lionhead Studios which developed Black & White and a sequel.

The original Black & White was widely hailed and developed a strong user community.  The developers allowed the game to use third-party content such as unofficial patches, additional maps, etc.  This significantly extended the life of the game which may have been a deciding factor for Lionhead not to include such support in the sequel.

Black & White 2 has been criticized since gameplay is limited to a single campaign and there is no way for players to add further content.  Once you have finished the official sequence of seven games, you must begin again.  This reduced the replay value for most consumers.

Economically speaking, there are circumstances in which this may be beneficial to the software developer.  If they had a similar game in the pipeline, consumers may have been left wanting more and may have chosen to purchase the next game quickly.  However, as it turned out, Lionhead did not have a similar game to launch.  Since players could neither expand on the existing game nor purchase a “next-gen” title, Lionhead’s decision ended up tarnishing their brand-name.

Where is Lionhead now? They’ve been bought out by Microsoft.

Applicability to Other Software

Developers of other categories of software will need to learn from the gaming software industry.  The power and the danger of software communities is increasingly important.  What do such communities offer?

  1. Extend Product Generation Life - This may be a good selling point during the initial software sale (1.0) but there is a risk that it will slow sales of an non-generation upgrade (a 1.5 version).
  2. Misuse - Opening up a line of software to the development community may result in security or functionality compromise (i.e. identity theft or other hacking.)
  3. Competitors - Opening up the code enough for developers to understand also means that your competitors will be able to understand it.  If they can understand it, they can emulate it.  Additionally, members of your own development community may decide to develop a mod or addon that becomes more desirable than your own core product.  Of course, this may turn into a new hiring pipeline as you can identify the most skilled and driven community members and hire them.

This is a scary prospect for many software developers.  But it is also a great opportunity for them.  These communities can serve as belwethers, letting you know how your next generation product must change in order to remain competitive.  Communities can quickly identify problems and, if given access, develop mods to fix flaws.  They also have the ability to adapt to niches.

Imagine, if you will, your software as an electric drill.  A drill has many uses each requiring a different drillbit or tip.  What we are talking about is concentrating your efforts on the core functionality of the product - the motor.  Your community can develop the myriad drillbits for you, if you give them the ability.  This avoids the costs of developing a hundred different drillbits each for a handful of users.

The development costs of customizing your software for different uses can be very high, particularly if the target markets are small and specialized.  By letting your community do your work for you, you are reducing costs and you are increasing the number of potential customers.  A market you wouldn’t have otherwise entered (small user base, high customization costs) can now be served by the combination of your drill and someone else’s drillbit.

The real future of software development is in communities.  Software developers first need to:

  1. Examine their markets and decide what level of community access is right for their product.
  2. They then need to follow this up by developing software products that are engineered to be community-accessible at their chosen level.
  3. Finally, they need to create, nurture, support, and then free their communities.

Bottom line: communities are not developed after products.  They are developed by products.

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20
Jun

Do We Live In Cities?

   Posted by: Adam   in Uncategorized

As many of my classmates move away to other places to begin their careers, several have expressed either happiness or sorrow at moving to a “big city.” Some enthusiastically embrace the idea of city life while others dislike the lack of a strong community. One common thread is that they all note the “size of the city” and worry about how many friends they’ll have and how many hangouts. After a lot of thought, I’m not sure these criteria are really what people are concerned about. Instead, I think they are dummy variables, used for self-justification and explaining to others.

Wherever you live, you have a circle of close friends and a wider network of acquaintance friends. In most cases, your close friends tend to know each other as close friends. They may have other close friends but the majority of them form a closed network. If we were to model this, it would look something like this:

What I am implying is that the size of your city isn’t a major criteria in the size of your intimate network. This is largely determined by personality traits, preferences, length of residency in the community, etc. But what about the other concern, number of venues?

This issue is probably more realistic than the size of network issue. However, it also doesn’t seem as important as people make it out to be. Consider how many places you visit in a typical 2-week period: perhaps 2 bookshops, 3 coffeeshops, 5 restaurants, etc. Now consider how many times you visit those same places in a 3-month period. Over that same 3-month period, how many places do you visit only once? For myself, and for the couple of people I’ve talked to, the number of places we visit tends to be fairly low and fairly constant. Once I find a great coffeeshop, I tend to go back there repeatedly.

In a large city, someone such as myself would probably end up with a similarly sized pool of regular haunts with limited exploration of other places. I believe this pool would not grow much in a larger city. Instead, the geographic distance between the locations might expand. In essence, a city, for me, would function in the same way a town would, only with greater geographic dispersion.

Am I saying that the town vs city argument is pointless? No. There are still benefits and drawbacks to cities. For example, say my haunts include locations A, B, and C. In a smaller community, my friends may be more likely to have congruent sets of haunts. In a city, we may have less overlap. Additionally, there are the considerations of services like public transport or airports, career options, etc.

What is interesting, and what may be worth studying, is why people think network size and number of haunts are major considerations in selecting a place to live. This may help us to understand the disparity between what people say they want from virtual communities (social networking sites as well as the internet as a whole) and what they actually want.

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