Ars Technica already has a fairly thorough review of NPR’s new beta “NPR Community,” so for the nitty-gritty on how it all works, I’ll let you read their post.
The NPR Community reminds me a lot of the New York Times social experiment dubbed Times People that debuted several months ago. At the time, I called it a new social network, much like Ars refers to NPR Community as a new social network.
In retrospect, I’d change my verbiage: these are not new social networks.
What’s the difference?
Facebook is a social network. So is MySpace. And LinkedIn.
Social networks exist on their own merits as a focal point for communities that don’t necessarily already exist online. When someone builds a new social network, it is essentially like constructing a lightning rod in an area where thunderstorms are likely, and then hoping that they guessed correctly.
Fostering community is a completely different exercise. Institutions like the New York Times and NPR already have an established readership and a number of engaged customers who have at least one thing in common: that they read the New York Times or listen to NPR.
In this case, the community already exists—it is a latent community—and it can be fostered, engaged with, and grown by building tools around the focal point that already exists.
To continue my terrible metaphor, this is like finding a lightning rod in the middle of a storm that keeps getting hit, and tacking on some sort of capacitor so that you can capture the energy and use it for something useful later.
Coexistence
I think that these new community tools are going to be a key element in breaking open the “walled garden” social networks. In an idea world, you or I would have an open-access profile in the cloud that could be accessed whenever we want to leave a comment or participate in a community.
I guess in a lot of ways, it should act the way Ning acts, except across the entire internet.
Companies like Facebook that currently house profiles for millions of people around the world are in an ideal position to become the entity that houses those profiles for site-based communities.
That’s the direction that things are going with Facebook Connect, except that Facebook Connect isn’t anywhere near robust and flexible enough to stop sites from creating their own systems.
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