Only people who were involved in the Durham, NC- based Internet start-up company KOZ.com would understand this to the fullest extent. But anyway...
The reason we failed was because we never answered the one question that was bugging us so much and because the market had not yet defined itself in terms of the protagonist with respect to communities.
That question: how do we define the ontology as Tester used to say all the time. We left that up to the provider of our software to hard wire if you will the structure of their community sites and yes, we used the term "channels". So the communities were stuctured from the top down to reflect their advertiser's target audience sectors.
The protagonist (if I'm using that term in the right way here): the user. Back then we thought of groups becuase that is how people define themselves in the real world - by belonging to groups and organizations. See, marketing to groups is more cost effective and if you can get people to congregate online for the same reasons you automatically create a great medium in which to market your advertiser's goods and services. But that was seriously flawed because critical mass of users would not be reached for another eight to ten years so little was known how users would bring the Internet into their lives.
Now we know both. The answers to both came from advances in social networking technology just in the past few years. Ontology, a more top-down approach, was replaced with member-generated taxonomy also known as folksonomy. Let the users posting content determine how it is categorized making the ontology arise organically and evolve as the community grows.
But we couldn't have seen this successfully either without flipping the script from group to user centric. The primary impetus for joining a social network is shameless self-promotion. Sure I will join virutal groups and participate as I can, but my primary focus is making sure MY webpages are updated. Why does this matter? Because it made communities successful and finacially attractive, and without that primary focus on me, myself, and I, users were not yet ready to flock to a set of tools so they could do more work (albeit more effectively) to promote their real-world groups. Now of course we have MySpace, Friendster, Hi5, Orkut, ..., but no KOZ.
Certainly there were many false moves that lead to bleeding cash back then, but we couldn't see the forest because the trees had not yet been identified. So let's chalk the whole experience up to KOZ being 2.0 way before Web 2.0 started linking people. We're so cool.
Labels: community, failure, koz, start-ups, taxonomy, user behavior
