As readers of this blog know, one of my companies is Me.com. For those unfamiliar with it, Me.com is hands-down the best platform for building online communities with integrated social networking functions. In essence, the primary customer of Me.com is the online community builder – not the consumer – although we obviously care about the consumer experience a lot.
While I am admittedly biased, why such bravado about Me.com? There are four reasons. One is that the solution, which is turn-key, hosted and administrable via an ordinary web browser, is designed for rapid deployment and easy customization by non-technical "pro-sumer" users.
In my experience, first efforts in any endeavor are rarely representative of the final bulls-eye, so the ability to "ship the idea," then easily "fix it" and then rapidly "iterate it" is a recipe for long term success. Me.com facilitates this.
In short, enabling "instant but easy to iterate" – think GeoCities with web sites, TypePad with blogs, MySpace with user profiles and Userplane (recently acquired by AOL) with IM and Chat Room functions – is a friction-free way of catalyzing rapid growth.
Two is that the solution is integrated and feature rich. Built around a technology core known as SNAPP (Social Networking Application Platform), the service offers robust content, community and communications functions, including rich profiles, custom skins, context traversal (covered in a past blog on Facebook), user-generated polls and quizzes, picture and posting functions, discussion groups, event planning, IM, email and chat functions. 
Plus, the system provides dynamic transparency of what's new, popular or recently viewed on the network, which encourages users to burrow deeper into hot spots.
Moreover, the service provides built in databases of cities, high schools, universities, automobiles, pets, churches, wines, etc., enabling systematic cultivation of specific contexts, all of which are indexed and searchable.
Finally, the system provides really good services for active administration, making it easy to customize look and feel, decide on the fly which modules are active, and provides tools for monitoring and measuring user and usage data.
Three, is something that our chairman, Kimball Small, clued me into: Me.com provides governance mechanisms and a business model that scale up or down equally well. His point in this regard is that part of what makes eBay work as well as it does is that the individual with an old TiVo box to sell can plug into the same platform as easily as the HP facilities manager with excess inventory to dispose of.
In the Me.com realm, the hallmark of what we have built is that the $100/month customer fundamentally gets the same basic functionality as the $10K/month one, and both reasonably conclude that they are getting a great deal. This is so because we have two types of deployment models tuned to the needs of each type of community builder.
The first, called an affinity group builder (AGB), is designed for more niche-oriented, Long Tail types of communities. Sample AGBs include: a community designed to bridge the virtual, online and offline personas of Second Life users; another is targeted at Raw Food lovers; still another is targeted at the Hip Hop community; another is targeted at Denver apartment dwellers. And new communities are launching all of the time.
The second, called large branded community (LBC), is designed for larger brands looking to leverage conversational marketing strategies with their target audience.
LBCs are different from AGBs in that they can be integrated with proprietary applications and can support standalone communities. The first of these communities are under-development as we speak (but also under non-disclosure) and suffice it to say, that the premise of scaleable governance and scaleable business models holds.
Ah, but can large brands and small niches co-exist? And can communities that may be measured in the thousands to tens of thousands truly be viable? Time will tell, but real communities thrive in all shapes and sizes so why should their online counterparts be any different?
Enter the fourth reason that I am so bullish on Me.com – the Connected Community model. Me.com is built around a vision we call Connected Communities, where community builders can use our web based tools to build custom communities that are integrated in the same way a shopping center with lots of tenants might have anchor tenants, specialty retailers, common areas, and the like.
Like the shopping center, there is leverage in both the built-in traffic and cross-purpose synergies of a multi-tenanted destination site. Part of what makes the model work is that services and data structures are consistently applied across communities. Plus, users and their usage patterns are linked between communities and users carry virtual passports that enable them to move freely between communities and port their identities, in total or piecemeal fashion across communities.
This enables a more than the sum of the parts experience, whereby each individual community can realize its full potential on a standalone basis, while being part of a larger whole.
Similarly, individual community members can create their identity once, upload their pictures once, create their posts once, and yet nonetheless, realize significant network effects as they find additional communities of interest.
I blogged about this concept last year in a post called Three Walled Gardens, and now Me.com has just unveiled the first sneak preview of its Connected Community model. Check it out, and if you are looking to build an online community that emulates real communities, request a demo. You won't be disappointed.
