Today I would like to continue my series about measuring 2.0’ness with a handful (part 3 of 5) of things to check. First things first: The idea to measure 2.0’ness is simply to identify easily those factors which make a 2.0-service or -application really „fly“ i.e. successful. There are certain things that many of the applications and services which are successful have in common.
The Bringin-People-together´ness is one of the five significant criterias to unleash the power of 2.0. The internet does not grow on its own, people make it grow like a building. It’s the people who connect and make the connections.
In part 1 (Longtail/Crowd Sourcing) and part 2 (Future/Trends/Innovation) I tried to explain my point of view about which are the first and the second most driving forces behind 2.0’ness. Part 3 (Connecting People) sheds some light upon the network and the social side of the net.
People – wherever they are – do not like to be alone. The human beeing is a social beeing which usually cannot live without any connection to others for endless periods of time. We like to connect and to contact. But if you should choose from 6 Billion people on the net with whom to connect, this results in a problem. You need to make a descision for a certain selection. You need something that helps you connect to the right people. Often the best connection is made meeting people which are „like-minded“ or which do have the „same interests“, at least they have something in common.
Bringing people together which are like-minded to inspire each other seems like a very promising approach then. And it is! Nearly all socalled social webapplications like e.g. facbook, xing, studivz, orkut, lastfm, flickr, myspace, and so on allow you to declare yourself as beeing interested in certain things by e.g. simply adding yourself to a group. It is easy as that! Just by „broadcasting“ your favourite subjects you get connections from others out there.
If you want to bring people together, you need to give them tools to express their profile of interest. This may be e.g.:
- a homepage,
- some list of favourite things,
- groups to select
- tags to be shared
- comments to be shared
- votings to be made
- an other stuff.
As soon as people check out that exposing some of their interests rewards people with beeing connected to like-minded ones, this will establish lasting connections. It actually builds the web and creates a stable structure. If you think in terms of „visitor“ or „customer“ this may lead to returning „visitors“ and „customers“ because they are bound by a stable structure. They are in a way catched and connected to a structure and they are happy finding like minded people in this structure.
Why do i blog this? It’s the next step in completing my series of 2.0’ness-factors and there are still two factors left. Be surprised by the next two and how you can combine them to make up a powerful instrument to evaluate 2.0’ness. If you have the time I would encourage you to just try to check you favourite services in respect to, what they offer to bring people together. Leave a comment to tell me what you discovered.
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