The perfect question?

I am a believer in the power of online communities. But I'm bugged that most of them are islands. They don't connect to each other. And it's more than inconvenience -- it's getting in the way of business. Here's why: Right now, online content companies share a lot of content, and a lot of business revolves around that. They all have communities, too, but they can't share them, for a variety of reasons. I sat across from Marc Canter at Kevin Werbach's pre-pre-Supernova party the other night and I asked him this question: "How will communities connect?" Mark was the right guy to ask. His post on this topic talks about initiatives (his and others') that are attacking this problem.

Comments

[Sameer Siruguri]

I am glad to see some one discussing this --- I definitely feel there's a pain point, as a user of these websites and a member of their communities, when I can't migrate my information from one community to another easily. If I find it so frustrating, with my two degrees in computer science and so many years of gadding about in Silicon Valley, what is Billy Bob in Kansas thinking?

There's also the question of what I do with the content I generate for these sites --- once I enter a book review on Amazon, it's locked in there, in the sense that I have already expended so much time and energy on posting it there, that it reduces my desire to put it somewhere else. I am now at the mercy of the ability of Amazon to effectively market my views, and provide good interfaces for my friends to find my reviews on there. That just doesn't seem... right.

Would it be too subversive for someone to provide a solution that simply automates this process of posting to different websites? I don't know enough about federated identity solutions to figure if that will be the answer, or what cost barriers the companies providing those solutions will erect.

Sameer.