Is there a Facebook community?

[Richard Millington]

I've noticed a few profiles listing Facebook or Twitter as their community.

But are these really communities? Or are these tools that enable communities?

Do you feel part of a community merely by using Facebook?

[Simon Peters]

Aren't "facebook users" a community of interest, at least? A "how to" article on, say, "optimising your facebook privacy settings"would be of interest to this community but not to the community of "electrical engineers", for example. (although when we dealing with such broad communities, you're bound to get overlap!).

So wouldn't the line be drawn when there is so much much overlap with so many other communities that it's not actually useful? When you get no extra information about that person based on their membership? In other words, when it no longer impinges on identity? And this isn't a function of size. The black community has huge overlap but there's enough impact on identity to make it useful and get buy-in. These are good questions - is there a sociologist in the house?

[John Norris]

Interesting thought...I feel part of the Commania community, but not so much Ning. Like many of you I see Ning (Facebook) as a platform. If I was in a Ning Development group, I would count that as more of being part of a Ning community.

That said, Ning, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Second Life, etc...are all tools with unique characteristics. I do identify myself as a member of their communities in as much as those unique characteristics influence my use. That's more than just a member of the group that uses their tools, but one who's work is partially directed by the tools.

I also have a bit of a communal feeling about Ning, Facebook, Twitter, etc..in that my work depends on the cloud they maintain. The inability to import and export from SOME of these spaces, makes me a tad uneasy...and I think I am not alone. :-)

[Andy Lacey]

Picking up on your example Rich, I imagine that when the telephone was invented (and only accessible to a limited number of people) that having one did make you feel part of a community. Being part of the 'telephone community' obviously sounds absurd these days.

Because Facebook and Twitter are relatively new communication platforms, people are mistaking them for communities per se, rather than enablers of communities.

It could be argued though that Facebook was initially a community – for Harvard students – but soon grew way beyond that and now almost no commonality exists between all members. Pretty much everyone is on it...even my mother!

At no point has the application itself been the community though - a community is clearly defined by its membership. Also, just to be clear, I don't think that volume is a defining factor, more the shared characteristics of the members.

[Amitha]

I guess I'm bit late replying to this thread, but I must say I agree with the notion that "Facebook/Twitter are only enablers of communities, but not communities themselves".

I had this discussion with our marketing team a few weeks ago, and I found it quite difficult to convince them that "Facebook is not a community". Everytime we talk about building a community around our brand, we naturally tend to lean towards Facebook as the model. I noticed we are making a mistake there!

This is my observation, and the point I made to my marketing team...

Facebook is "ego-centric". It allows me to put myself in the "center of the universe", and satisfy my ego-centric needs. When I log into FB, it shows everything centered around me. Now, I think that's not what a community should be. A community should be much more collective in it's nature, and more emphasis should put on "social interactions". A home page of any Ning network is a great example of how a community website look like.

Facebook doesn't allow my friends to interact with each other, if they are not connected to each other. If I am in X university network and having a friend John there, and Y City network and having a friend Jane there; there's no way for John and Jane to interact, if they don't become friends of each other. But on a community model, Jane should be able to talk to John! But on a community model, people are not solely connected through "friend" connection. It's a much wider bond that exist in a community. In a social network like FB, the connection is still mainly one to one. But a key characteristic of a community should be the many to many connection.

[Tom Ewing]

Yes, this is the basic difference between a network and a community. Twitter's openness allows it to bridge the gap to some extent - but only some: the spaces it creates are still very decentred.

I've just started reading Danah Boyd's thesis on teens using social networks - she defines the spaces they create as "networked publics" - millions of overlapping and interlocking communities, each centred on a single user like rain falling on a pond and creating a chaos of ripples. It's easy to mistake this for "a community" - but the difference is more than philosophical!

[Angela Connor]

This is a really good question. I suppose that you could be part of a group on Facebook that feels like a community. And depending on how you use it (strictly personal, strictly professional) then it could be a community of sorts as well. But for me, I do not consider Facebook a community simply as it exists. You would have to use it to build community. In my opinion, it's merely a platform.

[Clay]

Don't write off Twitter as a community platform just yet....

There are a number of applications popping up that allow you to 'slice and dice' Twitter to enable it to handle communities (better). It doesn't provide the level of functionality that Ning does, but some communities have their members on Twitter, not Ning.

If you're a Twitter user and you want additional segmentation functionality, check out PeopleBrowsr or TweetDeck. If you want to manage multiple Twitter profiles of your own, try HootSuite.

[Jill Biddington]

I don't feel or think that FaceBook are communities - but there are examples of how communities use FaceBook and Twitter to communicate within their own people. Both are vehicles for communication and it depends on the skills of the community to what extent they find them useful for their work.

One of the groups that I was a member of pulled itself out of FaceBook and set up their own network on Ning - the group didn't need much development for a community to develop. Much of the work in having a particular culture and shared value system had already been developed in real life but in an assortment of cities around Australia - the ning site really just allows the community to communicate across the nation more easily and transparently than on email lists and clunky other approaches like conferences etc.

[Mike D.]

I'm a bit late to this discussion, but I also agree that FB and Twitter aren't typical communities. I think I read somewhere that these networking sites are spokes that we can use to direct people back to the hub (i.e. we can use these tools to point people back to the main website/forum where your community resides).

I've had some good conversations with others on Twitter, but they have been mostly one-to-one and not one-to-many conversations. However, I did recently take part in a conversation through Twitter Chat which seems promising in promoting threaded discussions, but these are held on specific dates and times.

For the time being, I would agree that these tools only help to enable communities, but are not communities in and of themselves.

[John Norris]

I'd like to re-visit Richard's question, but focus on Twitter.

In some sense I feel I 'belong' to a community of health care social media types whom post around the hashtag #hcsm. Many of the posts are 'one-offs', just interesting things folks have come upon or RT'd. However, quite a few posts are responses to others, so there is interaction going in the public forum.

Further, a couple of times a week, there are organized posts concerning particular topics. At a designated time a particular theme of issue is put up and folks post about it. Ideas are put forth and considered, questions are given and answered.

Maybe it is not a community in the sense of a village, but it is a sense of community like the water cooler at work. A place to spend a few moments.

Now, I think these discussions would do much better with a tool like IRC, or even a virtual world, but it works for now as people find eachother.

[Brice Royer]

Interesting conversation.

Maybe it would help if we defined the word "community"?

What is a community? How do you know when you have one?

[Xavier]

socnet ad communities hve idtified differences ..i would rephrae the question