Building Social Web Applications

Joshua Porter of Bokardo has a new short series on building social web applications. He notes a common pitfall:

...there is no way to design a perfect social web site that doesn’t need ongoing management. Yet, some social start-ups fail to recognize this and launch their app without a designated caretaker. The result is a slow failure…the worst kind of failure because it’s not immediately apparent that it’s happening.

He also points to the importance of archived how-to information, such as Evoca's knowledgebank.

People have the same problems over and over again and the community manager spends more and more time answering the same questions.

Mike Haughey, founder of Metafilter, has seven tips for running a successful online community on Fortuitous. They include

Moderation is a full-time job, and use metrics to spread out the work, such as the user flags used by Craigslist.
Give people more than a generic, often anonymous, comment form for real contributions and participation from others.