The Tool Comes Before the Network

Modelling Social Network Communities Growth, Wisdump

We exist in an attention economy where online communities must provide valuable interactions to be sustainable. The most valuable interactions are those that collect the knowledge of the network and provide meaningful information to the user, such as the most interesting photos on Flickr or most popular bookmarks on Del.icio.us. By building crowdsourcing and networks around core tools, these two communities have stayed far from the downward slide of social network decline, demonstrating that scalable value is delivered by building networks around core services. Facebook is one of the first to retrospectively fit tools to an existing network, which is an intelligent move that hasn’t come too late. After all, Starbucks only began selling beverages a few years after opening. As for Xanga, MySpace and countless others, the horse has already bolted… so it’s time to do whatever Starbucks would be doing if it didn’t ever begin selling beverages.