The first time I saw the web was during college. Guillermo Payet showed me a text document on his computer, and he explained that the blue words could be clicked to go to another document. "Huh," I said. Guillermo explained that the Internet was about to change the world. Soon every business, even every person would have a web site. "Interesting," I thought. "I don't really see myself using it."
I first got interested in online community four years ago, after the birth of my daughter. Out-of-town relatives wanted to see photos, so I made a single html page with photos, and Guillermo let me post it on one of his servers. I figured I'd post photos there for a couple weeks.
Soon I was getting phone calls every day or two from relatives demanding new photos. The web page started to grow. Out of curiosity, I added a hit counter. Our little web page was averaging 18 visits a day!
18 visits a day? We Turners are few, and my wife's family is all local. It turned out all our family and friends, distant and local, were visiting the site frequently. Demands for updates continued to pour in, and my first blog (painstakingly hand-coded with my limited English-major capabilities) was born.
One of the most exciting parts of that experience for me was the connection we formed with my grandmother in Arizona, who for years had been relatively isolated from us. She got to be much more a part of our family. She started using email. We talked on the phone more often.
But what really opened my eyes was the reaction of our local friends--people we see all the time. They were checking out our photos and stories every day at work. Friends called to talk with us about the latest posts. And those relationships, already well-connected, became tighter. We were at the fingertips of everyone we cared about, no matter what time of day, no matter where they were.
Since that first html page I saw 15 years ago, my initial impressions have been resoundingly disproved. Businesses and people really do have their web sites. Real money changes hands virtually, information-seeking has evolved into information-filtering, and relationships are formed between real people--and between customer-people and business-people. I use the Internet constantly.
Suddenly, user expectations are catching up with the enabling factors of Web 2.0: lower technological entry-thresholds, increased broadband penetration, and popularization of sites showcasing user-contributed content.
There's a massive correction in progress as I write this. In the past year, the relative market share of Web 2.0 sites like Photobucket, Wikipedia, and MySpace compared to their old-school competitors
has increased by orders of magnitude. Driven by the popularity of media-sharing sites like YouTube, social networking sites like MySpace and Match.com, and personal publishing platforms like Blogger, adoption of interactive web modalities is suddenly widespread.
We've passed a tipping-point. Users expect to participate. They expect high fidelity. They expect multimedia. They expect responsiveness, transparency, and personality.
Community is what the web has always been trying to become. It's an instrument of the human need to form groups based on shared interest, and over time more people will participate more. More great-grandmothers will connect with more great-grandchildren. More VPs will engage directly with their customers. More voices will join the conversation. For better and worse, we are connected, and our connectedness is increasing.
In three years, concepts of online community, virtual identity, and user-generated content will disappear, in the same way the idea of connecting a computer to the Internet has disappeared. All web sites will include aspects of what we now think of as community. This blog will chronicle the death of online community and the emergence of the communal web!
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