Groups Commentary
Commenting on group technologies and services across the webArchive for June, 2008
Does cross-posting make you angry?
Whether online forums such as Yahoo Groups like it or not, posting the same message across several groups is here to stay. Take for example this reference to cross-posting on the Shelbyville Times, Tennessee, where some author wants to advertise a Xbox 360 on a couple of freecycle groups. In this particular instance the blogger is questioning the merits of the post in question, asserting this actually may be a possible spammer. Whether they are or not, I would say it is common in announcement-styled groups – such as those that sell and give away items – often are subject to cross-posting.
I would also say that cross-posting can be very useful for items that have only a small audience. In the above example, I could see a great interest in an Xbox 360 and associated Wii devices. On the other hand if you want to dispose of, say a rather interesting, perhaps quirky bit of furniture then cross-posting is a critical way of finding that “one” person who likes that particular item and in whose home it will fit nicely.
Is OxfordFreecycle about to implode?
I am very interested to watch the expanding growth of OxfordFreecycle group. Right now it appears the be becoming the definitive group for freecycling around the globe. It recently broke the 20,000 member barrier and also recently broke the 5,000 posts per month barrier.
How long can growth continue. If experience is anything to go by then at some point dissatisfaction with saturation of posts will begin to hurt members and a greater percentage will become lurkers. This is what happened to London Freecycle group, which was perceived by its membership to be oversized and so related borough groups were created in a devolution process. Now it is difficult to join the London group – you have to know it exists. And therefore as an inevitable conclusion its membership and number of posts reduces over time. Just take a look at the group statistics of the number of posts on its home page.
But London’s Freecycle group never reached the dizzying heights that Oxford’s is achieving. Is this because Oxfordshire already had a strategy for devolution in place? That is it already had a Witney group, a group for Bicester and so forth. Thus people who like a big group can enjoy the benefits of that and if they don’t like it they can join a small group. In Oxfordshire many belong to both and even the contentious cross-posts are the norm on a daily basis by the “professional” poster.
What is interesting me most is how London freecyclers created a campaign voicing their opinions that the group was too large. Not so in Oxford.
My prediction is that Oxford will continue to grow. Perhaps it will break the 30,000 member barrier and perhaps it will go above the 6,000 posts per month. At the moment the brakes are off. Global interest in climate change issues will surely drive those numbers spiraling up.
Can other groups rise to this challenge, should they wish to? Other groups may be stagnating. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from the Oxford model.
Are group statistics valuable?
A posting on TechCrunch highlights a shootout between Grouply and Ning. Grouply, as stated by its CEO Mark Robins is creating a social networking interface on top of Yahoo Groups, and in so doing is leveraging that existing huge userbase, and probably marginally attracting new members to yahoo groups. Part of the value for this must be addressing the old-hat image of what Yahoo Groups is seen as.
Ning on the other hand provides a new platform for group activity. The values here is that they can create new forms of networking for groups without any hindrance on old style interfaces. So, for example, they can seamlessly add blogging into a group, whereas Grouply provides non of this “extension” functionality.
So which is better? Surely that is the key question of anyone looking at statistics. That is can one see a measurable that is a useful indicator of performance.
Both Ning and Grouply can be measured on site hits. So perhaps that is one useful measure? Well actually it isn’t. The sad thing is that many Grouply users actually may use Grouply just the same way they use Yahoo Groups before Grouply. That is they use it as an interface to their email system. That is they may read about what is going on in their Yahoo Groups quite effectively without ever visiting the Grouply website, via the Grouply SmartDigest tool. The SmartDigest is a daily summary of activity across all groups.
In total contrast to interact with Ning groups one must visit the Ning website.
How key is this point? Well if you take ANY group, whether it be on Ning, Yahoo or Google Groups or whatever just take a look at the profile of active users versus passive members, otherwise known as lurkers. Always in any substantial group lurkers will be in the majority. As an example, I belong to one very active group with almost 20,000 members. This group has around 5,000 posts per month. So my question to you is does this activity level mean that 20,000 members are interacting?
The answer is patently no. What is probably going on is that at any given moment there are around a couple of hundred people who are actively posting. The rest are lurking
Does all this mean that either Ning or Grouply is far better? Are bald site statistics helpful? I would argue that statistics are in general a poor indicator.
Let me take a theoretical comparison elsewhere on the web. Suppose you are a horse dealer attempting to trade high-value horses. If each horse that you wish to trade is worth, say $100k then to make a substantial business you only need a few relevant visitors to your site every month. They key question is are they the kind of people who are customers? Having ten million or a hundred million hits on your website will do you little good since you can only sell the horses you have in your stables.
The key word in that paragraph is “relevant”. As a final and annoying example just search google for something and you are likely to come across a website that is rubbish. The website is just a list of other websites that may or may not be relevant to your search. Often such a website address has a domain name that is long and descriptive. We have all been there, we went to google to get an answer and all we got was links to possible answers, and often these “web pages” are just directories masking themselves as useful websites. In my opinion they are spam since they often add no content at all and Google should block these pages out of its searches.
But Google does not block them. And as such they get a lot of hits. Lots of hits and useless. You takes your choice.
