An online community consultant by trade, Luke Brynley-Jones has advised many of the UK’s largest non-profits about their online communications. Part of the team behind etribes, he recently oversaw the launch of etribes Life – their new personal publishing service. This is Luke’s personal view of the world behind the scenes of a social software start-up… [you can now listen to this post]
I have to admit to being a little apprehensive when Robin asked me to guest-blog this week. When I saw the list – I was the only expert I hadn’t heard of! It felt like the time I was asked to speak at the Institute of Librarians. What could I possibly say that they would find of interest? (And in that case, visa versa). That said, I think I do have an interesting story. Since Cybersoc the blog was born a year ago, the Internet, society and my life have changed radically. So, here’s my take on it all.
Our man in the street
I view the Internet is very much from a dumb user perspective. And I don’t say that lightly. I’m the kind of Internet user who finds Outlook too complex to manage; who can’t spell flicker correctly; and who spent years wondering why Philip Seymour Hoffman would write a blog called Scobleizer. When Simon Grice asked me to join etribes in 2001, my role was to be Our Man-in-The-Street in the office, if you get my drift.
Private blogospheres
Between 2001 and 2004 we watched with interest as online communities became increasingly focused on the individual. Our clients wanted to offer their members personal profiles, blogs and private messaging, such that, increasingly, the communities themselves were becoming decentralised and the forums (once hubs of activity) were loosing their most vocal proponents. All the mouthy folk wanted their own platforms – or even better – other people’s platforms! We had ended up creating mini-blogospheres (and I hadn’t even heard of that yet).
So our interest in blogging began. When we heard Ross Mayfield and Loic Le Meur explain the future of blogging at Our Social World last year, we left in no doubt that 2006 would be the Year of the Blog and, like everyone else in the room, we decided to launch our own personal publishing service.
Who really blogs anyway?
Not wishing to put the frighteners on Ross or Loic, we decided to target a slightly different market to theirs. In my man-in-the-street capacity, I did some research and discovered that less than 20% of my friends knew what a blog was and only 5% actually had a blog. And my friends are normal. Honest. In fact, my friends are almost all 25-45 years old, professionals, married or with long-term partners, Internet users, mobile phone users, house owners, and, by definition, people who like me. They are all busy and almost all claim not to have time to maintain a blog. That said, they do want to share their photos with friends and family. They also want to set up web-pages for birthday parties, holidays, selling stuff and promoting various interests, projects and clubs. In short: they each need a personal website.
A shameless plug for etribes Life
Thus etribes Life was born; a personal website for busy people who don’t want the commitment of a blog. We launched the Beta service at Les Blogs in Paris with Robert Scoble, Ben Hammersley and other luminaries present (David Sifry even wrote us a business plan on a napkin. You may have seen it since on Ebay ;) – and so far in 2006 the service has continued to grown rapidly. Now we hear that Typepad have raised $12 million to launch a similar service for non-bloggers (intriguingly codenamed Comet), which just illustrates the market’s huge potential.
Where is it all going?
I think we’re onto something. Actually, I think everyone’s onto something. There are a reported 85,000 blogs a day being created in the UK. By mid 2007, our predictions show that there will be something like 30 million blogs (or personal websites?) in use. We also think that people will be using their personal websites for everything from sharing and storing files, photos and music, to posting adverts, making phone-calls and, eventually, paying bills. In short, people will have a homepage for life. Their Life site. Hey, now there’s an idea…