As part of my research for our new online community I have read through a pile of reports, many from Forrester. I have read them with mixed emotions.

Some show great insight and Forrester are very good at structuring phenomena in the world of social networking sites. But sometimes you cannot help yourself from giggling and thinking of how true old sayings still are. Like “experts often discover things that ordinary people have known for ages”.

Savor this one from a Forrester report called Organic Branding: “People don’t form and interact with communities in order to support a company. They do it to serve their own emotional needs”.

What great insight! Such revolutionary thinking! Such gobbledygook! What an astounding example of discovering the obvious. Obvious to anybody who is a believer in true marketing orientation, that is. For oldies who still believe in product or production orientation it might be news. But to anyone claiming to be marketing oriented this insight should flow through your veins: People don’t buy your stuff for your sake, but for their own sake. Or, people don’t browse around your website or community because it’s so brilliantly designed or has such a cool function. They do it because there’s something in it for them.

There’s a nice twist to that as well: the true marketing minded and the usability apostles have very, very much in common.

Social Networking Sites are about to finally tilt the scale in favor of true marketing orientation. The immediate feedback and widely distributed opinions by customers and real people from real life in communities has given the marketing orientation advocates ammunition of a kind they have never ever had before.

Now, you can force product development to listen to the wishes of customers, as it is expressed and distributed in the blogosphere. The repercussions of attitudes, training and empowerment of front line staff are so much more direct and visible that there are no more arguments against taking good care of your customer service staff.

Unhappy users are transformed from anonymous statistics of brand defections to angry bloggers who make their voice heard and their dissatisfaction is widely and rapidly distributed.

So, as a passionate advocate of the power of the customer and the end user, I vow that our social networking site will be transparent and extremely user centric. And if we stumble at any time, please let me know and remind me of this (pompous) promise.

It’s amazing what kind of profane things come up during a project like this. Still, if you get them wrong you can create havoc further down the road.

Today it was time to discuss if members should be able to change their alias or not. It came up since a test user had misspelled his alias and wanted to correct it. At first glance, you say “of course you should be able to correct typos.”

But then you think of the consequences. Let’s say that a someone has been a member for a month or several and then suddenly decides to switch screen name.

Then what? All comments and other entries made would end up changing as well and other users would get puzzled by entries “changing authors”.

Can’t have that, can we?

One of two ways left to avoid typos like that would be introducing a spell check. But for what language? And aliases are pretty often made-up combinations that you don’t find in standard language anyway.

The other would be to offer some kind of preview with a possibility to edit misspelled entries before they are saved to the database. If you still mess up, you have to start again. You could at least use the incorrect member to send yourself an invitation to create a new one

I think we will go for number two and hope our future members can tyope.

A hot topic in our project right now is what is the best method kick off member recruitment?

Just opening up for anybody to sign up or to do the “invite a limited number of friends”-thing?

Of course, opening up for anybody makes it easy for Tom, Dick and Harry to join the community. But does it create the buzz? I’d say no.

A limited invitations to friends, on the other hand, might reduce the number of spontaneous sign-ups, but would help spreading the word. Since all other communities seem to do it this way, it probably works the best. (And, of course, it could always be coupled with an option to ask the team for an invitation.)

But then comes the next question, how many invitations per member and how do you earn new invitations or do you just get new invitations by a fixed number each day or week?

I’m inclined to vote for ten invitations initially and then one added for each log-on. That would keep the technical complexity reasonable. Alternatives to that would be two new for each you send. Or some function of your level of activity in the community. But would really the added value be worth the technical complexity. I doubt it and I guess that Toby would agree.

Have you seen the iA Web Trendmap 2007? It’s just great, particularly for folks like us in the process of building a new online community. Where do you really belong? Are you in sharing, technology or what? Know your neighbors conceptually and user benefit-wise and set out to diffirentiate from them.

I just love it!

Just read an interesting post on “How to Monetize Social Networks” talking about how Facebook and MySpace are striving to go beyond Google ads. It mentions the reluctance of members to accept too obvious publicity.

I think that to a considerable extent, that reluctance or willingness is linked to the benefits delivered to the members of the network. Which, on the other hand, would be linked to the networks long term survival-chances anyway.

Just finished migrating the last few tickets, now that Toby had added the missing categories in Trac; our catchall for ideas on how to integrate with other social networks to offer extended value.

Now we are all on Trac, so to say. What a relief.

It really works well. With custom queries you can easily build your own to-do list sorted by milestone and priority.

The screen of my main computer is still black and limp. I guess the graphics card has given up. Will have to try to replace it with another one tomorrow.

And Google are busy verifying to open the mail in Apps. Then I can hopefully stop getting the back-ups in my usual inbox.

I have just spent half a Sunday migrating umpteen items from our to-do and wish list in Google Spreadsheets to Toby’s Trac system.

I guess it will turn out useful, making it easier to manage the workflow and to trac back on past actions. But it was pretty mind numbing just sitting there rewriting all the entries and dropping down all those menus. And of course, Toby had created categories with a techy slant. There was no category for commercial, for example.

But, in all honesty, I have to give it to him that Trac seems to be really great. I guess that even UI Jane can live with the interface. And it’s free. Nevertheless, it would have been better if Toby dear had gotten around to implement it from the start.

It’s pretty cool really. We run this project almost entirely online and with open source stuff; Trac, Google Documents and Spreadsheets, Google Groups, Google Analytics and finally Google Adsense. I just have some problem getting the Google Apps going. I wonder if we could do the plan in Google Calendar. And that’s only the stuff that I know the names of. The rest of the team could probably add another half-a dozen open source thingies we use.

There I was in a cab, with a good job and fair pay, still thinking: “wouldn’t it be just great to work for myself and not for others?”.

Ideas like that had popped up regularly for a couple of years. I even had a business plan pretty ready when my employer was acquired by a really big corporation and my dayjob turned more interesting again. The problem with all previous ideas had been that they were based on consultancy services – just like my present job – and that means, of course, that what you earn is directly related to how many hours you work. Does that sound like fun to you? I mean, should working for yourself just mean working your ass off for just as many hours that you are working your ass off today? Except that the doe would go into your own pocket, of course. No, there must be something better to do.

So there I was in the cab, changing my mind-set to conceiving a business concept that was not directly related to how many hours I bill. (Yes, I do understand that starting your own business isn’t done in an afternoon. It takes great efforts and many hours. But my hook was to avoid hinging the long term turn-over to hours worked on a continuous basis).

Another thing to keep in mind is that I have a good life today, with a family I love and a house I own (small loans, too). I don’t want to risk all that. So the concept had to be something that you can start on the side, without too great a risk and without upsetting your employer too much.

Ten minutes later, the core concept was ready.

You see, I’m not one of those very young start-up upstarts (witty, hey?). I’ve been in business for a while. But the point is that I often beat the kids when it comes to being creative, identifying trends and thinking up new concepts. Some five years ago, at a seminar in trend spotting, I claimed that social web functionality would be a main trend in the years to come. (I don’t pretend to have been the guy inventing that particular expression, but I did see it coming.)

So, the idea is about building a new web community to fill a gap that we think is waiting to be filled. When I mentioned the idea to some close friends and colleagues they all said: “Yeah, you’ve got something there. I haven’t seen anyone doing just this. Maybe bits and pieces of it, but not in this combination. It would be really great to be able to do just that.” And as with all social networks, their value to the members increases with the number of members. Which means that if you do it well enough and get members enough, you can hope being able to make some money from displaying Google Ads.

Oh, no! Not a nother web community, you say. Of course, I wouldn’t want to open just one more of the same as all the others. This is different of course. But I can’t tell you just how it is different. Not yet. I don’t want to give anything away so someone else could do a rip-off.

I thought it could be interesting for others to get some insight into the ins and outs and birth pains of a new web project. That’s why I start this blog. Since this is my first start-up, you might find a bit of tooing and froing, but that’s supposed to be part of the fun – for you that is. For me and my band of brothers (and sisters) it might be a bit painful. If you have any ideas on how to relieve that pain, you’re more than welcome to pass on some wisdom by commenting.