Article in ITviikko

I haven’t had time to inform my dear international readers that recently ITviikko, one of the IT newspapers published in Finland, devoted a whole page to my thoughts on how Internet services are developed around and with communities.

The article is now available on Exove blog, but only in Finnish.

In a nutshell, the article discusses the following topics:

• A lot of recent successful Internet services are based on community features, such as flickr.com or Wikipedia.
• The community provides almost all content.
• The community may also manage the service.
• The biggest challenge in community services is to bootstrap the community and feed the growth.
• The community cannot be controlled; you may try to steer it to the desired direction.
• The community probably develops to a suprising direction, and the end result may be much better for everyone.
• Community services fit also to b2b business; the stakeholders of corporations form communities.