Communities and Mobility

Today Michael Mace posted a nice little overview of Everything you always wanted to know about web community, and then some over on his blog. There are links to a couple versions of this long report (which I mostly haven't read yet, cause it's long) but the blog post alone is nice.

Of course, the most interesting thing was after he asked "What does it mean to mobile?"

Good point, and something we've actually dealt with lately. Naturally, all our client work is secret, cause that would make it too easy, but I've started internalizing some principles of community mobile design and this is a good excuse to chat about them.

• First of all, it's a lot easier to read than to post in any way. Entirely aside from the difficulty of entering info into mobiles, most people lurk. They read blog posts and do not comment, they read forums and do not respond, they read reviews and do not post them. Make reading features easy and fast to get to.
• It's only easy to read things when it's easy to read them. Use all your best practices about reading text on mobiles.
• Big communities already exist. If you have one on your desktop website, or can tie into one someone else has, by all means use that. Don't confuse everyone by starting from zero with a mobile social feature unless you have to.

As yet, a lot of these points drive not just design, but strategy. You have to chat with the clients about what the best solution to pursue even is. But one thing is still true: If your company has social info or reviews or something that isn't mobile yet, get it that way soon. You are missing an opportunity every day.

Naturally, this is a "right now" sort of thing. Over time the final state – or at least the next state – of mobile social networks will emerge.