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Social Network

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Flickr Community Managrs

As a huge fan and early adopter of Flickr, the online photo sharing community, as well as also being tasked with managing a large online community myself, I found this article about community managers at Flickr interesting:

At first glance this parallel society has been made, quite literally, in the image of our own. But in truth it's more like a Photoshopped image -- the nice parts accentuated, the inappropriate bits cropped away. So it goes with any online community, of course. Behavior must be moderated and a communal ethos must be preserved; Wild West cliches aside, total freedom at any entity like this would sink it in a storm of lawsuits, flame wars and gridlocked cacophony. So directors of community exist. And while the job of nurturing and policing any online realm would make for a fascinating study, I was particularly curious about how it worked at Flickr.

Director of Community Heather Champ doesn't just guard the pool and blow the occasional whistle; it's a far more delicate, and revealing, dance that keeps the user population here happy, healthy and growing. In addressing that question of how much to police and how much to let things be, Champ oversees an experiment that, outside some far-flung and sandy exceptions, one rarely sees in such detail.

I've believed in this website and the product from the very beginning and it's really satisfying for me to see it grow into a vibrant and engaging community. I'm glad to see that its merger into Yahoo has been relatively positive, although I'm still bitter at having to give up my original login for a Yahoo one instead. Boo to that.

Their programmers in particular are top notch, so if any of ya'll read this: Thanks for making the site products so usable!

Read rest here.

[Via]

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YOU'VE GOT POWNCE

First he gave me an early invitation to Gmail long before accounts had 100 invites, let alone being completely open to the public.   And now he's hooked me up with an invite to join Pownce.  Thanks Kaizar! "What's Pownce?" you ask.  Think Socialista on Saturday nights plus Facebook plus YouSendIt  plus Twitter plus Evite all in one very clean interface, and the result you get is Pownce.

The New York Times writes:

[It's] a social network service with a velvet rope: Just now, the hottest start-up in Silicon Valley--minutely examined by bloggers, panted after by investors--is Pownce, but only a chosen few can try out its Web site.

Kevin Rose, the co-founder and chief architect of Digg, a hugely popular news site, announced in late June the introduction of Pownce, a social-networking service that combines messaging with file-sharing. Mr. Rose immediately endowed his latest venture with some mystique by declaring that, for the time being, only those with invitations would be permitted to test his new site.

Within days, invitations were selling on eBay for as much as $10.

Like I did with the original Gmail invites and an extra t-shirt I picked up from MTV's free pre-release screening of Napoleon Dynamite that I gave away to the first commenter, I'm giving away one Pownce invite to the first person to leave a comment here (I'll need your e-mail address).

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SUNDANCE CHANNEL + GOOGLE MAPS = GREEN!

Combining the nifty technology behind the Google Maps application with the social networking phenomenon, the Sundance Channel created a focused platfrom, called "Eco-mmunity Map" that connects people, businesses, organizations, and tree huggers all over the US to orchestrate and coordinate and exchange information about their "green" efforts. If you don't know "green" by now, then you really have been living underneath a rock (a very polluted rock at that): Green symbolizes a global identity underscoring an eco-revolution, which basically means we all need to stop treating Mother Earth like she's Tina and we're Ike.

Check out the website here and say hi to Al Gore. Or browse it for hot "green" chicks with small carbon footprints. Oh yea.

(Thanks Pooja!)

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