How to read this blog
virtual places
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Additions: Added community applications
Today I was talking to one of my colleagues about communities and virtual places and stuff – I’ll leave it to him to comment on his observations. I described my view of things and thought it worth noting them here:
In my view there are three four types of online community ‘places’ at this time:
- Community support tools
- Community Applications
- Worlds
- Games
Community support tools are things like facebook , linkedin , bulletin boards. These sort of places offer existing communities a place to communicate. The frame of reference for the community is outside the tool, i.e. you remember when we were at school together?
Community applications are things like zopa . This site allows a community of lenders to lend to a community of borrowers. I distinguish applications from the others in terms of the role of the application – the support tool allows a community to communicate and are often used by the other virtual places, but an application actually serves some specific purpose that could not be fulfilled except by a community.
Worlds are things like second life . They have a world in which players interact. Existing communities can use this as a tool but the world also provides an internal frame of reference i.e. have you seen the bank over here in second life?
Finally games provide a world in which one has objectives defined by the game, and rules governing it’s play. World of Warcraft being an example. Whilst existing communities can come to a game frequently ad hoc communities are formed to solve objectives in the game, i.e. I need to kill hogger, can you come help me?
Just a few thoughts…
