Flickr: Community
Via the Citizen Agency Blog (Choice words from Stewart Butterfield) I found the following quote from an interview by CNN of Stewart Butterfield, one of the founders of Flickr:
There was a lot of dialogue between the people who were developing Flickr and their users to get feedback on how they wanted Flickr to develop. That interaction made the initial community very strong and then that seed was there for new people who joined to make the community experience strong for them too. [ emphasis mine ]
Think of the field as the internet and the farmers as Flickr (or any other Web 2.0 social-networking AdSense collecting site)...they can plow all they want, but without some kind of participation on the part of the early adopters (the seed), there would be no crops to harvest.
OK, so that was a horrible analogy.
Success is not an either/or proposition. Success is the result of both parties working together. It’s co-creation, it’s co-dependency. And at some point maybe one party needs to move on. I understand that, and I’m not blogging on and on about this simply to provoke my RSI.
Yes, I see a lot of whining. But underneath that whining I see some troubling aspects which I personally cannot dismiss as simply…well, whining.