Exercise 6.3: Trust and reputation: how is it achieved?

The two communities I’ve chosen are Facebook and the community created when you conduct a Webex session.

Facebook

Usability, sociability and sustainability

I’ve now been using Facebook for about 4 months, but I have still not used all its functionally. However, as I try each new function, I am impressed with how easy it is. Way back at the dawn of the web, creating webpages with images was a real chore. The flexibility to be able to import videos, still images, links while being able to comment, share and tag these bits of content is awesome.

The ease that all this is accomplished makes the Facebook experience very compelling from a socialibity and sustainability point of view. If the site is easy to use,people are deriving some benefit from visiting it and they feel that they can control access to their content and the people who visit the site, they will continue to use the site. For me, Facebook has all of these things.

Webex

Usability, sociability and sustainability

Although Webex may not be considered a community in the conventional sense, I believe that a community can be created to solve a single problem or issue: It has a purpose, people and a size defined by the number of people at the meeting. So – I would like to use Webex in this context. I was very impressed by the Webex meeting last night for a number of reasons.

Firstly, Webex’s usability was very impressive. Being able to share and present your desktop to anyone in the group is a powerful function. Being able to go beyond a ‘screenshot’ to being able to ‘drive’ an application ‘live’ is huge.

Secondly, although much of the good humour and warmth (socialbility) was due to the wonderful personality of Justine, Webex also supported this through its panel where users could vote, emote, signal that they wanted to talk etc.

When a product is both highly usable and sociable, it becomes sustainable through attractiveness of use to any community.