An important ingredient of an online community is the fact that it must be desigend from the start as a mobile service There is a big difference between designing something for mobile use from the start and making an existing website fit onto a mobile platform.
By ensuring the mobile application is efficient, there are many benefits for the design of the Internet site which is viewed on a computer, if it works well on mobile, it will work brilliantly on a computer - speed simplicity and functionality are critical for success.
Already some communities are being developed primarily for mobile use, such as http://www.gypsii.com/ who are designing their community specifically for mobile, and most importantly for the Apple iphone.
A new commmunity site must be do this now - this will give a big advantage in the applications developed and the lead-time to introducing these applications to mobile architecture will save money and help maintain a lead as a community - travelers are the first users of mobile technology, I now see as many people using a mobile on the train as I do on their laptops - air travel will soon have wifi, in a car the mobile is the gps, hands fee phone and email service - mobiles are used for check-in scanning, unlocking doors and paying for services.
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All applications should be developed under open licence and, from the start, third party applications should be encouraged, first to modify for your framework and secondly to be developed specifically for integration with uyou.
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The integration and association of leading service websites offering key ingredients should be sought.
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The aim should be to create "innovating media by empowering readers to become writers and consumers to become creators".
A community site is all about giving the visitors their own facilities to create their own space. Photos are a great thing to share and to get people to give - you could for example integrate http://www.flickr.com into this and perhaps leverage through http://www.pbase.com/ and http://www.redbubble.com/
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It is important that members of a community can take their content, friends lists and history , pack it into a virtual carry bag and leave for another site reloading everything there - this is where all the other community sites fall down - only Google claims (Orkut does not do this so, cobblers shoes) it is building an open source standard for this - so perhaps a reason to use Google hosting service. The opposite is true of course - people can come through your door and set up home with us just as easily - keeps you on our toes.
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Contributor's Note
Tony Tidswell is building a new meta-community space - to be continued
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