Is it true that there is no community in web 2.0?

Asks Francois Gossieaux in her article Is it true that there is no community in web 2.0?

CIO Magazine’s Chris Koch is not seeing real objective evidence that Web 2.0 and more specifically, social networking, are creating real communities (via Mario Sundar & Damon Billian). In the article he says: “I think community is the code word of denial of the 00s, allowing people to slide past any discussion or proof of real value, just as collaboration was the code word of denial of the 90s for the disastrous wave of online b-to-b exchanges that wasted millions of investors’ dollars.”

Hmmmm, I don't quite get that Chris. :-( Francois says

First off, there is no question that there is enough value for the members of those communities to participate in those social networking sites - a big distinction from yesteryear’s online marketplaces where nobody wanted to join and see their offerings being commoditized. A recent Hitwise US Consumer Generated Media Report makes that point clearly when it reported that visits to Myspace increased 51% between March-December, outpacing the 34% overall growth for the social networking category during the same period (via latest issue of Revenue Magazine). Other social networking sites, like Orkut and Bebo, beat those numbers with traffic growth of 63% and 95% respectively for the same period.

And I absolutely agree with her. I think its worth quoting her final summary

There is no question that given the right environment and incentives, you can build a community around just about anything, including power tools and kitchens - just take a look at the Do It Yourself community.

Or indeed the tons of examples we have on our blog site, from Forum Oxford to spreadshirt.com or sneakerplay.com or in fact the elephants dream project

All that being said, there are inherent risks to “commercializing” personal relationships as P&G does in some of their communities - specifically the VocalPoint community of 600,000 moms where they do not require members to disclose the fact that they are working on P&G’s behalf when pitching products to friends. This could indeed lead to the destruction of word of mouth marketing and community marketing much the same way as spammers killed email marketing.

Whether there is community in web 2.0 or not is irrelevant - that is like saying that there is no collaboration happening in collaboration software. That may be true, as there are plenty of reasons, many of them going beyond the collaborative tools themselves, why groups of people may not embrace the collaborative environment for their collaboration. Web 2.0 is about the net as the platform, it’s about collaborative cumulative creation by users, it’s about applications that become better the more people use them, it’s about software as a service, it’s about lightweight programming. Community is about people interacting with other people, not about technology. In the case of business communities it is about people interacting with companies around certain business processes - and not just marketing as described in the article, but also innovation, customer service, and new product development. let’s not forget that some of the most successful communities were able to thrive with little help from technology - using simple discussion boards or groups.

So let’s stop confusing web 2.0 with community 2.0.

Lets stop confusing interruption with engagement.

What we do see is many companies trying to shoehorn old practices into new models. It just won't work