When building community sites, we will always have the problem of chicken and egg. Nobody gets involved into your community if they don’t have critical mass, and critical mass wont get built if users don’t join the web community. How are you going to solve this problem? I think it can be solved to some level by “Standing on the shoulders of the giants”. One way is single signon.

But the true single sign on for the web doesn’t exist yet, but bigger players on the web have so many users that, we can consider them as sso providers. Allowing our users to use one of the established service providers userid/password pair gives us the advantage of converting their users into ours. It also reduces the pain of creating Yet Another User Id/Pw for the user, reducing the entry barrier for our users.

In my personal experience at ubuntuAtWork.org, I have seen 45% increase in registration after we opened up register/login using FB Connect. There are many other success stories.
Solutions:
In the market we have three big compitators

• OpenID : Platform and vendor independent. Standards set by an open standards committe. Big internet companies like Google, Yahoo, etc are supporting them. OpenId is a distributed identity provider and has the biggest user base in the world. The usebase also includes the users of gmail, ymail, wordpress, LJ etc
• Facebook connect: Facebook is worlds biggest social network as of today. It has free APIs for the usage.
• Google Friend Connect: is the compitator to Facebook connect. It has bigger user base in India considering the people on orkut and people using gmail (yes, gmail over took Yahoo recently in India)

Integrated solution: Combination of OpenId and facebook connect will give us bigger advantage. It gives us a large internet users we could target. Drupal the platform used by many communities by default supports OpenId at core. And its not difficult to use it on the wordpress and Joomla. Facebook connect is a simple API, the required modules exist for drupal to implement this. Read the rest of this entry »

There are both positives and negatives being on twitter. I get to share interesting stuff, like live pictures, articles, posts, ideas, travel experience etc. I also get to read. I have got so many great answers to my questions, that i reach to a twitter client as soon as I have a question. Its special while traveling as you get answers in real time. I have also tried to help people. Twitter is the new **water cooler**. Yes I use it to track my boss too :)

On the negative side anybody can easily track me easily. There is information overload. You really can not keep up with everybody as you start following more and more people. And last but not the least tweeting when I am angry

The positives have been so overwhelming that I don’t consider negatives as negatives except point #3. So now, I have a rule. Don’t tweet when you are angry. I give two thinkings before I tweet anything negative. Since tweeting is easy, we generally tend to judge everything in 140 seconds. Twitter has bigger effect (as much as a blog post if not more), so we need to responsible before we comment on anything. I must agree those #fail tags have helped me many times but I personally think twice before I tag anything #fail. So do I moderate my tweets? Yes, I do.

Do you moderate your own tweets? In what scenarios?

As part of CSR, I was introduced to UbuntuAtWork.org, in their own words
Ubuntu at Work is a global social networking community that connects women micro entrepreneurs across the developing world with coaches and collaborators around the world who offer them encouragement and support to develop sound business ideas, funding assistance, and networking resources to pursue their entrepreneurial aspirations.
It looked very interesting for me as both social media and social entrepreneurship are my biggest interests. I started as a regular volunteer visiting women at their home and trying to understand their business model, financial status etc.

But in recent times my work involved lot of traveling, I shifted my focus to other place “The Web”. For UbuntuAtWork web is their second home. We tried to make it is as simple and social as possible. I choose WordPress as the platform. There are many reasons for not selecting it but my biggest reason to select was a. user friendliness and b. community. Today I am happy. The community helped me to integrate twitter, facebook, shopping cart(We are already trying to sell some interesting stuff made by women) with wordpress. The site is as such under continuous construction (Its a living site and not create and forget it, kind of website), I keep tweaking it everyday. I know there are so many things that I can do. I am waiting for buddypress to stabilize, so I can add more social features. There are so many other things in my mind which I am not able to implement as I am traveling. In the mean time suggest me that can make it social and viral.

Working with UbuntuAtWork has been fulfilling. I have met many interesting people, thanks to Vibha. She makes sure to introduce at least two of her friends every week. As I know more people my interest in social media and entrepreneurship keeps growing. One day I might become one!

BTW you can also help one of us at UbuntuAtWork to go to BlogWorld. It just needs a click and doesn’t even need an email :)

If you are interested in volunteering. Please leave a comment. One of us will send you the welcome kit.

Actually this was meant for my twitter followers, But now its open to all my readers. I have Rs. 500 RangDe social lending coupon. Whoever answers this Bangalore quiz (easy) earliest with maximum number of correct answers will get this coupon. Using which you can lend somebody on RangDe. You will get the money + 2% interest once they pay back the loan and of course you will get some karma points.

Quiz:

1. Whats earlier version of M1A2 called? Ans:- Bangalore Torpedo
2. Is there a Gul Mohar Marg in Bangalore? Ans:- Yes. Inside IISc
3. Where in Bangalore you will find 3000 million year old rock ? Ans:- Inside lalbagh, the rock on which Kempegowda tower is built.
4. Which area of Bangalore first got electricity? Ans:- Cantonment
5. How much did Govt spend to construct Vidhana Soudha? Ans:- Rs 1.75 crore.
6. From where did the granite used to construct Vidhana Soudha came from? Ans:- Mostly from Mallasandra and Hessaraghatta
7. Before Independence Gandhi was asked to take rest in Bangalore, Where was it exactly? Ans:- Okay. It was both Kumara krupa road and Nandhi hills. I was expecting Nandhi Hills.

Go ahead answer them as comments. May be I will close it at 7pm?? closed.

Note: NO, this is not sponsored by RangDe. This one is out of my EB adsense money :)

Results: Raghava got it right second time. Congratulations. I will send a mail. Manoj and Fagun were very near. BTW where is that  city market building? Next time I will hide answers until I close the quiz that should make it more interesting.

As I had written earlier, myself and @vsr are working on version 2 of Tweet4Blood . Here are some screens which VSR recently created. Home page has more information now. It has lot of white (yellow?) space which I like. As you can see it has very prominent twitter login button for donors to login. You don’t have to login to request as before.

The major change to the app will be alert customization for donors. Now you can login using your twitter account (Yeah. oAuth. No password sharing) and set your alerts. You can get the alerts for the blood requests in your city by mail, DM and IM (is coming not in screen shot). i.e when somebody requests your blood group, in your city, tweet4blood will send you an IM/DM/email depending on your settings.

Blood requesting is same as before, though it will include some suggestions from Umesh aka @ooomz like more user friendly forms. Like I have written earlier, you dont have to login to request.

Let us know what your thoughts about this new design. Actually you can suggest features too.

Question: Should we have an option to automatically post to FaceBook? may be perhaps using an app.