I spent some time reviewing Apple’s developer comunity. Here’re my thoughts.

Apple Developer Connection 
http://developer.apple.com/ 

Top 3 good things:

• Apple Developer Connection (ADC) members can help the company discover & isolate bugs within its products. Members can submit bug reports/enhancement requests on Apple products & track these submissions. This is a great way for developers to contribute to the robustness of Apple’s products
  
• ADC provides developer Technical Support: a team made up of highly qualified engineers with development expertise in key Apple technologies provide either direct one-on-one support troubleshooting issues, hands-on assistance to accelerate a project, or helpful guidance to the right documentation and sample code. This is a good way to support developers working on Apple’s products
  
• ADC has a link to its worldwide online store at
  http://www.apple.com/buy/ where developers and users can buy Apple products. It also offers support and training services

Top 3 things to improve:

• No blogs or links to blogs on ADC’s site. Blogging is a powerful medium for companies to talk to developers and/or customers and is a great way to share information. For example: Microsoft used the concept of corporate blogging to bridge the divide between its customers and itself
  
• I couldn’t find discussion forums or suggestion boxes on ADC’s site. It is difficult for developers to share their ideas and provide feedback
  
• No tracking statistics are provided. Information like users, postings, page hits, downloads, community & site ranking makes it possible to measure the success of the community & also encourages new users to join
  
  

Here’s a writeup on Oracle:

Oracle Technology Network (OTN)

Community Statistics:

Registrations: 5.2 million
Discussion forum threads: approx 400,000
New discussion forum messages: 1.2 million
Published technical articles/notes: 600
Countries containing members: 252
Most members: US with 1.6 million
Fewest members: Midway Islands with 2

Top 3 good things:

• To foster the Oracle community, Oracle formally recognizes Oracle advocates with strong credentials as evangelists & educators in that community. These Oracle ACEs are technically proficient & eager to share their experiences whether through writing books, articles, or blogs, speaking at events, participating in OTN discussion forums or simply serving as Oracle advocates in their respective organizations. This is a great way to build visibility for Oracle, its products & its ACEs
  
• To illustrate how to use Oracle products and technologies, OTN provides source code & installation instructions for complete working sample applications. The site also features an area called Code Tips where developers can share their knowledge with other Oracle users by submitting tips & techniques. This is a great way to increase the use of Oracle’s products
  
• Community areas are provided for other countries as well. China, Japan & Korea have their own communities & these are linked to the main OTN page
  

Top 3 things to improve:

• Communities from more countries can be featured. Today, only China, Japan & Korea are covered. It would be good to encourage Oracle affiliates in other countries to build and develop communities
  
• An online store can be implemented where users and developers can purchase products online. For example, Intel’s community site has a pointer to
  http://www.intel.com/buy/index.htm where you can buy any Intel product online
  
• The expertise of Oracle ACEs can be used to hire new employees. This way, newcomers can find able mentors and Oracle can benefit by finding great new employees
  

Yahoo Developer Network

Statistics:
Director: Chad Dickerson
Blogsite: http://developer.yahoo.net/blog
Members: 1066

Top 3 good things:

• Yahoo Developer Network offers web services and APIs that make it easy for developers to build applications and mashups that integrate data sources in new ways, making the web a more useful & fun place for everyone. Mashups take content from one application and merge them with another, often to a startlingly cool effect
  
• Yahoo HotJobs RSS feed enables you to get HotJobs search results as an RSS feed: you can then save those results in My Yahoo! or your favorite feed aggregator, or incorporate that data into your own website or client application
  
• A suggestion box is provided: this is a great way for developers to post questions, enhancement requests, bug reports or any other feedback items pertaining to the Developer network

Top 3 things to improve:

• Jobs are listed as RSS feeds. It would be good to also list them in a way that everyone can read and understand instead of having to figure out how to send the RSS request and how to decipher the RSS Response
  
• Success stories & testimonials could be listed in the community area. This would make it possible for developers to look at other products & find ways to achieve similar success with their products
  
• Like I’ve commented before in my blogs, more tracking statistics like page hits, downloads, community & site ranking would make it possible to measure the success of the community
  

I spent some time reviewing Microsoft’s Developer Community and here’s what I found:

Statistics:
Forum users: 615,684
Forum posts: 1,110,622
Posts per 24 hours: 800-1000
Chats per month: 30
Newsgroups: 2000

Top 3 good things:

• Lists Codeplex on the main page. This is Microsoft‘s open source project hosting website. Codeplex can be used to create new projects to share with the world, join others who have already started their own projects, or use the applications on this site to provide feedback. At last count, there were about 1407 projects
  
• Microsoft‘s main page has a link to a site called Channel 9 which showcases various technologies and projects via audio/video. This is useful and provides an interactive way for viewers to learn and provide feedback
  
• The community area consists of forums, blogs, technical chats, newsgroups, events and webcasts thus providing a variety of ways for developers to keep up with recent developments
  

Top 3 things to improve:

• The community area could list job postings. This would be helpful for developers looking for jobs and employers looking for suitable people. For example, the java.net community has such a feature on its website
  
• We were able to find community managers for individual products and technologies but could not find an owner or manager for the entire community
  
• A former program manager lists a map: http://alexbarnett.net/blog/Default.aspx of online communities. This can be a useful start for similar efforts to map Microsoft‘s online communities and make it easier to search and navigate
  
  

I spent some time looking at the java.net community and here are some of my thoughts:

java.net community:
Site: http://community.java.net/
Bloggers: About 300-350 active participants
Postings: About 5-10 posts per day

Top 3 good things:

• Help wanted ads are listed both for developers looking for an interesting project to work on and for those involved in a java.net project who are looking for someone to fill a particular need. Listings are restricted to volunteer openings for non-commercial projects. Paid job listings are on a separate JobsWiki page
  
• Links to success stories are provided (for example, OpenSymphony is a collection of projects that share common goals: good design, real-world applicability and loose coupling). This makes it possible for developers to look at other products & find ways to achieve similar success with their products
  
• Blog listing by topic, date, technology makes  it easy to navigate. The community area also has RSS feeds, weblogs, mailing lists, Wikis, articles, books & archives thus providing a variety of ways for developers to keep up with recent developments

Top 3 things to improve:

• The help wanted ad listings have a few bugs (for example, the search listing for the JDK community does not list any ads. Also, trying to list all the ads results in a blank page)
  
• The link to success stories has only 3 entries. More stories will go a long way in motivating developers and provide a place to showcase successful products
  
• More project tracking statistics that are visible to everyone (for example, page hits, downloads, community & site ranking). This type of information enables emergent development to occur and measures the success of the community
  

• Tight communications, via asynchronous formats like mailing lists, to make sure that everybody can be kept informed about everyone else’s progress, questions & concerns
• Full tracking of all collaboratively built artifacts, from specifications and designs to source code and QA test results, so all participants have rapid access to the precise deliverables that everyone is working on or are using as references
• Some form of workflow, whether via a proscribed process or implemented through tracking software, to make sure that everybody knows not only what they are responsible for, but what everybody else is working on as well
• Security: You need to establish technical means of ensuring that not only the relevant development teams have the ability to view & modify the work in progress, other random individuals at either location, or internet crackers, cannot have any way to get at the project
• Manageability: When setting up your collaborative environment, aim for a structure that will support more than just the one team you may be collaborating with today. For example, setup your mailing lists, issue tracking, etc., on a per-application or per-project basis, so that each distinct collaboration initiative has its own workspace. This ties back into security: you need to choose and configure tools that support multiple collaborative efforts, where distinct remote teams only have access to what they need
• Internationalization and localization: With a developer community that includes offshore development teams internationalization and localization issues arise, both with the collaborative development tools and the work products the teams are creating. It will not help your cause to mandate the use of tools that many members of one team cannot understand because of language barriers. Putting multilingual people in key positions can help relay information to teammates who may only speak one language

<img src="/images/64360-56413/visit.jpg”>
David Armano has a provoking post on moving customers from visitors to engaging them and finally allowing them to share with new visitors. Good visual.

Where’s the sausage has an interesting piece on “How customer complaints good for business“.

“A great story from Oliver on his experience of how restaurant Sticky Fingers responded to a bad experience he had with them. He blogged about his complaints, which prompted a response from the local supervisor.”

From the original piece, Oliver says –
“Every single person who came into contact with this free catering event
walked away with a terrific story to tell about Sticky Fingers, a new
appreciation for their brand, and a rekindled taste for their delicious
food. (I expect at least half will be having a meal there inside of the
next two weeks, myself included.)”

Getting feedback from customers good and bad is to be expected when you run a community. Encourage it and ensure that you overdo your response on the positive side.

1. All viral adoption is “perpetuated“. For every one successful case of HotorNot there are thousands of Suqidoo and besides the fact that you have to make a product or service something to get passionate about, building a community around it “just does not happen” with 10 users telling 10 other users.

2. The communities that thrive are the ones that are built one participant at a time. Its slow, painful, measured and very effective. Connect with community members, take a genuine interest in their needs and most importantly cater to their specific need as much as you can within the confines of your “community”. But make it each persons own community.

3. Community value increases exponentially with increased participation. It cannot be a linear value proposition. If that was the case, the “network” effect would not exist. To ensure the value increases exponentially, you have to let the community jointly own the direction & its future.

4. “Marketing” is not a four letter word for communities, but “Control” might be. You have to ensure that people know about that the community exists. Does not mean you spam them like Facebook did, or keep nagging them like BirthdayAlarm. On the other hand trying to “control” the community discussion, direction and future is the quickest way to get a competitive community built by the users without you.

5. There is no pixie dust, silver bullet or magic trick. No software program enables your community to happen, regardless of how much it promises to be “just like Myspace”. No consultant (including us at Canvas Group) can make magic happen – although we wish we could. It take good focus, set goals, a lot of hard work (segmenting your users, micro targeting your initial adopters and encouraging feedback) and a little luck.

Its amazing how working and being with our community has changed my own perspective on news and events. On a flight back from Orange county today I spent some time thinking about the ways I get news now versus a year ago. My top 3:

1. Daily RSS feeds from over 148 bloggers – politics, sports, community, marketing, startups, entrepreneurs (No CNN, Rediff, MSNBC or NPR). If a blogger talks about it I would know.

2. Daily TIVO recording of Jon Stewart show. We have a limit of 30 min max TV daily at home for all of us. Mine is done in 22 min.

3. Email discussions with friends and other associates.

How has social media changed your news consumption?