COMMENTS
Thank you Darmesh for highlightening the deficiencies in Linkedin! The biggest problem with LinkedIn group is that it is not really a group. All that a “LinkedIn group” is a list. It does not have even the basic group communication features such as message boards, walls and a homepage. The most you can do with LinkedIn is connect with individuals one at a time. The power of any group is in its ability to foster relationships and discussions. I hope people at LinkedIn wake up and see how Facebook and similar social networking sites are eating into.
I have a suggestion about OnStartups community. Creating a facebook group is a step in the right direction to create a community. But I feel the community is large enough and quite active (already 88 members on facebook, one discussion and 4 wall posts) to merit its own social networking site. I would recommend setting up a dedicated network site on ning.com. They provide all the features of a social network with the power of creating your own brand (something like
http://network.onstartups.com). I am in the process of setting up one for my alma mater and I love it. You can also monetize it if you so choose to. Let me know if you need help, I will be glad to work with you.
Prasad: Excellent point.
I have actually looked into several of the social site platforms (including ning). Though this would indeed be a better way to build the OnStartups brand and get some cool features out to the community, my leaning towards something like Facebook is that there is already an "audience" out there (folks on the site already) and lots of people already know how to use it.
I will take a look at Ning again to see how it might contrast to Facebook in terms of features and such.
In fact, this entire exercise might be a good way to do some real world testing on each of the main platforms out there (good fodder for future articles)
Stay tuned...
Dharmesh,
I actually don't agree. For OnStartups LinkedIn seems a better bet than Facebook. The question really is who is the customer: the group creator or the group members? If it is the group creator then as your points suggest Facebook is better since it makes his life easier, but if the customer is are the group members who want to network with other people in the community who live close by or people in the community with specific specialties then LinkedIn is hands-down a better bet.
Facebook is a great next step for a mailing list, where we read from multiple members and have some relationship already that we want to strengthen. But it seems that from a user standpoint this is really the 1 or 2 posters to this blog. As a self-interested person it is hard to justify spending time in the onStartups Facebook group.
In contrast, there is the Found|Read site, where the site members are also posters, and therefore does make me want to get to know more of the community members.
Actually NING is a great platform for groups!!