I read this book pretty much cover-to-cover and found it very thought provoking. It does a great job of explaining the opportunities in creating "Virtual Communities". Virtual communities are described as areas where a group of users sharing common interests gather to learn about and discuss information. These communities create an information source that shifts power from the vendors to the customers. Longer term, vendors can capitalize on this community by selling directly to the community members, and more importantly by using the customer interaction to create word-of-mouth advertising. Who are you more likely to trust: another user of the product or some sleazy salesman?
Up until this book, I have seen little written on the longer term business models on how to make money by aggregating users. This book will explain the rationale of why there is enormous value in web sites with a large base of users.
The book has a very interesting chart which describes the return on various strategic investments for a startup trying to build a virtual community. The conclusion was that far and away the most important investments were vendor acquisition (i.e. companies wanting to sell products to the members of the community), member-generated content, and member acquisition. Interestingly, usage fees for the site had an enormous long-term negative impact for the site (despite their short term ability to generate revenue).
There are a couple of points that I think were not well addressed in this book:
1) I don't believe that the authors make a compelling argument about how to sell the first vendors on the advantages of being a part of the virtual community. From my experience, vendors don't sign up for a new product or service because "that's where the market is going". They need to be convinced that there's an advantage for them to be first, and that reason was not adequately described in the book.
2) The book states the importance of member-generated content as a way to build up the community and keep traffic coming to the site. It was never clear to me from the book how to do this through a commercially sponsored newsgroup versus the already existing Usenet newsgroups today (which already have a pre-existing and active community). For instance, there are already many Usenet newsgroups related to Travel. Why should potential travelers use a commercially sponsored site instead of a Usenet group? Clearly there are sites that have been successful at creating their own newsgroup areas so I believe that there are justifiable reasons. I'm just not sure what those reasons are and the book didn't explain them.
Overall, an interesting book and well worth your time.
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