I had an amazing week in Dallas despite the 112 degree daily heat index. It seriously felt like walking outside was getting into a hot car. Getting into a hot car was more like deciding to stick your head into the oven.
Helping out with Planning for Telligent, seeing new products, and participating in an all-night coding competition got me thinking about the various markets and customers that use Community Server. Then I saw Seth Godin’s post about opposites. It made me wonder what the opposite of Community Server is.
Is it Live Spaces or Blogspot?
I’m not sure I see spaces as competition, but in several ways it’s an opposite approach. Instead of customized SEO optimized niche community site designed around a topic area it’s a one size fits all service for millions of individual bloggers. It’s more of a melting pot approach.
FaceBook?
Facebook changes the focus of a community site from content to people. From posts to profiles. Community Server today is much more focused on optimizing content delivery over person to person connections. Is that an opposite approach? I think they are complimentary. You really need to do both well to serve customers and it’s really just a different pivot that’s created by views on pretty much the same data.
Custom Sites?
If Community Server provides a templated framework to build a customer community then you could argue that another approach would be people that choose to build those frameworks themselves.
Sharepoint?
You could argue that today Sharepoint is to enterprises what Community Server is to your customers. They are both collaboration tools, but one is focused on the external and the other on internal collaboration. Sharepoint, however, in a lot of ways mirrors the Community Server pivot around content rather than people.
Other?
The Techcrunch folks put up a great list of Community Platform providers here.
Community Server is one of only 6 from the 34 vendors on a Microsoft Technology stack. The others are mostly LAMP. But I don’t think the choice of technology for your community platform matters as much to your customers. It might matter for your server farm and integration with your other systems, but not so much for customers so we can’t use that pivot to define an opposite.
From the chart Lithium Software only targets large enterprise deployments where their pricing is an initial setup fee and then a monthly charge based on the pageviews in your communities. This is pretty different from most of Telligent’s offerings today. There is no “Lithium Community Server” for sale as a product so they are much more service focused with long term client engagements. That could be construed as an opposite today.
Leverage Software only sells a hosted solution for clients at a flat rate. But there is hosted pricing for CS available.
Defining Opposite
In the end I think defining an opposite for Community Server is going to depends on the customers. Community Server, for example, is probably more platform than I need for Ledgards.com. Someone looking for a simple family web site solution might find Community Server more than they need. So, in that regard I’m taken back to simpler hosted solutions for families targeted around the sharing scenarios like Flickr or Live Spaces.
It’s not to say that Telligent couldn’t go after those customers, but Community Server, as a for purchase product, probably isn’t the answer for that market. Sort of like Seth’s Duncan Donuts versus Starbucks example. So the next question becomes how you become the best Starbucks and do you also try and launch a chain of Duncan Donuts?
At the end of the day I’m really excited about the potential at both the high and low end of the market for content & people platforms and I’m am thrilled to be part of the Telligent team.
