Building better communities by knowing your user.

I was reading Web Development 2.0 and found a lot of really interesting information. One bit relates well to virtual communities.

One example: Flickr had a report of users with no contacts in the Flickr social network, which they called the "Loneliest Users" report. What a great report -- a way to see who is uploading photos but not sharing them with anyone! With that, they could go add themselves as contacts for these "loneliest" users, and teach them how to use the contact feature.

Simply put, this is smart. More specifically, but still generalizing, they are identifying personalized ways of interacting with community members to encourage social behavior. Now here's an opportunity for a buzz word.

Anyway, the whole piece is good. If you're a developer, I recommend giving it a read. As a side note, I dropped Drivel and am trying out new blog posting software called "Blog Entry Poster"... Ironically, this very generically named software has much better formatting features. If you're reading this, the software works.