The community manager role is often misunderstood – it is really more about being a voice for the community to communicate the needs of the community within the company and then help communicate the needs of the company back into the community. This dual role is one of the things that makes corporate community management such a challenge – there are significant trade-offs and give and take between the company and the community. This also means that the community manager needs to understand the impact to various segments of the community from the very vocal power users to the less vocal casual users. Companies like Twitter tend to have issues when they neglect this role and neglect communications with the community.

I mean which is it, Twitter? You can’t scale or you just want to make things simpler? I don’t know about you, but I’m losing trust either way just because they’re contradicting themselves.

Everyone please sign my #fixreplies petition here and RT to send a strong, unified message:
http://bit.ly/fixtwitter

With new mainstream accounts like @aplusk, @oprah, and @kingsthings, who needs to grow a site by way of a community when you can have millions of new users whenever a celeb signs up? Very wrong, and you’d think they would have taken notes after Facebook’s “We know what’s best for you” debacle.

But even though this feature was originally community driven doesn’t mean it’s good for the current community if it means it’s going to bring the system down. I don’t think the current influx of Twitter users, or even some of the old timers, realize the “exponentiality” of Twitter communication. It’s massive. But without the system there is no way for the community to exist. Now I’m making an assumption that this problem is what’s driving the change since that’s what’s driven most of the feature withdrawals in the past, such as Track and With Others.

Moveover, Twitter has always depended on the developer community to come up with ways to fill in the gaps they can’t. And this strategy is a good one. Twitter can’t do everything, especially for free, and it’s longevity is dependent on it becoming more like a platform than an app. I don’t doubt that someone will figure out a cool app that will make it easy to discover new people in interesting conversations.

I’d like to see this community mature to a point where it takes responsibility for its impact on the technology. Like when a celebrity has a race with a cable news network to see who can get to a million followers faster we take as stronger stand and tell people that’s not what Twitter is for and why that’s actually *bad* for Twitter.

But in the end, who can make this happen, lead this effort? A community manager. So I guess, Dawn, I agree with you, but maybe for different reasons.

To me the big problem is that micro-blogging isn’t standardized or federated, and one for-profit company holds all the keys to the castle. Just blogged about it: http://jasonmauer.com/2009/twitter-the-overlord/

Wikitravel was a success because Evan really groks community in a wiki way, and by moving fast to add oft-requested functionality that Twitter has lagged behind on (like groups), they’ve managed to create a vibrant and responsive approach to working with their community.

I actually began my microblogging adventures on Identi.ca, and moved to Twitter because everyone in Portland tech was on it. If this replies debacle (which I am not particularly bothered by, personally) forces everyone off Twitter on to Identi.ca, I wouldn’t be perturbed.