The 411 on Eventrue - a web 2.0 community that gets people to go out!

This seems like a pretty well thought out business plan and I think, really highlights some things we *haven't* covered in the course yet.

The course seems to accpet that you have an eCommunity already in place, or, that if you don't "providing content first" will be a magic bullet to solve the the problem of users. What I'm struck with when reading about Eventure is that we haven't really discussed how to get people to use your site.

Many of the readings come form the angle of a) studying existing communities or b) adding eCommunity features onto "regular" websities.

Paul may correct me, but I don'ts see this as the directio that eCommunities are heading. Most the eCommunities I run across these days are a lot like Eventure:

Web 2.0 sites that exist soley for the purpose of being a community. They seem to be cropping up daily. I'd love if we could study in the course how sites like these manage to get large user bases.

We know it can't be quality alone (otherwise, how could myspace exist) and it can't be cool features alone (because a lot of sites with neat features fail) and it can't be advertising alone (a lot of site heavily promoted also fail).

So, what makes users want to use sites? What possess a newbie to enter an eCommunity when there are no older generation? and what happens when these sites die?

My next comment is about RSS. XML, and data sharing. It seems that RSS is being used these days ONLY for news aggregators. This is cool in itself, but I'd love to see a site like this use RSS or another open API to share data in interesting ways. I think the coolest web 2.0 stuff is going to happen when sites start talking to each other and linking people together.