Origins of the idea

The idea of MicroCommunity emerged because of the frustration of current social tools. These tools (especially Facebook groups now, and forums before) suffer from two main problems:

• The first was that content is locked in information silos and in some cases cannot be reached by search engine crawlers.
• The second is that these tools usually limit the way users interact with content. For instance:
  • Users aggregate information in posts instead of using an editable page
  • Users answer the questions of others using tens of comments with no way to filter good answers
  • Users are unable to tag content nor they can retrieve it later based on their tagging.

People are already finding their own solutions for problems mentioned above.

The first approach focuses on the efficiency in manipulating content. The easiest way is maintaining a collection of websites or online services. For instance you create a wiki, sign up for an online Q&A service, open a bookmarking group and use a mailing list. The cost of maintaining that number of services limits this type of solution to communities which have enough number of committed members. However, this solution keeps the activity of the community fragmented. This problem of fragmentation does not usually have a good solution except by developing a unique solution for that community, something that is not always affordable for all communities.

The second approach focuses on the connectivity of the community. Before several years that solution was forums and bulletin boards, and now they are Facebook groups. Despite their inefficiency in manipulating content, their power is the social experience they provide to their users, something that makes those community favor this type of solutions over the first type which usually cause the social experience of the group to be fragmented.