It’s like a war, except with programmers and social networks instead of soldiers and anti-aircraft artillery. First Google opened up its distributed social net, Google Friend Connect — which I have installed in my sidebar and also embedded below — and then Facebook threw open the doors on its version, imaginatively called (what else) Facebook Connect. The aim of both ventures is the same: to allow you to use your login credentials from the network on various sites around the Web, bringing your social profile with you wherever you go. In the process, both companies no doubt hope to entice more people to build a social network based on their tools and services (for some reason I’m reminded of the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church at this point, but that might just be me).

Eric Eldon has a good overview of the differences at VentureBeat, and there is also plenty of coverage at places like Read/Write Web, as well as All Facebook and the always excellent Gina Trapani at Lifehacker. Looking at both of them got me wondering about whether sites like the New York Times will integrate either Friend Connect or Facebook Connect and make them work with the paper’s TimesPeople network, or whether it will work with other distributed social tools like Glue from adaptiveblue.com, which I’ve been testing recently. It’s nice to see ways of connecting to networks without having to actually go to the respective websites all the time.

(Note: My Google Friend Connect box looks somewhat pathetic at the moment — so click on the “join” button and add yourself to my network)

The always excellent Jason Kottke has a post up that got me thinking about the “broken windows” theory and how it applies to online communities. The theory — articulated in this piece from The Atlantic in 1982 — states that crime and bad behaviour of various kinds tends to proliferate where there are obvious signs of neglect, such as broken windows. In other words, if people perceive that no one cares or is looking after a place, the odds of vandalism increase, and The Economist has some hard evidence to back up the theory. The obvious corollary is to online communities or group discussions, Kottke argues (and I agree). As he puts it:

“When forums, message boards, and blog comment threads with more than a handful of participants are unmoderated, bad behavior follows. The appearance of one troll encourages others. Undeleted hateful or ad hominem comments are an indication that that sort of thing is allowable behavior and encourages more of the same.

Those commenters who are normally respectable participants are emboldened by the uptick in bad behavior and misbehave themselves. More likely, they’re discouraged from helping with the community moderation process of keeping their peers in line with social pressure. Or they stop visiting the site altogether.”

This, in a nutshell, is the kind of thing I think we are dealing with a lot in the comments on news stories at the Globe and Mail (the newspaper where I have taken on a newly-created position as communities editor, for those of you just joining us). We were one of the first newspapers in North America to launch comments, but they currently suffer from too little moderation — in part because we simply can’t moderate the 5,000 or so we get every day (we got almost 10,000 on Monday), and not all readers are motivated to click the “flag this comment” link we include nearby. I wrote about our challenges with comments in a recent post that ran at the Globe website.

We are working on adding Digg-style comment voting, and some other features that I hope will help solve this problem, as well as ways of identifying and elevating the intelligent and thoughtful commenters in our community and giving them more profile, or deputizing them in a way — a way of helping to fix the windows, in other words (in addition to removing flagged comments quickly), and of taking responsibility for the conversation. That’s part of what I tried to do with a recent post, in which I read the 2,000 or so comments we got on two news stories about the political meltdown in Ottawa and tried to pull some of the representative comments out.

I can’t do this all by myself, obviously — which is where you come in. If you read anything on the Globe and Mail website that you honestly believe shouldn’t be there, I’d like you to let me know either by flagging it for me on Twitter (I am @mathewi) or by emailing me at mathew (at) mathewingram.com. If you think we’ve made a mistake, or there’s something else wrong with what we’ve written, please do likewise. And if you see someone say something about the Globe or one of our stories (or one of our reporters) on Facebook, or a blog, or Twitter, or anywhere else, I’d like you to let me know so I can respond. It doesn’t have to be bad — it’s nice to get positive comments sometimes as well :-)

(Note: the video embedded here is of an interview with long-time online community expert Randy Farmer, which I got from a link at Kottke’s blog)

As many people who have been reading this blog for awhile probably know, I work for the Globe and Mail, a daily newspaper based in Toronto, where I’ve been working since 1994 or so. I’ve written about the stock market, the rise of the Internet, moved out West to write about oil and gas, and then came back in 2000 to be the Globe’s first online columnist and its first blogger (before anyone — including me — really knew what that meant). For the past year and a half or so, I’ve been the newspaper’s “new media” reporter, writing about all the ways in which the Web and social media are changing the business of online content for newspapers, magazines, authors, musicians, actors, artists and just about everyone in between.

A little while ago, I was offered an opportunity at the Globe that I got pretty excited about: a position that we’re calling “Communities Editor.” What does that mean exactly? To tell you the truth, I’m not quite sure.

As far as I’m concerned, it means a chance to apply some of those Web 2.0, “media is a conversation,” social-networking principles (the kind we started the mesh conference to talk about) to the newspaper that I work for, instead of just writing about what other content producers are doing. We’re talking about blogs, comments, interactive features, Twitter, Facebook, and much more. Some attempts will fail. Others (hopefully) will not. The reality is that creating communities doesn’t happen overnight.

In fact, I would argue (and have argued) that it’s impossible to actually create a community at all, despite the fact that legions of companies are desperately trying to do just that. To use a real-world analogy, you can build houses and lay sidewalks and plant trees, but you can’t create a community — that’s something that happens organically, if you have all the right ingredients. What are those ingredients? I don’t think anyone has the answer to that, which is part of what makes it so fascinating.

When it comes to the Globe, I think that compelling, thoughtful content and commentary is a pretty good starting place for growing a community, and judging by the response since we launched comments on all of our news stories (the first newspaper in North America to do so, as far as I know), lots of other people think so too. I’m hoping we can build on that. But it’s going to take work, and more than a little risk as well.

As I told the senior editors at the Globe, in order for us to do this properly, we need to be committed to opening up our content in ways we haven’t even thought of — including some ways that might seem strange or contentious, and which could at least initially be met with considerable internal resistance. Among other things, we need to make it easier for people to find our content, share our content, link to our content and even make use of our content (in some cases to create their own content).

To me, that’s part of what “social media” means, and it’s the kind of thing that true communities take for granted.

Are we ready for that? To be quite honest, I don’t know. I hope so. But the reality is that unless we are sincere in our efforts, then we might as well not bother. As I said when I accepted the job, if what we’re talking about is creating the appearance of conversation, a Potemkin village that creates the illusion of a community, or using social-media tools solely to spam readers with advertising, then we have already failed. Creating a real community is infinitely harder — but I think it can also be substantially more rewarding, and that’s what I’m hoping to work towards.

As far as this blog goes, I’m going to continue to write about most of the things I’ve been writing about up until this point — social media, new business models, and so on. I think the challenges that newspapers like mine are facing are more or less the same as the challenges facing the music industry, the movie business, book publishers and pretty much any other content-related industry you can think of. And I hope to be able to tell you about some of the things we’re experimenting with or thinking about, and get feedback from you on what to do or how best to do it (feel free to tell me when and where we are blowing it as well). Should be a fun ride.

The venerable New York Times has launched a new social-networking style feature to its site, called TimesPeople. In its early incarnation, it involves downloading an extension to use with Firefox (interestingly enough, the site doesn’t seem to care about Internet Exploder users — only going after the early adopters, apparently). Once you install it, you get a toolbar that you can use to save or recommend stories from the Times website, and other users with the extension can see what you’ve saved. In other words, a kind of del.icio.us plugin for the New York Times cognoscenti. On the TimesPeople information site, it says that with a future release, no browser plugin will be required.

I don’t want to be too hard on the Times — I think adding social-browsing and social-networking elements is a great idea, and I don’t want to dissuade either the NYT or anyone else from giving them a shot. But the NYT effort feels like it doesn’t go far enough. Why? Because the service contains exactly what it says on the tin: TimesPeople, and only TimesPeople. In other words, it’s for people who just read the New York Times, and all they really care about is what other people who read the New York Times care about.

I’m not saying that isn’t a valuable thing — at the Globe and Mail site, we do something similar by allowing users to click a button and recommend a story, and then see the most recommended (and most emailed, and most commented) on a “most popular” aggregation page. And I think that has value for regular readers. But what about connecting the site to the rest of the Web? The Times has taken a step in that direction with its integration of BlogRunner on its technology page, but there is so much more that could be done. And while TimesPeople connects one way (through RSS feeds of saved content) it doesn’t look like anything feeds back in the other direction. Why just show people the popular NYT content — why not the most popular from elsewhere? Why not integrate something like Scott Karp’s Publish 2.0 tool?

I guess my problem with the feature is that, like so many of the things that mainstream media sites such as the Times do (and I’m including the Globe in this), it plays to the traditional — and, I think, flawed — “portal” strategy, which assumes that everyone comes to the site as a destination and spends most of their time there, and is only interested in what happens there. I think that describes a relatively small (and declining) segment of the online population.

Hugh McLeod’s latest GapingVoid cartoon probably sums up what many Twitter users have been thinking of late. The service, which hasn’t exactly been known for its reliable uptime, has been effectively crippled for almost a week now, with no ability to page back through previous messages and no support for using it through instant messaging. For many Twitter users, including me, the inability to see previous messages makes the service effectively useless, since the only messages you see are the ones that happen to be there when you look at the site, or @ replies sent directly to you. Some people are giving up or considering it.

Mike Arrington and others have written that whether Twitter is up or down doesn’t really matter any more because people are addicted to the service, and therefore will put up with anything — but I’m starting to wonder about that, to be honest. And while I have said in the past (during the whole “FriendFeed is going to kill Twitter” hysteria) that Twitter and FriendFeed aren’t really competitors, I’m not so sure of that either any more. I see more and more people saying they are giving up on Twitter and moving their conversations to FriendFeed. Will they come back? Some think they will. Not really sure of that either.