Finally, The Internet As Intended.

About a month ago at the Online Community Camp in San Francisco I moderated the Emerging Technologies in Online Community session (grab the ppt here). In the talk I said you might as well kiss the borders of your online community goodbye. What I meant was this - tomorrow, the web is the community, and your members are running free out there, convening and collaborating away - and they are not doing it on your site. So let them, encourage them, but give them the tools to make your community portable. Don’t restrict them to your websites pidly 800x600 borders. Let your community members continue to participate in the community by pluging content and functions into their own websites, by commenting and conversing on other websites. Browser extensions, desktop widgets, site widgets, bookmarklets, syndication, and SMS let your community exist well beyond the boundaries of your ‘web pages’.

Dont believe this is the future of things, here’s a list of new companies that are turning the web into a community by enabling conversation, information sharing, and networking beyond the confines of a destination web site:

WidgetBox, which is still in stealth beta mode (but you can peek under the covers over at Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch) will offer users a host of "site widgets" that they can plug into blogs, auctions, social networks, and personal homepages.

CoComment lets users attach conversations to any site, collect their comments, organize them, and share them.

Itzle, a browser extension that "allows you to walk around websites as if they were physical locations". Users can have real-time chats, co-surf with friends, and share favorites.

Even Google is getting into the game with Google Notebook. Which doesn’t have a social aspect to it just yet, but is a good example of functionality that lets users interact across the web.

Of course there are the photo sites that let you plug your photos into blogs and personal sites, flickr, and photoBucket. And Yahoo is in the mix with Yahoo! Widgets, and OS X provides a platform you can extend your community to, and so will Vista.

The interesting thing is that all of these tools are just that - tools. They have a social focus, but are not ‘communities’ in and of themselves. This leaves alot of space for traditional online communities - ones that are rooted in a ‘destination site’ - to take these concepts and free their members from the confines of their site. Sites that already have significant membership and participation should really be able to leverage these types of tools to build an even stronger base.