Posted by
blizzard
on from the feeling-not-so-well dept.
caferace writes "More news about Salon... In what looks to me like a sharp bid to continue their move up the 'Net food-chain, Salon today announced they are purchasing The Well , the renowned Bay area BBS/Web community that started some 14 years ago. Wired has a story here. "
Buyout can work - example from history
by
Erbo
·
· Score: 3
It's possible that this buyout could actually be a good, or at least non-disatrous, thing for the Well. It might be helpful if I mention here the history of a similar online community, Electric Minds. (Disclaimer: I am a part of this story, but I don't speak officially for the company I work for.)
Electric Minds was kind of a "spinoff" of the Well, created by noted online community guru Howard Rheingold after he had been a Well user for some time and written a book, The Virtual Community, which dealt in large part with the Well and his experiences there. Electric Minds was intended to be very Well-like in its operation, and, indeed, used the WellEngaged conferencing system on its server. Unfortunately, they couldn't make any money at it, and their principal financing partner (SoftBank) didn't come up with the cash they needed to keep their doors open.
At that point, the company I work for, Durand Communications (now owned by Online System Services Inc.) stepped in and bought Electric Minds. We worked hard to integrate the Electric Minds conferencing system with our existing online community-building server, CommunityWare, including the implementation of a conferencing system that mirrored the WellEngaged one. (I personally wrote a big chunk of that code.) The community members, in large part, were supportive of the move, as they had been expecting Electric Minds to completely shut down, and had been making plans to keep the community together.
Since that time, there have been problems, a number of them related to a "self-governance" movement for the community that never really panned out. There have been a number of server crashes and screw-ups, too. Yet, to this day, the Electric Minds community is still large and thriving, if somewhat altered in its makeup over time. (Rheingold left as community host some time back over internal divisions, and another longtime EMinds conference host is now running the community.) True, we never made any money from it, either, but we are now applying the lessons learned from Electric Minds in a whole series of new directions that do have revenue-generating potential.
So what was my point here? From what Salon has already done with their "Table Talk" conferencing system, I can see that they, too, understand the idea of "community." I'm not saying that the Well acquisition will be trouble-free for them or for the Well, but my expectation would be that the Well will survive at least as well as its offshoot has, because its new owners do understand "community," as well as the nature and "quirks" of the community they're buying into. (Those are important; you need to keep from alienating the longtime users if you want the community to survive. It's why we bent over backwards to essentially clone WellEngaged on our own software platform. Similarly, I wouldn't expect Salon to drop the old text-mode Well interface anytime soon.)
If they're smart, they won't concentrate on revenue right away, but they'll certainly apply what they learn from the Well to help make their site, and their business, even better.
I must say that I am sick of hearing about the WELL and how long it has been around and how influential it is. The very first BBS in the world was CBBS (now chinet) in Chicago. Ward Christiansen of CBBS wrote XMODEM. Almost everybody who's been on the Internet more than 4 years in Chicago is a former chinet user. (Rumor has it Randy Suess ran the thing out of his studio apartment with racks of modems everywhere). Very few people seem to know about CBBS though. I guess it is because the magazines that write about this stuff are concentrated in the Bay Area and thus focus on it.
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Electric Minds was kind of a "spinoff" of the Well, created by noted online community guru Howard Rheingold after he had been a Well user for some time and written a book, The Virtual Community, which dealt in large part with the Well and his experiences there. Electric Minds was intended to be very Well-like in its operation, and, indeed, used the WellEngaged conferencing system on its server. Unfortunately, they couldn't make any money at it, and their principal financing partner (SoftBank) didn't come up with the cash they needed to keep their doors open.
At that point, the company I work for, Durand Communications (now owned by Online System Services Inc.) stepped in and bought Electric Minds. We worked hard to integrate the Electric Minds conferencing system with our existing online community-building server, CommunityWare, including the implementation of a conferencing system that mirrored the WellEngaged one. (I personally wrote a big chunk of that code.) The community members, in large part, were supportive of the move, as they had been expecting Electric Minds to completely shut down, and had been making plans to keep the community together.
Since that time, there have been problems, a number of them related to a "self-governance" movement for the community that never really panned out. There have been a number of server crashes and screw-ups, too. Yet, to this day, the Electric Minds community is still large and thriving, if somewhat altered in its makeup over time. (Rheingold left as community host some time back over internal divisions, and another longtime EMinds conference host is now running the community.) True, we never made any money from it, either, but we are now applying the lessons learned from Electric Minds in a whole series of new directions that do have revenue-generating potential.
So what was my point here? From what Salon has already done with their "Table Talk" conferencing system, I can see that they, too, understand the idea of "community." I'm not saying that the Well acquisition will be trouble-free for them or for the Well, but my expectation would be that the Well will survive at least as well as its offshoot has, because its new owners do understand "community," as well as the nature and "quirks" of the community they're buying into. (Those are important; you need to keep from alienating the longtime users if you want the community to survive. It's why we bent over backwards to essentially clone WellEngaged on our own software platform. Similarly, I wouldn't expect Salon to drop the old text-mode Well interface anytime soon.)
If they're smart, they won't concentrate on revenue right away, but they'll certainly apply what they learn from the Well to help make their site, and their business, even better.
Eric ("erbo" on EMinds)
--
Be who you are...and be it in style!
I must say that I am sick of hearing about the WELL and how long it has been around and how influential it is. The very first BBS in the world was CBBS (now chinet) in Chicago. Ward Christiansen of CBBS wrote XMODEM. Almost everybody who's been on the Internet more than 4 years in Chicago is a former chinet user. (Rumor has it Randy Suess ran the thing out of his studio apartment with racks of modems everywhere). Very few people seem to know about CBBS though. I guess it is because the magazines that write about this stuff are concentrated in the Bay Area and thus focus on it.