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The good: social networking technologies make it easier to keep up with a large circle of acquaintances and meet new people. They provide a venue for online socializing, as well as for coordinating in-person meetings.

The bad: they devalue the meaning of “friend.” Our traditional notion of friendship embraces trust, support, compatible values, etc. On social network sites, a “friend” may simply be someone on whose link you have clicked.

The ugly: for teens, who can be viciously competitive, networking sites that feature a list of one’s best friends and space for everyone to comment about you can be an unpleasant venue for social humiliation and bullying. These sites can make the emotional landmines of adolescence concrete and explicit.

Customer service is not a segregated group who simply answers questions of a finalized product. They are completely integrated into the design system and the senior people are the most deeply embedded in user culture. There is a strong commitment to the needs and desires of the users.

While the creators have visions of what they think would be cool, they do not construct unmovable roadmaps well into the future. They are constantly reacting to what's going on, adding new features as needed. The code on these sites changes constantly, not just once a quarter. The designers try out features and watch how they get used. If no one is interested, that's fine - they'll just make something new. They are all deeply in touch with what people are actually doing, why and how it manifests itself on the site.

EMBEDDED OBSERVATION

The designers of these systems are engaged in embedded observation. They are living in the culture that they are helping to frame. They are aware of the others living in that culture and constantly engaging with them to really understand the emergent behaviors. They recognize their power as designers and try to use it to benefit the collective rather than their own personal goals. Their design process is stemming from this embedded observation, producing a state of "flow" to use Cziksentmihalyi's term. The designers love what they are doing and infuse their passion into the systems. This is a very powerful way of doing design.

Just because people _can_ connect globally does not mean they want to. People are more drawn to those who are like them, who share their same values and cultural norms. In this way, people don't have to explain the foundations of their thoughts. They feel more closely aligned and more willing to share with people who are more like them. Similarities breed less conflict. Furthermore, most people don't use digital communities to make new friends - most use it to connect to offline friends through technology.

Of course, there are important exceptions to this. Ostracized individuals frequently use social software to connect with strangers like them. Single (and for the matter married) people use dating sites to meet strangers, although they are mostly looking for strangers in geographic proximity. Strangers connect around topical interests. These are some of the reasons that we build global networks.

3) Empower individual users to be cultural spokespeople. Give them the ability to modify the system for their communities and cultural needs. Again, this means openness of software or providing richer platforms to develop on top of.

Organic community growth, embedded design, and the ability to connect culturally local communities through global network are the way to form large sustainable communities. My hope is that there are new fascinating communities emerging as we speak!