Over the last few days two very well written articles about Mozilla Labs in general and the Concept Series in particular were published by BusinessWeek and ZDNet. BusinessWeek took a broad view of design and innovation in Open Source and published their article “Mozilla Labs Explores Open Source Design” as part of an online special. Dana Blankenhorn from ZDNet wrote a very passionate piece about Labs and our work together with the wider community: “Mozilla Labs where the future is being made today”. Both articles are testament of the amazing Mozilla Labs community, the creativity and passion of each and every participant in our Design Challenges and what we accomplished together. Currently we are working hard on building better tools, better programs, more outreach and create more opportunities to participate – I can’t wait to see what 2010 has in store for us! To end with, I couldn’t have said it any better myself – in Dana’s words: “Try things out. Play - Play is where great ideas come from.”

My dear friends at Fast Company recently ran an article about the restaurant chain Houlihan and their use of a private social network to connect to their die-hard fans & diners. They managed to build their network to 10,500 “Houlifans”, who provide feedback to the company (in return for coupons, exclusive information and so on). So far so good… What starts to tick me off is the fact that every time a business magazine such as Fast Company talks about communities, the very next line is about profits:

The community's feedback has allowed the company to revamp on the fly, and the small-plates menu now accounts for 26% of item sales in the 10 markets where it has debuted. Those dishes carry a higher-than-average profit margin on smaller-than-average portions. In the Kansas City area, site of the first test, overall profits are up 12% [...]

Seriously - if that’s the way you see your community (and I am sure Houlihan wouldn’t have more than 10,000 fans in their network if they would treat their community members purely like a way to increase revenue), you better don’t even start. It’s a recipe for disaster. So - please dear business writers: I know that it’s compelling to draw the comparison between organizations with strong communities and increased revenues. But that’s not the story - it’s the byproduct of an organization which produces something their customers want.

I did some hacking and with considerably little amount I managed to create a proper tumblr template for this site - and so it begins: My journey away from Twitter and the all-too-short 140 characters and away from Wordpress (which is a great platform but always felt to big & complex to me) to tumblr. Bear with me while I figure this out - and be assured that my next posts will be a bit more substantial. :)

It’s most likely just me and the fact that I tend to babble on Twitter - but lately I find myself more and more scratching my head and wondering if the signal to noise ratio on Twitter really is that bad… Combined with the fact that Twitter seems purely about shouting and not about discussion (anymore) I figured that I try something different:  I’ll move most of my conversation to a tumblr (micro-) blog at blog.finette.co.uk – let’s see how that goes. :)

Yeah - I know… But. There are still people who think you can “market to the social web” – point in case: Adam L. Penenberg’s book Viral Loop (no link to Amazon as I don’t endorse reading this book!) was recently market in Fast Company with the headline:

Go Viral. The users do all the marketing. You reap all the profits.

Yes. You get it Adam. Good luck reaping the profits from your book going viral.