Communication Needs & the Community
Posted by Sundar Subramanian on Sun, Sep 03, 2006 @ 04:23 AM
Peter is a 79 year old widower who lives alone in UK. A lover of motorcycles, he likes to reminiscence about his experiences in the Second World War and how he took up art as a hobby after retirement.
Why am I talking about Peter? Because he has already garnered the maximum number of subscribers in YouTube (YouTube ID: geriatric1927) and each of his videos has got tens of thousands of views in just two weeks. His videos have started a passionate movement within the community with many users posting reply videos and some of them are pretty introspective. They talk about the basic human yearning to connect with others and how sites like YouTube help them in this. The benefit YouTube has garnered is immense and when the Web2.0 hype eventually bursts and the dust settles, I expect it to be one of the few startups left standing because YouTube fulfills the innate desire to communicate (even if it does this in an asynchronous manner) and imparts its users a sense of belonging in a community in a user-friendly way. And this is precisely what Dimdim also aims to achieve in a synchronous way with immediate results for all the parties in a conversation.