May. Bulletin boards and chat rooms have been only small elements in the operation of sites that are considered pacesetters in creating online communities. For media entities like the Discovery Channel, the combination of entertainment, information and access to a community is the product. Banks and airlines that want to become portals to sell products will find the road even rougher. Everyone wanted to get into that. But there was a lot of work involved.
Communities are very fickle.
They will move on if there's not underlying support. The rapid demise of Electric Minds, an online community developed by Howard Rheingold, is another example of how even well-conceived community ideas can be brutally difficult to implement, even for cyber pioneers. E-mail might look like a safe bet now, but watch out. Sabeer Bhatia, general manager of Microsoft's Hotmail, could stand to gain from marketing's private label e-mail, but he's deeply skeptical. He has no plans to cobrand his technology.