For the first time, it's possible to sustain a group conversation, using links and inline graphics, without waiting forever for pages to serve. I'd like to benchmark them by putting them on the same server and using identical, large , message bases to see if the performance degrades as the message base grows. David Wooley maintains a page that points to various ongoing experiments in Web chat and Web conferencing. And I include whatever interesting virtual community experiments I find on my page of virtual community-related resources . Software is evolving rapidly.
Communities take more time.
Nobody can predict whether the multiplicity of choices available on the WELL will fragment and dilute attention so much that no communities reach critical mass. Or perhaps that same multiplicity will amplify the ability of like-minded people to find each other. Humans and human relationships move more slowly than software. We need software tools to bring the Web to life, if it is to be more than a pretty picture book, but in our quest for the tools, let us not forget cooperation, community, and conviviality.