I was having this exact discussion with my team last week. I'm convinced it's heading towards ubiquity, and that "destination sites" (like blogs or dedicated community sites) will be rare in a few years. I'm looking into ways to put our message where our customers are, rather than expect them to come to us. That takes a different kind of message creation, and a different kind of publishing.

Our first step is to get better at creating messaging that's compelling--including creating more video, and to do a better job customizing content/messaging to unique target markets. Then we need to find ways to get the content into unique communities, without having to post in every community individually.

The end goal will need to be getting people to subscribe in some fashion, since it's inefficient to create/distribute content one at a time.

Hopefully, subscriptions will evolve into a more pervasive mechanism, regardless of the where the subscription was originally found. If someone subscribes to some content via one community site, then the person leaves that site/deletes the account, I hope the subscription lives on no matter where the person ends up--a new community/PC/mobile device. Maybe better tagging/search feeds?

John Porcaro
Director, Online Community
Microsoft Xbox

From a long-term perspective, a decade from now, the term "social network" will be as alien to young people as the term "proprietary online service" is to today's youth. And just as the open Web took the experiments of America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy and set them free on the Internet, so, too, will the things we've seen inside Facebook, MySpace, and other "walled gardens" find broader adoption and more rapid innovation out in an emerging open "Social Web". More: http://therealmccrea.com/2008/04/20/fixing-the-social-web-aggregated-me/

Online communities always will offer options to meet and communicate in ways that geography won't allow.

The gathering will become more natural and more seamlessly reflect what we're doing in the rest of our lives. Right now we're fitting ourselves into what's being offered and making that work however it works.

As we get more fluent and as "spaces" get more in tune with us, the communities that reinvent and form themselves will be those that reflect what we need in our lives -- work, education, entertainment, companionship, and meaningful purpose.

We'll meet our customers online and off, via print, online text, audio, video, and the magic of touch screen. We'll use each as naturally as we now talk, move, and type.

People will still want to interact with and buy from people (not companies), that they know, like, and trust.

I think it is likely to be both. Great comments above - and while horizontal communities serve one kind of need, more focused communities serve a very different need.

The web lets us find and connect to our tribe across the boundaries of time and space - and that is the real beauty of it. The form will morph, but the core underlying motivation won't.

For companies to leverage community - they have to become a useful member of the tribe.

TO'B