and here was my response, just to keep everything open:

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Brian might be the better person to get into this dialogue than I, since he's the guy with the "vision", and is also closer to Pincus, you should post this on Briatribe if you haven't already.

I think that with our focus on community we're going to first work on plugin-ifying the tribe, like the profiles we have today (and coming soon, the homepage). All moderators will have way more controls over what appears on their tribe card, including video, single photo modules, special groups of threads, and RSS feeds. And each of those modules will be exportable via TribeCast, so that users can include chunks of Tribe on any page that they like, including their homepage.

i would hope, that with such tools (and you're right about the photo album, but we hadn't put much thought to it), users could create the environments for each of the scenarios you're describing below. Keep in mind, some of this may be a time in coming, since we need to revisit some of the foundational work that we're starting with... there were places where we didn't use the right tools the first time around, and Brian and I are really looking forwards to ripping some crap out and replacing it with the good stuff.

And, speaking of photos, our Qoop failure was mostly due to a person leaving after it was partially, but not completely implemented. I guess you can order "postcards" and a calendar now, but that's lame. I'm going to run it by Gary to see if we could get a person to look into making that work, thanks for the suggestion!

Anyhoo, I'm going to forward this to Brian too, and as I said, I think this would make a great topic in Briatribe. Now that Jan is gone, I don't think we're as depressed as we used to be about the state of things, and you'll find that we're far more optimistic and genuinely interested in talking about all of the rad stuff we can do, hooray!
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Mike-

An insightful post, as always. And spot on with respect to the real opportunity that lays before us. But let me try to build this up from a very simple concept:

Tribe will be the preeminent service on the internet for creating and managing community.

I know that you mentioned this in your post, but I think it worth restating because we need to be sure not to lose that focus. The open-ended question is, as always, what sort of "community" are we talking about here. But even answering that question may be getting ahead of ourselves just a bit. The first thing we need to do is address some issues in our platform that have cropped up over the last 3 years. At this point, I think we know what we need to change in order for this thing to scale a long way. We have a pretty good grip on profiles, and the depth that they add to the groups experience. Next week, we will roll out a new Home Page experience that I think will set us up for the long haul on that front - complete with drag and drop configuration and fully customizable components. Of course, this leaves the tribes which need the same level of attention.

In addition to the Big Three (Profile, Home, Tribe) there are any number of other components that could use some help, and of course there are key foundational features that we have not built into the system, such as tagging. Finally, there are fundamental issues around the isolation of communities (whether due to subject matter or just the desire of the community owner) that would also need to be addressed in order to achieve the goal of preeminence in the community space.

Which begs the question: what do we do first, and how do we do it? The simple answer to this one has a lot to do with understanding the various directions we can go (commerce vs. art/organization vs. lead generation - aka photo printing) and which one presents the most viable business to us. That, in combination of our financial situation will go a long way in dictating our direction. If we need to rush to revenues or cashflow positive, then we would likely continue down our current path of keeping costs down and trying to maximize the bang on our hard to come by bucks. On the other hand, if we found a partner or investor who shares in the vision of becoming a more open platform for hosting communities, you may see us doing a bit more invasive surgery on the app in order to build some core features in from the ground up.

What we are doing currently is talking to some potential strategic partners who are curious about the space, and all are impressed with the community that already exists here, and with the quality of conversation and feedback that we have gotten from our members. As you can probably guess, I can't really go into details about who we are talking to or what we are talking about with them, (it's not NBC - I can tell you that!) but having gone through this sale process over the summer it is quite clear that community on the internet is a very valuable thing and LOTS of people want it. And if there is one thing that Mark Pincus is very very good at, it's finding a valuable idea and someone who will pay for it.

So, the bottom line is that we still don't know exactly what our execution plan looks like, but I think it is taking shape pretty quickly. All of the ideas that you mention are in my opinion very clever business ideas built around the one thing that we do best. In fact, I went through some old design docs and presentations tonight and many of those ideas, in one form or another, have been explored. Ultimately they were abandoned though, because we have always had a hard time getting all our management on the same page and the conclusion has usually been that building a business one storefront at a time or one photo order at a time was not going to be fast enough. The interface changes and privacy/flagging stuff were an effort to build a larger mainstream audience quickly -> more page views -> more advertising dollars.

But those guys are all gone now! So it should be pretty easy to build a concensus!

Let's hope so anyway...

Firstly I like where “foaf.tribe.com” could take me. However, I must admit I wonder sometimes how committed the company is to community spaces. The current blogging opportunity is limited and far too restrictive.

Tribe does not seem to change very often; there is no external evidence of continuous improvement. So your competitors are drawing me away, as I look towards more richly constructed environments. I mean with so many rich wysiwyg text editors in the market place with spell checking, content constraint, and theming one would have expected after six months text fields were a thing of the past. A richer email experience would help encourage people to develop their community presence. I enjoy the concept, I particularly like the name. It says something about me.

However, in the longterm - I don’t think this space. Sorry about the critique.