So Meredith still hasn’t delivered. She hasn’t gone into active labor. And she’s more than a week overdue. It feels like we’ve been in a holding pattern circling the airport forever, with no end in sight. But just like with a flight, the end comes one way or the other (ie, land or run out of gas.) I’m just hoping that she won’t need to be induced. We’ll know a lot more within the next couple of days i’m guessing.
In the midst of this personal frustration, something really interesting happened in my professional life. I don’t talk about it much, but I have a number of side projects that I work on.
Since December 2000, I’ve been constructing and running a site called ODwire.org, which has become the largest social network for eye doctors. I actually started it at the behest of my father, a retired eye doctor, just as a way for him to keep in touch with his peers and old friends.
When I started the initial design for the community I thought the site would be a major flop (sorry, dad), for several reasons:
- It wasn’t clear to me back then that folks of my father’s generation would take to the site, or that highly paid professionals would take the time to browse such a site
- I did not think my father would have the sticktuitiveness to act as a site facilitator without alienating large chunks of the member base.
- My father also demanded that the site should be run as a closed community that required registration and manual verification before a user could “enter the club”. He felt that professionals would want a more private space to share their feelings, and without some degree of privacy, no one would want to chat or open up about issues of substance. Great idea, but this made it really difficult to get noticed by search engines, because search bots couldn’t get inside the site. As far as the bots knew, our content was limited to 3-4 pages.
Despite my initial concerns, and much to my amazement, the site didn’t flop. It has grown from nothing to being an important, legitimate media property serving the profession.
This morning, we went over the 10,000 registered, verified user mark. This may not sound like a lot of users when you think about general social networking sites like Twitter, but in reality it represents 1/4 to 1/3 of ALL optometrists in the United States, and it is a highly targeted, sought-after population. The site does over a million page views a month, and it is far and away the biggest site of its kind in eye care. Not bad for a ‘gated online community’.
Meredith has long asked me to comment about how we managed to build the community and keep it relevant and growing over the past 8-9 years. I’ve been reluctant to share, simply because… I don’t know the answer! That is, i’ve never really taken a step back to analyze the success factors or ’secret sauce’ that made our small community into an important venue.
Meredith is going to teach a class about online community for SJSU in January, and she’s asked me for some real-world examples that I can share with the students. So it is probably high time that I wrap my head around what it is we’ve built, why it is so popular, and how it can be replicated. Or at the very least, come up with some anecdotes about the pitfalls of building a community like ours so that her students won’t make the same mistakes we did along the way.
In commemoration of our 10,000th registrant, Meredith was kind enough to get me this awesome Boston Cream Pie this morning. Yay chocolate! Yay creamy goodness!
Thank You, Meredith!
Who knows — maybe the cake will push her into active labor, and we’ll have something even more important to celebrate today 
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