links for 2009-03-20

"Craigslist doesn’t have any method for conducting auctions, a proven way to get a good price for whatever you’re selling. My friend Keith Teare solved that problem, though, by using a combination of a Craigslist listing for a computer he wanted to sell with a Google Docs spreadsheet and form to take bids on the item. Here’s how he did it."

So what does all this mean for social networking, blogging, twittering, Natural Enterprise, intentional community, the future of work, etc.? Here are Pollard's Hypotheses of Social Cohesion, so far hypothetical, except insofar as I've observed the dynamics in a lot of workplaces:

Understanding your count of leaders can help you see how to grow groups. For example when I first created iPhoneWebDev I had to do an immense amount of effort to grow the community. This is because with Participation Inequality I had to grow the group by 10 members before I got the least amount of help increasing the content of the group and I had to grow it by 100 members before I had someone who was doing as much work as I was to create content.

At 100 members, with my first active participant, we continued to grow, but we were both were working hard and felt rather lonely.

"For the first time we're hosting a joint event with the Facebook Application Developer Meetup. Just one week after Facebook has launched Facebook Connect for the iPhone we'll be featuring a number of companies that run mobile products and interact with the Facebook platform."