So I'm writing our product plan now. Actually, I'm writing the preamble to it. The part we'll use to set up the discussion -- a level setting sort of thing. I know very clearly what I'd like to say, but it would take several hours to say all that.

Maybe it's a personal problem. I'm always getting dinged for lecturing. I can't tell you how many times I've heard; “just tell them what they need to know”. There's a valid point there, most professional people don't tolerate a lot of background. But weak-tie (or loosely coupled, or flex, or whatever you want to call them) personal networks in the online world are a completely new community game for Microsoft IT professionals, and to a lesser but still meaningful extent, our developer audience as well.

Assuming I take the time to define community, and somebody asks a question about the middle ground, or weak tie community, I know what I’d like to say. I’d like to point out that we are all familiar with offline weak-tie communities and are a part of several: the people we run into at the hairdressers, the half-time gathering of parents during the kid's soccer games; the company Christmas party, or the gym crowd. In the offline cases, the impact of weak-tie community (in terms of message propagation, for instance) is bounded by the number of people that can participate, and the duration and spacing of the interactions. Still, the gossip does spread, networking does happen, jobs get found, rides get shared, and a host of other things happen. However, online weak-tie community has no such bounds. The limiting factors are removed. Not to put too fine a point on it, but comparing offline weak-tie networks to online weak-tie networks is like comparing the newly sprouted sapling to the mature tree. The latter has fully developed properties the former either only hinted at or did not reveal at all. There’s nobody that’s managing (perhaps "understanding and tracking" would be better than "managing") this well, though there are people making better use of it than us.

And for that reason, online community will never be the same. Customer communications will never be the same. I think people need to know what the big waves are that are rocking the boat. But that does sound a lot like lecturing -- even to me.