I think one of the most challenging parts of building a "marketplace," which for discussion purposes I'll simply say is the same as a community or forum as long as one party has something the other needs, is keeping both sides of the table balanced. For ebay, these parties are buyers and sellers. For Trulia Voices, these parties are home buyers/sellers and real estate professionals/local residents.

Having Trulia Voices w/in a larger real estate site - Trulia.com - helped resolve some of this need at launch; we were able to leverage current visitors and partners to drive awareness and early usage of the product. Questions initially came from onsite promotion and answers came from marketing outreach to the industry. [For products not imbedded w/in larger sites, partnerships with other services/communities seem to be the great substitute (as some of my friends are beginning to discover in their own product development efforts).]

Keeping both sides of the table in equal proportion is a challenge that extends into the lifetime of the product. There are constant tweaks that need to be made in order to assure each side is contributing at the level needed. As one side scales but, another set of changes must be made to assure the other side matches.

This challenge is what makes online marketplace development exciting - your creative hat goes and you hash through the ideas to find the answers. And, each time, the answer is very different.

today i hit up mad dog in the fog to watch the uruguay vs. brazil semi final soccer match.

as i intensely watched the screen, certainly interested in the conversations around me but giving zero social signals saying "hey come talk to me," i observed strangers who did not know each other become rather social. and it all started with small social signals, such as gregarious eyes that invite conversation in. it is these small, less obvious signals that are exchanged between people that fosters trust and conversation, that turn a one off, boring experience into a fun one. and after a beer (i am a light weight, what can i say) i too started looking around and joined in the conversation.

just as in offline relationships, online products need to enable members to signal to each other in low involvement ways, enabling them to "get to know each other" without actually saying hi directly or boldly. it is only through such low involvement tools that relationships can begin to be fostered. while not the only component, it is the rewards that are derived through such exchanges that a loyal membership base is able to establish.

on Trulia Voices, low involvement relationship building can happen indirectly by participating in a conversation (answering the same questions). On Yelp, it can be through cool little icons you give to someone that don't make you feel like you need to say hi or that the other person is obligated to respond in return to my gesture.  

Fatdoor, a website that visually displays neighborhood homes on a map, puts an icon next to each house where a registered member lives, and of course provides each member with a public profile, launched a pilot test in the San Jose area so a coworker and I thought we'd take a poke around. What we found was amazing - on my coworker's block (he lives in the area covered by the pilot) 8 of his neighbors were already registered members and had pretty complete profiles. Given that the site just launched, we were really shocked to see such rapid adoption of users in such close proximity. As my coworker's next door neighbor was registered and had entered her email address so we could contact her directly we dropped her a note to find out how she heard of it, and why she signed up. She didn't responded, so my coworker walked next door and spoke with her. Turns out she never even heard of the site and had no idea how her information (full first and last name) got there!

While it may be legal to display a persons full name next to their property, i'm not so sure it's cool to act as if that user is actually a registered member of the site. The site goes one step further and actually assigns political, among other, preferences to that person. This also makes me wonder if they are pulling our email addresses from public databases to ensure we get lots of the spam we all know and love so much.

Personally, i think Fatdoor has crossed one Fat line! Have some ethics people, well at least when you're going to be caught red handed. I doubt this will a be socially accepted move. Stupid community building act for sure if you ask me.

After 3+ months of development, one too many lessons in how I can improve my communication skills (I hope this is an age thing, ie skill acquired over time), and many uses of my new favorite phrase "i'm thinking" when caught staring into the blue or traversing the office in deep thought, Trulia Voices has FINALLY launched (for the full scoop see here). I left the office at 4AM (engineering at 6-7AM!) and came in around 10:30AM bouncing around between office cubes with an excited "we're live, we're live, we're live... guys we're alive!"

Personally I feel that if you can not acknowledge your weaknesses and focus on trying to improve them, then you can never achieve your full potential. And, I certainly learned a handful of lessons in this launch. Some of the biggest ones were:

1. If you can't explain why something won't work in a way that makes sense to others, then shut the hell up (advice straight from dad, and it saved my rear one too many times)
2. don't tell higher-ups, "no, you're wrong". hmmm... :)
3. instead of telling people what you think the best way to execute is, present the problem and ask for a solution. Maybe this one is obvious but from my eyes i think it's a lot harder to learn how to do this one well across a big organization when everyone on a team is not always involved in a product at every stage.
4. If you think you're right and everyone else disagrees, stand up and say it! This is an old one, but i always relearn it.
5. Do lots of yoga

And I'm sure i'm missing many more but what a start... If I knew better i prob.would not be posting this but personally, i don't think these issues are all unique to me. I think many my age encounter their own set of lessons and communication issues. Then again, maybe I'm wrong...