Recently I’ve made a small but significant change to some of my niche apps.  By adding in a commenting system suddenly everyone using the app can converse and discuss things.

It has brought these simple apps to life.

Something Seth Godin’s book “Tribes” discusses is the importance and power of groups of people brought together by an idea.  By adding a way to unite the users of my apps around something as simple as comments it adds legitimacy to the app, social proof that others are using it, and helps to grow a community of people around the ideas in the app.

What amazes me the most about these apps is that things I never expected can happen with ideas I would normally dismiss.  I run many blogs and the comments that get submitted are 99% spam.  Very few people comment on my sites.  So when the idea to add comments to the apps was presented I was understandably not too enthusiastic about it.  But I’m glad I did add it.

It has got me thinking about how else I can build community in these apps and start to introduce the users of the apps to each other.  There are so many possibilities.

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