First Rabble Review

We had our first review of Rabble. We were very pleased with the write up entitled Joining the Rabble: Making Mobile Community Work. The article can be found at TelecommWeb. A subscription is required. Shawn did a write up here with some excerpts.

Although there are some great comments about the product from a feature standpoint, I was really excited about some of the commentary about the community, which is without question the key component to making something like Rabble a success.

From the article

So whom does Rabble attract and what sorts of content do they make? From what we have seen, the early user base is young 20-somethings who most often post images of themselves and who ask such earth-shattering questions as whether they should let their hair go curly or straight? We get a lot of new- car posts; the occasional semi-nude body advertising his/her physique; and a lot of semi- drunk gal pals taking pictures of themselves in bars, asking the eternal question of life: "Whassup?"

It's very difficult to strike the right balance of product feature set to match a demographic. We set out to create a community that would allow our target demographic to interact and create content much in the same way that they have on some of the leading youth focused blogging sites and the social networking sites. To us, the early indications are that the users understand this immediately and know what to expect, albeit in a mobile environment. Another important piece of the puzzle is to have early members of the community to take a leadership role and model the behavior norms of the other users. The reviewer understood this and commented as follows:

Trivial? Yes. Mundane? Often. Thoroughly absorbing? Absolutely. Whether someone is complaining about an intense family problem or just showing off his or her body (or how drunk they can be while still holding a phone cam), the ephemeral postings quickly can germinate into ongoing soap operas or conversations among a group of simpatico souls. Learning the hard lessons of online communities that often go bust, Rabble does an excellent job of bringing the most active and interesting content to the top. It tracks the most- frequently-subscribed channels, the most popular and frequent posters, and "cool content." It is in these areas where we find serial postings from people whose personalities come through. Rabble already has its own grassroots celebrities. "LiberalFury" is an activist chronicling his journey to Washington, D.C., while "fayble" is a young lady who is away from her boyfriend and obsessively pining away in endless posts. This reviewer is a couple of decades away from his early Twenties, and yet the angst and trivia of these posts is absorbing. Rabble also has seeded the community with minor rock bands who post images and thoughts from the road as they tour.

It is still early and we have a long way to go, but we are excited by both the activity of our users as well as the interest of outside parties.