54 Design to thrive: Creating Social networks and online Communities wave Google's Wave is an example of Google getting their priorities right and designing for user experience first. With Wave, Google asked how they could redesign the user expe- rience of e-mail, blogging, and instant messaging using networking tools that weren't available 40 years ago when e-mail was invented. My point here is that even Google is susceptible to falling into the business- model-before-user-experience trap. With Knol, Google, ironically, is making the same type of mistake that AltaVista made back in 1999 that allowed Google to capture market share in the search engine market. They put the business model ahead of the user experience in order to keep pace with a competitor. By confusing priorities and allowing their users' experience with the product to be degraded, it seems likely that Knol will fail to compete successfully with Wikipedia. what is ReMuneRation? So far, other than talking about creating a positive user experience, I've talked more about what remuneration is not than what it is. So many people have an intuitive grasp of remuneration and the concept seems so commonsensical that it's ripe for abuse. Its simplest formulation basically says that individuals will not become members of a social network unless there is a clear benefit for doing so. People need to believe that they will obtain some positive return on the investment of their time and energy in order to be attracted to participa- tion in an e-community. They need to believe that some value will come from joining a group. foCuS on teChnique Part of the users' remuneration is the experience of communication in your community, not by looking at archived postings or content from your community posted on other sites. Therefore, managers can give as much value as possible to users' participation by employing the following techniques: n Don't archive your postings. n Discourage attempts to send conversations to other blogs, Web sites, and discussion groups. n Ban redistribution to servers and cross postings. Many make a serious mistake because they think that the remuneration needs to be financial; in fact, we've already seen this kind of remuneration at work in Google's Knol where they use AdSense to pay knol and bloggers. However,