Disclaimer: This is a post I probably "shouldn't" write, but in the spirit of today's atmosphere of openness and transparency in business (and social media in general), I'll go ahead and write it anyway :-)

I see a disturbing trend in online community platforms emerging, and that trend is the race to cram as many features as possible into a platform so it looks better than your competitor's software on some industry analyst's matrix of platform features.  Of course, this goes on everywhere in business and is just the nature of the game...  However, it's a race that no one can ever really win.  It's also a game that one audience in particular definitely loses - community members.  Here's why:

• It hurts the user experience - If you give too many options to members they will have no idea where to go or what to do.  Frustrated, these members eventually stop participating, attrition rates rise and you end up spending thousands more in recruiting costs.  As a result, a bad user experience hurts more than just the members...  
• It splinters the conversation - If the conversations are occurring in too many sections of the site, the feeling of true community suffers.  People feel isolated and limited in their interactions with others, which is the basis for community.
• It ends up feeling more like a "market research tool" than a real online community - People are used to participating in social networks and online communities; they're not used to the tools we use as market researchers.  The more "whiz bang" research features there are, the less it starts to look like a social network and the more it starts to look like some advanced focus group tool.  That's fine if you're just running an online focus group, but not ok if you intend to keep them there for the long haul.

This doesn't even account for people on the client or agency side who are tasked with choosing solutions.  The tendency is to create a giant chart of features since that's an easy way to compare, yet that might be the very thing not to do since it emphasizes the delivery mechanisms rather than the deliverables/outcomes (which, of course, is what really matters)... 

"Getting Real"

So how do we solve this?  In my mind, we seriously question everything before it makes its way into the community platform, and try to cut where we can to make things easier for our members...  I'm a huge fan of 37signals and their philosophy for developing web applications (for online communities and otherwise).  It's a pretty simple philosophy that pares down the features in an application to the bare minimum to accomplish the given task, and is something we try to follow here at PluggedIN.  It forces new features to "prove themselves" before they make it into the software.  If you haven't already picked it up, check out their book "Getting Real."  Even if you're not a web developer, it's still worth a read for some of the ideas behind their system (and it's free if you read it online!).  Now only if everyone followed this approach, we'd all have much happier community members :-)     

The road ahead (at least, for PluggedIN...)

We just launched Version 2.0 of the PluggedIN MROC Platform, and if your read through the press release you'll notice one thing - no new features (for now).  Rather, we're working on optimizing the experience for members and clients, and making it so the addition of new features in the future won't cause that user experience to suffer.  Don't get me wrong - we're adding new features...  Just not at the expense of the user experience for members and clients.

This is something I've noticed many survey builders are taking to heart, by trying to create more engaging and interactive ways of taking surveys.  Let's hope that those of us on the qualitative communities side of the industry also take heed of these lessons before it's too late...  

Ultimately, the "feature war" is a game that everyone has to take part in if you want to be a player...  Just consider this post to be my plea to fellow community practioners and market researchers that we don't ignore the people that really matter - our community members and our clients.

-Matt