Community of Practice

If you go to the Browse menu and choose People (the link is https://discussions.apple.com/people) you can see that there are more than 3.8 million users. It would be difficult to see how many are active contributors and how many are "one post wonders".

There are additional opportunities for further interaction. Level 4 members can attend conference calls and level 5 members can attend regional meetups. I went to one in NYC. Here are the details: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2548447

Trust me, access to the Lounge would not enlighten you significantly further. With few exceptions, mostly of the "haven't seen you post in a while, have you been OK?" ilk, the discussions are just about identical to what you see in the general forums.

Regards.

Posted above, but again, the "Lounge" consists of two additional forums where users who reach a certain level here can discuss problems and issue amongst themselves and bring technical or forum issues to the attention of the Community Hosts. As deggie said, the rules there are slightly more relaxed than they are in the main forums, allowing a small amount of non-technical chatter, but not markedly so.

Other than that, being able to discuss amongst a smaller group of Communities users, there are no additional benefits other than a user who arrives at Level 6 gets a t-shirt.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2548447

Regards.

I don't believe anyone here knows how many users within any given time frame although it may be well over 2 million with various activity levels from 1 post to, well, a lot. Apple will not proived the information to you.

This is an Apple, Inc. website which is why there is no category for non-apple products. If you have read the Terms of Use and the purpose of the site you would know why there is no such community.

Referring to your second question deggie has already pointed out that the whole purpose of Discussions is to deal with Apple products. More specifically it is to deal with technical questions about those products. That narrow focus gives very good results. Broadening the remit to 'conversations' with 'interesting people' would increase the traffic on an already very busy site and begin to move the focus from technical forum to chat room.

You would have to talk to someone in Apple Corporate offices to get a definitive answer, but I can pretty much assure you that all coporate help sites are not geared to being social networking sites and such activity is dissuaded. Michael has already given an good explanation why.

There are a lot of other sites where users can bond. The Communities are run by Apple as a resource for users to help other users with technical questions. The load even just such questions put on the forum software is almost more than it can handle, and adding to that load by expanding the Communities to be a more general social site would probably put too much of a load on the system, or at least would require Apple spend a lot more money on the system to no good purpose.

To sum up, and this is all that anyone here can say, here is Apple's own statement of the purpose of the Communities:

"Apple Support Communities is here to help people use Apple products and technologies more effectively. "

Allowing general chatter and gab would not serve that purpose in any way I can see. If you want bonding, try Facebook.

I agree with deggie, though; this seems to be getting beyond a class project and into a debate on the purpose of the Communities, and Apple's stated that purpose pretty clearly. So unless you have further specific questions about using the Communities, which is the purpose of this particular forum, we probably should close this thread off at this point.

Regards.

The "Lounge" consists of two additional forums where users who reach a certain level here can discuss problems and issue amongst themselves and bring technical or forum issues to the attention of the Community Hosts. As deggie said, the rules there are slightly more relaxed than they are in the main forums, allowing a small amount of non-technical chatter, but not markedly so.

jasiek13 wrote:

However, dont you think that Apple could give users of this community maybe an extra platform to extend their relationships in order to make this site even better?

I looked at this site for couple weeks now and it seems like there is a lot users, who spend a lot of time here. I think that bonding users, who regularly visit the site, could bring extra benefits to all users.

What do you think?

I usually visit the site several times a day and browse those forums of particular interest to me for two reasons: to increase my knowledge of the products I use and so hopefully improve my use of them; to occasionally offer help where I can. I sometimes come here to ask a specific question and usually get an answer from someone whose opinion I trust very quickly. I have found no other forum that offers so much to me in these respects.

The areas I frequent are usually extremely courteous, although I believe some others can be a little wild and wooly from time to time.

I feel no need for any bonding and as Dave and I have already explained the extra traffic created by such activity could present server issues which might harm the intended operation of Discussions.

So I don't think that sort of thing would make this site better, in fact I think it might damage it.

EDIT: I meant to add that we have the option to give our email in our profile should we wish.

Hi Jasiek13,

I too am looking into brand communities for my masters studies.

if you want to make contact to discuss and trade research, please email me andrewb(at)rry.no

One book I can highly recommend is Netnography by Rob Kozinets.

Look forward to hearing from you.

Regards

Andrew