But what makes up a web community; what makes them successful? Below I discuss the four C’s of community: Content, Context, Connectivity and Community.

Content

A current meme when organising or building a website is the catchphrase Content is King. A big shift in the web in recent years has been the way websites are constructed. Today it’s a necessity, and indeed best practice, to separate form from content. In one hand you have the compelling content, whilst in the other you have the presentation, be it in the form of HTML and CSS, Flash or RSS, amongst others.

Quality content is one way in which you can make your website stand out. It is also a great way to attract the people who are needed to form the elusive community that your brand is hoping build. When considering community initiatives, there are three questions to ask: Where will the content come from; for example community driven or syndication? Does it provide indisputable value; does it have a unique selling point (USP)? Can a regular flow of quality content be maintained? Even pre-Web 2.0 initiatives have to focus on keeping the content itself fresh and relevant.

Web accessibility and search engine optimisation are also vital, so having content completely separated from presentation means a number of assistive technologies can make better use of the content, whilst the web robots can also readily consume the information.

Context

Context means understanding how people use your website, where they are in the user-journey and serving them the right experience at the right time. Well-designed applications and functionality have great opportunities to deliver on context.

For example, FriendFeed‘s iPhone version, which is simply a re-worked web interface, is perfectly designed for contextual usage on the go. Similarly, Remember The Milk updates the interface explicitly for mobile and iPhone users, whilst also syndicating the content to applications such as Google Calendar. (It is questionable whether user-agent switching is good practice, but that is a whole new blog post.) Conversely, Delicious makes no attempt at changing the user interface for iPhone or Nokia N95 users since the iPhone and N95 have full web-capabilities through their respective web browsers.

In some instances the context in which the content is displayed will require reduced functionality. For example, the Last.fm mobile site does not allow you to play music, but simply search music listings, view recommendations, events and friend listings, and edit settings. However, through its API, Last.fm is able to offer its data and platform to third party developers to aid the building of new applications and communities, thus changing its context.

Connectivity

Connectivity is the ability of a system, whether that is a web-based community or a device like the iPhone, to connect with little or no modification. In the realm of communities, the ability to easily connect to your peers is the Holy Grail of the application.

Successful communities thrive on fluid, hard-to-measure activities that are, in the purest sense, relationship-based. It’s not all about mass communications — although Twitter and YouTube are both bucking this trend — but more about the micro-interactions. Designing experiences that support thousands of micro-interactions means that the community is able to function, unhindered, almost indefinitely. Facebook lends itself expertly to micro-interactions through the user’s ‘wall’.

Companies are turning to communities as the new customer relationship management (CRM), but this requires people to mind them. Organisations such as 37Signals and WildBit very effectively use Twitter to broadcast service updates and sometimes apologies, whilst the BBC and The Guardian online use it to broadcast links to new content.

Continuity

People often don’t like change, but communities that thrive often do so though evolution to meet the needs of users. Communities need to be flexible to evolve while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained. Too much of a radical change will almost certainly have a detrimental impact upon visits, at least initially.

Building communities is the new marketing for a brand, whether that is through wholely-owned properties or 3rd party social media services such as Twitter, WordPress or Ning. The starting point to any community is finding a niche that is currently underserved and serving that community better than anyone else. But Brands need to know a few things before they head down the community path. The web is saturated with communities. Some are thriving, while others have come and gone. Creating a community is not like your average marketing campaign that you can ditch it is a failure. If the community is successful the four C’s of content, contect, connectivity and continuity will have to be maintained and indeed, developed.

But what is a User Agent? A User Agent is the client application used with a particular network protocol; the phrase is most commonly used in reference to those which access the Web. Web user agents range from web browsers and e-mail clients to search engine crawlers (spiders), as well as mobile phones, screen readers and braille browsers used by people with disabilities. When Internet users visit a web site, a text string is generally sent to identify the user agent to the server. This forms part of the HTTP request, prefixed with user-agent: and typically includes information such as the application name, version, host operating system, and language. Bots, such as web crawlers, often also include a URL and/or e-mail address so that the webmaster can contact the operator of the bot.

By simply typing about:version into Chrome’s address bar you will be presented with the following information:

Google Chrome
0.2.149.29 (1798)
Official Build
Google Inc.
Copyright © 2006-2008 Google Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.29 Safari/525.13

As you can see Chrome’s version information provides limited detail about the browser. The last line is the important one. It is the HTTP User-Agent header:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.29 Safari/525.13.

If you know the RFC 2616 specification on the HyperText Transfer Protocol — which incidentally, I gladly don’t — you would know that the User Agent, or more formally, product token, should be short and to the point:

Product tokens SHOULD be short and to the point. They MUST NOT be used for advertising or other non-essential information. Although any token character MAY appear in a product-version, this token SHOULD only be used for a version identifier (i.e., successive versions of the same product SHOULD only differ in the product-version portion of the product value).

Clearly this isn’t the case! One of Google’s reason’s behind creating the Chrome browser was to start afresh. It would have therefore been truely amazing if they had made the string simply Chrome/0.2.149.27.

Unfortunately, browser sniffing makes an ever-growing UA string the path of least resistance for browser vendors.

So, what does Chrome’s User Agent string actually mean:

• Mozilla/ – This means that browser has the kind of capabilities that Netscape 1.1 had compared to Mosaic and Lynx.
• 5.0 – This means that the browser engine is from the post-Browser War Web Standards era as opposed to being from the Browser War era.
• (Windows; – This means that general windowing system flavor the browser runs on is Windows (as opposed to, for example, Apple and X11).
• U; – This means that the browser has at least the level of cryptographic capability / encryption strength that U.S. versions of browsers had in the late 1990s.
• Windows NT 6.0; – This indicates the operating system the browser is running on. In this instance, the browser is running on Vista.
• en-US) – This indicates the user interface language of the browser (U.S. English in this case). This may be used to choose between different content languages even though HTTP has a different header for that purpose.
• AppleWebKit/ – This indicates that the engine of the browser is WebKit as opposed to being Gecko. Developers should not do user agent sniffing as a rule, but if they still do, this is what they should be sniffing.
• 525.13 – This is the WebKit version from which Chrome branched its copy. Site admins could use this to detect old versions with known bugs.
• (KHTML, like Gecko) – This introduces the substring Gecko into the UA string while pointing out to human readers that Webkit was forked from KHTML. Without this substring, Chrome might be put in the same category as IE and Netscape 4.
• Chrome/ – This string identifies the browser as actually Google Chrome.
• 0.2.149.27 – This is the Chrome version. This could be used to detect old versions with known bugs.
• Safari/ – This means that the browser is like Safari as opposed to being like Firefox.
• 525.13 – This just repeats the WebKit version in order to have some version but not the irrelevant Safari.app version.