So, I spent the day today waiting for my Pod to arrive from Boston. As luck has it, I'm no so lucky and did a complete runaround all day long to locate what was happening, when and where. Suffice to say that I spent most of my day failing at building Target furniture and diddling around on work stuff.

Sometimes, I feel like things a deliberately made more difficult than they should ever be... i.e. in the case of my furniture building. There's a lot of things that could really make things much easier, like arrows, shapes, other annoying guiding features that help stupid people like me figure things out. In turn, this made me think about what I'm doing for work and how to make things as simple as possible for everyone involved to figure out how to effectively communicate with one another. I looked at sites like Twitter, which encourages peer teaching to enable users to learn about their community. There are communities like MySpace and Facebook that depend on current users to invite others they know and to build their community by simply adding more of your real-life friends, associates, schoolmates, coworkers, etc.

How can I do this with a financial networking site? Do people want to be "social"? Do they want to be argumentative? Are they funny people? Will they understand the benefits and drawbacks of communicating and building their network, or will they only use the tools and features we offer to track their own earning? WHY will they communicate? How would these people have gotten together to talk about investing if it was a live scenario?

My brain hurts.

Labels: communication, development, social media, start-ups, websites, work