The Atheist Spot makes it into Alltop!

So I was browsing around alltop.com, and noticed they had a category for religious news. I was shocked (sarcastically, of course) that there was no representation from the atheist community. Seemed like every faith was represented, but not the lack of faith. After a few email exchanges with the site moderator, I'm super excited to report that we are now the atheist representation for http://religon.alltop.com/! (Scroll to the bottom and you'll find us, I promise).


For those that haven't seen http://alltop.com, it's a really useful site to use a start page or a quick reference point, to see what's going on in the world, or in any niche news domains that you may be interested in. You can even remove certain feeds and limit it to what you like best. Cause honestly, who wants to read about atheist news all the time (except for me).

Featured link of the week - A new social network for Atheists

This week we review a new social network that's been getting some attention in the blogosphere: Atheist Nexus. An member named vjack submitted the story to The Atheist Spot just today (you can read it here).

The Atheist Nexus social network looks to have been built on top of Ning, which was founded by Marc Andreeson (the founder of Netscape) in 2005 to help niche communities connect and develop online. A perfect fit for us godless atheists!

Being built on an established platform link Ning, the site comes ready with some nifty features including real time chat, a video archive, a message board, and something that most excited me...a projects list. Currently the list of projects is all hypothetical (e.g. scholarships, library donations, recycling programs), but just the thought of sponsoring students and community programs in the name of atheism sends chills down my spine.

In the end, the fate of a site like this, and in reality most any site, lies in it's ability to keep its members coming back. The fate of most upstart social networks looks like a reverse hockey stick curve. Lot's of excitement up front (mostly early adopters), lots of new members, and then a pretty quick dropoff as people forget they ever signed up and move on to the next shiny site. I would say there are two keys to creating a long term success:

1. Getting to a "critical mass" number of members. I wish I knew what this number actually was, but I would say it is some percentage of the active atheist community. If enough people are members of the site, they will naturally bring it up in conversation, which will continue to spread the message of the site, and bring in a steady stream of members. It wouldn't hurt to have some atheist celebrities as members. As with most Web 2.0 sites, this is a Catch-22 situation. New members won't join until there are enough friends on the site, but there won't be enough friends on the site until more people join. But just note that every popular social media site started this way too, and they survived.

2. The more difficult of the two, and something that any new site has to deal with in some way, is to have a compelling reason for members to keep coming back. Since a typical social networking site doesn't actually produce any original content (not that there's anything wrong with that :), the site owners need to work hard to leverage the social aspects of the site to bring it's users back. Even trickier is to convince members to use the site instead of or along side a facebook or a myspace, where most members will probably already have accounts and be unmotivated to have two identities to maintain.

My humble advice to the owners of the Atheist Nexus:

1. Keep doing what you're doing. No matter what happens, this is a good thing for the atheist community, and I love the fact that so many atheists are so able and willing to use their tech expertice to further "the message". Just make sure to keep the interface as clean and simple as possible. It's too tempting to add features and more features. Control yourself!

2. Having said that, you must focus on the people and the community over the technology. What will make the site last will be real people connecting in real life, doing real things for the world, and making a real difference. Especially in a community such as this (as opposed to a tween oriented myspace).

3. Don't compete with the facebook's and myspace's. You have to learn to live with them, and somehow leverage them to further your site's power. Maybe create a facebook group driving people to your site, or a myspace widget with recent posts or videos. Just don't spend time trying to convince people to choose your site over facebook. Encourage people to choose both.

I recommend everyone check the Atheist Nexus out for themselves, give it a spin. I have no doubt the site owners crave feedback as much as we do (as hard as that may be to believe), so share your thoughts with them or leave your comments here.

In our minds we trust,
Lenny