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NYCRUNS Team Blog

Thoughts From The Team At NYCRUNS On What We Are Doing, And What's Going On In The Wider World Of New York Area Running

What NYCRUNS Left Behind

Posted by steve
steve
That was a very long day at the Damon Runyan, hope you guys had fun, I'm knacker
User is currently offline
on Wednesday, 15 February 2012 in New York Area Running

In a nutshell; the partner finder and a community and content hub. Today - I want to look at community...mostly.

Chances are, when I started NYCRUNS you were not on Facebook. You almost certainly weren't on Twitter - I wasn't either. I think to a certain extent - Facebook and Twitter made a lot of what we could have done with NYCRUNS with community unnecessary. I also think the fairly insular nature of running clubs made it very difficult. Either way, it didn't work. 
 
Take the forums for instance  - they never took off and were unceremoniously wiped off the site last summer. Meanwhile both new and old running clubs have thriving mailing lists and active Facebook groups. The really active people in some of the clubs cross pollinate on twitter too. There is good and bad to this situation. The good part is that people are able to share information in ways they weren't before.
 
The bad in my humble opinion is that the newer options are not always as good as forums were.
 
Most of the club oriented options are walled gardens; in fact Facebook itself is a big walled garden. I wouldn't be the first to call it AOL 2012. The good thing about a walled garden is that you can generally trust the people in there with you - the bad part is that you are cut off from the world to some extent - it depends on the wall. News about a race that might circulate on The North Brooklyn board, might never circulate on The Central Park Track Club board. So, there is that. This wouldn't be a problem except that most people only need so many social media outlets in their lives. Some people are lazy too so they don't look too hard. They don't google. The don't turn to twitter.

Twitter, otoh, is the opposite of a walled garden; though it is pretty insular and incredibly ephemeral. Good luck finding a conversation about a race that happened last year that is coming up again. 

NYCRUNS will be addressing this in a couple of different ways. Obviously, we're going to try to get you to participate in our social media channels and like this and that. What I'm interested in doing though is funneling information from the walled gardens to the less walled NYCRUNS gardens. Cross posting horizontally across different facebook entities via NYCRUNS is what is in my head. It may take the form of an NYCRUNS facebook app. I'm not sure yet.
 
What I can tell you is we will be doing is changing the free calendar so that you can meaningfully review races and then cross pollinate this information to social; particularly our facebook pages and yours. Were going to do something similar with clubs. I think this will be pretty cool and help continue to increase the diversity of races and running interests while cross pollinating all of our efforts.
 
Any thoughts?
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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