Clearly both approaches work, but there are also parallels between how these communities grew and what the communities themselves are like. Facebook by nature is closed compared to Twitter. In Facebook you generally have to except people/friends before they can see your profile but you certainly need to be a Facebook member; whereas most of Twitter is open to anyone with a web connection, member or not. One’s content is restrictive by nature while the other is open by nature and this is similar to their community building philosophies as well as developers’ ability to create applications for the platform.

So what kind of platform is My City Lives going to be, exclusive or open?  Well we hope it will be as open as Twitter and that the community will create all the game changing apps that Twitters community has spawned.  So how do we ensure this? We keep it as simple as possible while allowing our users to find useful information. But how will it grow?

Once you’ve decided on the inclusive or exclusive community part, then there comes the actual building and growing of the community. Do you send out press releases? Do you connect with bloggers in your area? Do you buy adds on Facebook (god no)? Do you speak at events/hang out where early adopters hang out? Do you SEO the %*@# out of your site? Do you focus on word of mouth? Do you take the age old inventors angle and just make something that you would use and hope that you’re solving a problem that many people have? Or maybe you just sit back and let Twitter do what it does best.

Well I can comfortably tell you that we are “focused” on most of these options.  But what we really want to do, is build this sucker from the inside out. My City Lives is about recommendations and exploration, so we’re hoping our community will recommend it to friends and recommend through exploration. This is exactly why we are adding 10 StoryCatchers to our team.  In no particular order, Ambreen, Emily, Bill, Gabby, Lu Anne, My Ahn, Simon, Mahmoud, Aliyyah and Grace will be joining our team officially this Saturday.  These StoryCatchers will be responsible for helping to seed the early stage content on My City Lives and will help define what the site is all about by infusing the site with their talent and creativity.  We have also been in contact with quite a few bloggers who write about Toronto as well as conventional media in order to reach the non-techies. There are many things we have on the go and hopefully some will even surprise you.  But for now, please welcome our new StoryCatchers.