I would like to call your attention to what I am calling “Temporary Social Webs”.  These are social webs that only exist for a short period of time that are used for some social purpose.  I have been involved with two in the last year:

1. family members to post notes about recovery from an operation I had
2. one of my best childhood friends died and the local paper provided a site for talking amongst people that remembered him

Like other social web sites there are a lot of fairly random contributions, but I think the significant points are:

• the contributors are not usually very computer savvy
• the contributions are only maintained for a short period of time.
• this is more than just commenting on an article, as the contributions are coalesced along the subject over a time

The operation recovery site is http://caringbridge.com.  It is little more than a blog, but I number of my family members are not great at computers, so there involvement is tremendous.

The deceased site was from the http://boston.com.  The site was maintained free for 6 months and expired.  There was an opportunity for someone to pay for the site going forward, but I don’t think that occurred.  I think the site helped and met its goal of helping us to remember our friend.

I think there is a tremendous opportunity to explore other uses of Temporary Web Sites, maybe prompted by marketing requests or the like where people are directed to a site that will help them do something socially for a short period of time.