It seems like most Bahá'í websites are built on a model that the web is currently running away from: the Myspace-profile sort of model, where one or a few people - the administrators of the account - create a profile-like set of a few pages, with some information about the person or entity being profiled, a news feed with event updates, and some items of special interest like youtube videos or something. This has been the traditional vision of our Baha'i community websites for years, and in fact even if you look at the Portland Baha'i website - which is in my opinion one of the best Baha'i websites out there - it's the same model, with a few things added in like a newsletter signup, and searchable calendar for the entire Portland metro area.
The weaknesses inherent in that model became apparent when Facebook came along with a nice clean design and allowed people to interact with a far wider range of content, created by a far more diverse range of people sharing similar networks. Suddenly it wasn't just profiles and four songs - it was a wall, and events, and invitations, and status updates, and a world of user-created content that far surpassed the "profile" model. Now there are new technologies like twitter and flickr that are changing the ways that people interact with each other on the internet. The kind of Bahá'í website that I would be interested in seeing (and building - as I can scrape time out of my schedule) is one that takes advantage of those technologies in judicious ways in order to build dynamic and interesting web communities that are rich with user created content: kind of like a cross between the individual usefulness of Facebook and the community presence of the Portland Baha'i website, but one which would both encourage and harness the interest that so many Baha'is have online.
For example, right now in Portland our LSA pays a person to develop local news stories for our website and put them online. This echoes the trend on MySpace, where so many musicians have a manager who runs their profile for them. I think the reason is that, for any website based on the "profile" model, regular and interesting updates are *critical* to maintain the interest of that site's followers: if I am a fan of the MySpace PolkaPop Band, I want to know what that band is doing, and the only one that can tell me is that band, because they control the profile. Now let's take a look at Facebook. In a way, each person's page can be thought of as a website that a worldwide community of friends helps to create, with their status updates, pictures, wall posts, events, and everything else. What band manager can hope to compete with that?
I guess my point is this: as a Bahá'ís, we have such a community, but our websites do not in any way capitalize on this potential resource. Instead, we still have sites where one person is responsible for making periodic updates to a site that is basically a "profile" of one Bahá'í community. Best case scenario with this is a site like Portland's - which I think we can all agree is one in a million in terms of clean design, ease of use, and interesting content - and it will *still* only be useful a few times per person, to people from Portland who are just hearing about the Bahá'í Faith. The content that one person can produce is just not dynamic enough to compete with the content that thousands of people can produce. People make Facebook their home page because it's interesting again every 30 minutes. As a Bahá'í living in this rich and interesting community, with ideas as profound and history as moving and plans as revolutionary as we have, I should at least want to visit my community's website once a week, but the pull of one or two new articles - no matter how relevant and good looking - is just not enough.
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