Millions upon millions of people join online communities, but how many of those members know what goes on behind the scenes of these sites. I for one, was quite interested to find out how the business aspect of these sites came about, and so I interviewed two entrepreneurs who are striving to make a name in the World Wide Web.

Donald Burnette is a second year undergraduate student at the University of Florida. He is currently taking 22 hour credits, and is triple majoring in Mathematics, Physics, and Engineering, hoping to graduate in four years and go on to graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Aside from all of this, he is also a businessman. Two years ago, he and fellow WhatsUpBuddy.com partner, Trevor Barrett, started an investment company called “To Be Insight,” which is still being successfully operated. Last summer, Donald got the idea to jump on the bandwagon of online communities, and start a community Web site of his own. Always on the look-out for a business that would be somewhat easy to obtain, starting an online community fit that profile, and they got to work on getting the site up. He asked his existing business partner to go in on the site with him, and he agreed. They also found a third partner, Brent Rozner, who lives in Canada and does all the graphic work for the site.

When they first started the site, they wanted to have a site like MySpace.com, but specifically geared for an older demographic. However, to have a successful online community, you need millions of members, and targeting an older audience was not working out for the Web site. Their numbers were low, and those who did join had trouble figuring out how to navigate the site. They knew they had to make some changes to get the number of members higher, so they started targeting a younger audience. They knew that this demographic was already using these kinds of sites, and they needed to target a crowd that would be coming in the masses.

To get a good idea of what works well on these sites, the two looked at competitors. Some of the sites they looked at were Friendster.com, MySpace.com, Facebook.com, and Iprocrastinate.com. They noticed that the older sites, Friendster and MySpace, were becoming very corporate, and were hoping it would turn most people off, and make them want to switch to their site, WhatsUpBuddy.com. And they also focused in on what people found most appeasing. So they had their site have unlimited photo options. Their take is that sex sells--people love posting pictures, and looking at pictures of other people. They were hoping that their inclusion of unlimited albums would put them a step ahead of their competitors, but their hopes were quickly shattered once Facebook.com added photo albums to their already popular site.

But to be different and stand out, they added a few features that other sites have yet to offer. For one, there is a film strip on every page that shows randomly selected photos from different people’s albums. Users can click on any of the photos, which leads them to the album that it came from. They are hoping that this will be a tool that gets the site to connect members with other members who might not connect otherwise. They also have a “Recently Viewed Profiles” and Recently View Galleries,” which logs the last five pages you have visited. The creator, Donald, thinks this is a very unique and helpful feature.

And in their ongoing efforts to improve the site, they have launched a new feature, a user message board. With the Message Board users can send messages to all of their friends at the same time and it will show up on their personal profile. The creators feel it is a good way to communicate with many people at the same time. If users don’t like this new feature, they can customize their profile not to have it.

Another way the user can customize the site to their liking, is the age bracket. Users can set an age bracket as to who can see their profile, and whose profile they can see. For example, if one was to set the age from 18-24, then to them, the site only consists of 18-24 year old people. This feature also helps with safety, if younger members did not want older users to find them.

However, the creators feel that safety is mainly up to the good sense of the user. They try and do their part by making your information confidential, unless the users opts to make it public. But, the user always has the option to make their personal information private.

Interestingly enough, the two explained that nothing on these sites are completely private. Every thing the user does is logged on a data base. Every click of your mouse, every page visited, can all be looked at through the database. Another thing to look out for is passwords. If the site has an option for the password to be retrieved, it means the site knows what your password is. If the option is to reset your password, it means you are the only person who knows it. Information like this is all found in the Terms of Agreement, and is important for users to look through.

All in all, these two are just trying to make a successful business. They feel like if in two years, their site hasn’t gone anywhere, that at least they tried.