Spymac.com

Spymac is an online community consisting of over 30,000 Apple computer enthusiasts from both sexes and from geographies spanning the globe. It is located on the World Wide Web (WWW) at http://www.spymac.com. Spymac is not the typical web community where all interaction between users takes place solely in online forums; Spymac utilizes a wide variety of technologies to facilitate communication.

Spymac hosts personal web logs (blogs), a real-time chat box, a vast forum, image hosting, and personal web hosting. There are few online communities that offer such a wide array of services to all of its users for free. Any person browsing the WWW can log into Spymac, sign up for an account, receive a personalized @spymac.com e-mail address, and 100 MB of web-space.

Spymac is also functions as a web-portal for Apple related news. The homepage features recent news contributed by a small staff of freelance writers, most of which work for other various newspapers around the world. The writers supply almost daily information on a number of topics, and Spymac members have the ability to comment on each given issue.

This information delivery scheme is not only a great way to get information on a niche subject, but it also offers users the ability to see how others with similar interests feel on issues they care about.

Another interesting feature on Spymac is the “around town” links featured in a sidebar if the user so chooses.

Headlines are stripped from other Apple oriented sites, and are summarized and hyperlinked. This connects users of Spymac directly to other online communities of people with similar interests.

Also featured on the Spymac homepage are links to all of the sections, recent image and forum postings, and the “shoutbox” to chat with other Spymac community members in real-time.

The landscape of Spymac is so large that it is hard to get around within the interface at times. There is a feeling of being in digital Disneyland – at first one can be so overwhelmed, they are frozen in cyberspace. After a little searching and exploring, Spymac becomes a great place to hangout and discuss a number of topics and issues with others around the world.

The Spymac forums are broken up into five major sections: computing, creativity, technology, hangouts, and Spymac HQ. Each major section contains a small selection of subsections. Computing contains hardware central and software central. Creativity is comprised of designer’s den, developer’s den, and musician’s den. Technology has technology central, classifieds, arcade, and helping hand. Hangouts contain lounge, sanctuary, political corner, and red light district. Finally, Spymac HQ has site comments and site support. Each section and subsection of Spymac fills a communicative niche for users. If one needs technical help on setting up a home network, then technology central’s helping hand subsection is a great place to start. If one wants to tell a crass joke, then the red light district is the hangout most likely to have an interested audience.

Each section and subsection offers members a place where their thoughts and ideas can be heard and commented on within a preconfigured context. The same post made in two different sections of the forums can, and are, met with drastically different opinions and comments based simply on where they are said. This mimics reality quite well. For example, making a joke about politics at a party amongst friends is much different from offering the same humorous political viewpoints at a town meeting. The context of the comments carries a great deal of weight.

Users may also create their own forum when people can view topics on their own mini forum. The most populat user forum is called “Spy Grrls,” created for female members to discuss issues important to them.

The section is the most popular member forum not because Spymac is jam packed with females, but rather because men like to drop in and see what the ladies are discussing.

The avatars that inhabit Spymac are as wide ranging as the services that Spymac offers. Most avatars correlate closely to the human that owns them, but as with many pseudo-anonymous interactions, people feel more free to speak their mind for good or bad. This is why portals with major person-to-person, or person to group interaction usually rely on moderators to keep the peace within the community. Without some sort of regulation of actions, which are also present in reality through laws and continually constructed social norms, there would be a potential for a chaotic landscape.

Moderators are either loved or hated within the community.

Certain users strive to get in close with the moderators and administrators in the hopes that someday they too may have the notoriety and prestige of being labeled a moderator on the site.

Others constantly bicker and argue with moderators about topics ranging from censorship to issues with the site’s layout.

On Spymac, the bottom line is, the moderators hold the power. If users have problems they must deal with the moderating team to get the issue resolved. Once a user is black listed by the moderators, then there is little opportunity for redemption.

The rules of Spymac are not set in stone, at least not just yet. There is a new section entitled “Spymac etiquette” that has yet to be deployed, but one can assume that once this section is released the rules will be a great issue of discussion.

At the current time all decision on whether a post is to be censored or if a user is to be banned are made by the administrators and moderators of the site.

The most interesting aspect of Spymac is it’s members. They cover the spectrum of personalities from teenagers with bizarre business aspirations, to grumpy old European photographers. It seems everyone on Spymac has an opinion, and most are more than willing to express it. This leads to good discussions and hilarious arguments.

Most users offer some sort of projection of their “real world” personality to the online world at Spymac. It can be argued that many users like to tout their expertise and rub it in the face of others from time to time, but all in all, most people on Spymac are genuine (as far as I can tell).

There are a number of features that streamline communication between Spymac’s 30,000 members. Users can assign friends through a control panel to track various postings by others, and one can request a mutual friend so they can track the other person’s posting as well.

Another feature allows for direct personal messages to be sent between users. As long as the recipient’s user name is known, a message can be sent.

If one user is harassing another member the annoyed user can block him or her, or worse the moderators can ban them from their account.

User interaction on Spymac ranges from knowledgeable people around the globe helping others resolve issues, to incessantly chiding other members. One member who is the brunt of much harassment is a user who goes by the avatar “larryiskewl.”

His posts are often met with harsh criticism, such as:

Or:

Larry constantly uploads images to his image gallery and has logged over 2,500 posts. This causes many users to accuse him of “spamming” the site. A user who goes by the avatar “SwitchyMcSwitch” offers a good example of this reasoning:

Not all users on Spymac face the scrutiny of Larry. Most, in fact, find Spymac to be a great place to find help on a range of topics. For example, one user asked:

Within a short period of time, the user was offered a link to an online resource to help solve their issue.

Spymac, like any real community, has its upsides and downsides, it good seeds and its bad ones, but overall Spymac is a very interesting and worthwhile online community. With a wealth of services and resources for users to tap, Spymac seems to be the type of online community that we will be seeing more and more of in the future. As people begin to spend a great deal of time online, communities in the digital realm will begin to reflect more on the society in which they reflect and peoples avatars will carry a great deal of weight.