ReadWriteWeb

So you've got a fabulous idea for a startup? That's great, but before you get wide-eyed and start thinking about wireframes, venture capital and moving to San Francisco, get your feet wet first by beginning to build your community.

Having a strong and loyal community behind you is an important step in the startup process. After all, it will be much easier to convince a potential investor of the viability of your product if there is a thriving community eager to get their hands on it.

Kevin Hale, co-founder of Wufoo, an online form builder, knows this better than anyone.

With hundreds of thousands of users and over a million pageviews since its launch early this year, Scitable is a science learning network that's teaching us at ReadWriteWeb more about getting traffic than about genetics. For entrepreneurs appealing to niche verticals - i.e., anyone not attempting to be the next Facebook - these lessons are no less valuable than those learned in our previous interview on Spymaster's virality.

Read on for our exploration of Scitable's success, from origins and outreach to servers and scaling, with their publishing director, Vikram Savkar.

In recent days, an application designed for Google's mobile operating system "Android" was accused of wiping data from user's phones. It's not known whether or not the rumors are true, but once again questions are being raised about the safety and security of Google's open platform versus more controlled and regulated platforms like that of Apple's iPhone. For supporters of the iPhone, a story about a rogue Android application proves their point that Apple's oversight and review process is necessary for keeping consumers safe.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica is about to open ups its articles to edits by its users. Jorge Cauz, Britannica's president, tells the SMH that readers will soon be able to make edits to existing articles and create their own content. These updates, however, will be vetted by Britannica's staff, which hopes to review every edit within 20 minutes.

Britannica is trying to a take a hybrid approach which combines Britannica's editorial expertise with Wikipedia's principles of transparency and openness.

Netvibes, one of the many personalized homepage products available today, has just announced a new feature which allows users to share anything from their Netvibes pages - not just tabs, but also articles, widgets, and RSS feeds. This new feature allows those items to be shared via integration with two of the most popular social networks: Twitter and Facebook, the latter being powered by Facebook Connect. What's not to love? As it turns out, based on the comments found on the Netvibes blog, users are not happy about this change.

Effective user adoption is the absolute best predictor of enterprise software success. That was one of the key takeaways for me from the OpenAir User Conference this week.

According to a study done by the Sand Hill Group and Neochange, the most critical factor (70% listed it as number 1) for software success and return-on-investment is effective user adoption.

Social media, it's all about the democratization of communication and empowering new voices - right? A few years into the new media revolution, reality is looking a little more complicated than that theory would suggest.

The wild garden of services growing from the read/write soil of the new web struggles each time a new app is launched and looks more like a ghost town than a place to enjoy the network effect of the crowd. How can new services ramp up social connections quickly? Recommending "friendship" with active early adopters is one strategy being explored by a number of sites. The end result can be a lopsided environment where a handful of winners dominate the collective mindshare - again.