Web development, starting a community site?

when starting a community site (myspace/facebook/faceparty etc), how is the best way to get members. because obviously the database is empty, so members arent going to sign up to a site where there are no members, and you arent going to get more members if people dont sign up. is there a way to get around this? or is it simply a case of adding a few hundred example profiles and allowing time for the site to snowball?

Web development, starting a community site?
This is a 2 step process. (Well, it's a bit more complicated, but can be broken down into 2 steps)





Step 1) Get users. You need to get the users to want to be on your site in the first place. You need to be able to offer something no other site offers; something that will make users want to join your site, over others of the same type. If you're the ONLY site that is there for specific discussion about A, and there is a steady growth of people liking to discuss A, then you're in luck, but if, like you said, myspace/facebook, et cetera, then you HAVE to consider why someone would want to join our site over the ones with the already established user bases.





Step 2) Get the ball rolling; breaking the ice; whatever you want to call it. if your starting a forum, you need to start the discussion your self, or (and I've been guilty of this in the past), create a couple of troll accounts for the sole purpose of baiting people to talk. For a social site, you'd need to start out, get your friends on there, then there friends, all of that, it's pretty much a viral process. A lot of people (myself included) only join where there friends are. Thats the whole reason I have aim, because all of my friends are on aim. As much as I hate myspace, all of my friends are there, and only there, so, I am too, lol





gl =)
Reply:Well you need to entice people to join for other reasons too usually. Ability to host some pictures or ability to vote for some poll or something to get people to sign up, and then the snowball happens. I'm not sure if example profiles would help or not in that case, since I don't think people would want to sign up to be friends with some example profile they've never met.


But I could be wrong, I don't use those types of sites.