Brittaney Massey

I joined recipe.com and tried to get in touch with members of the online community. I had to become a member of facebook and MixingBowl.com just to achieve this task. When I finally found a couple of members I emailed them and asked them two main questions. My first question was if they felt that members should be able to add recipes to the site. The reactions I got back were that they didn't know you couldn't. Also that if the site allowed the members to add recipes it would give the site a broader base. The second question I asked was if they felt that recipe.com was an online community to them. One answer was no. The second answer I received said "In a sense...you can leave comments. But the site seems impersonal and you don't get to make friends. That would seem like more of a community to me."

The main observation that I made was that the community was not really a community. You have to join other groups and other sites just to find people who follow recipe.com. In my opinion it doesn't make much of a community. I also recently discovered, just like the person I interviewed, that you couldn't add recipes. It's not much of a sharing community if you can't add recipes on a recipe site. Anything you click on that involves connecting with other people will take you to another site. That doesn't leave many active members on the actual site. My observation is that people join recipe.com as fans not as community members.