After six years in that hot seat, Figallo helped develop AOL’s first Web chat interface, Virtual Places, then co-designed and managed online discussion for IBM’s Deep Blue vs. Kasparov chess event.

Drawn from this experience and providing a wealth of real-life examples, Figallo’s book offers useful guidance for managing the human side of the online experience. Acknowledging that the word “community” is impossibly overbroad, ranging from “barn-raising Amish” to “identifiable demographic at which ads can be pitched,” Figallo stresses the importance of matching the setup to the needs of the people a site is trying to serve — whether the ultimate goal is selling product, tending online bar or running the best darn Elvis shrine this side of Graceland.

As Figallo has learned over the last couple of decades, this is easier said than done. We talked recently about the joys and sorrows of technology’s human side — and some survival tips for the innkeepers of cyberspace.

Some people say online communities go through similar phases as the Wild West, in terms of a civilization process: You start with the hardy pioneers, and then along come the missionaries and merchants and teachers, and pretty soon you’ve got cities and towns. You’ve been involved in online community well over a decade — have you seen this sort of change?

I’ll tell you, I see the same dynamics today in 1998 in a group interaction in a Table Talk discussion that I was seeing on the Well in its first years. There are always going to be people who see themselves as pioneers, and who are leaders. There are always going to be people who feel at the mercy of the veterans — “we’re the newbies, we’re just learning.” There are the people who are self-styled authorities. And other people who are friendly and just want to arrive in these communities and make friends and have productive conversations.

I see the same sorts of dynamics of people identifying who they agree with, who they don’t agree with, who they like, who they don’t like, and then sort of freezing into those conflicts. Those conflicts become the tension within the community that is always there. After just reading the discussions for a couple hours, you can tell who hates who, who likes who, who will probably never agree about anything.

Having seen you dealing with the fallout of some of these conflicts for some time, I’d think you’d be well within your rights to be pretty burned out on online community. What keeps you coming back?

Well, I have taken a couple of breaks — I was in the midst of taking a break from managing community when I wrote this book.

The book was a seven-month writing project, and at the end of the fifth month, I took this position here at Salon to manage Table Talk. As soon as I dropped back into the role of managing an online community, I had to reconsider everything I had written in the previous months, because I’d started to view it through sort of an idealist matrix, and write about all of the best possible scenarios. And when I got back online I realized, once again, that it’s not typical to have the best possible scenarios.

If you’re managing a community where you allow people to be themselves, explore and be creative, there are a lot of things that you really cannot control. You want people to be creative; you want the creative people to stick around, because they are really the core of these online communities. They create the discussions — the conflicts are interesting.

People love train wrecks.

And people love to watch other people behave. Human behavior is so predictable and unpredictable at the same time that it really is entertaining.

It can’t get too out of control, or you’ll drive people away, but it can’t become too bland or it’s not interesting. You have to develop techniques for mitigating it when it starts to get out of hand — where flame wars erupt and are not quenched, where flame wars spread and all people can actually see is name-calling.

That gets very boring after a while. You feel sort of embarrassed, as an observer and a participant, to join a system and to feel like a voyeur watching two people showing the worst parts of their personalities to the world, without, seemingly, any awareness that there are possibly tens of thousands of people reading.

Including their current or prospective employers.

I know. And that’s why people have to consider that they might not want to leave that stuff lying around! [laughs] In Table Talk you can delete your postings at any time.

What’s the draw of communities?

Concepts of community are very different. Some are based around the serendipity of showing up at the same Web site to try out the same software at the same time. Others are intentionally formed to figure out a problem — somebody says, “We’re going to have a community site to discuss educational reform in the United States.” Only people who are interested in that particular topic will go, and you can call that a community.

Or there’s this person I talk about in the book who owns a Volkswagen minibus, and apparently has owned one, or maybe a succession of them, for 20 years. He loves that vehicle so much that he put up an entire Web site about it. It caters to the other lovers of the minivans.

Communities can also form around a style — I’d say that more than anything, Salon’s community is formed around a certain ethos that Salon, in its editorial content, represents. It’s a little left-leaning, but it also takes swipes and parodies left-leaning culture. It’s formed around people who like to read, who like to write, who like to express ideas. Language is pretty much open on Table Talk, but we don’t like for one person to raise the abuse to a level where it drives another person from the system.

How do you deal with bullies online?

The best way, I find, is to not take them too seriously, and to set an example of how to not take them too seriously. For me, I don’t have to be afraid of bullies, because I’m The Manager [laughs], I’m the sysop … But there are other people who definitely can be shut down by someone who’s willing to use up the greatest amount of screen space possible with their rhetoric.

Some people are especially good at throwing insults. Yet you have to deflate these egos somehow just to keep the playing field fair. Sometimes it falls on the staff to do that; but often there are other people online, other members of the community who are also good at doing that, who recognize pomposity when they see it, who kind of neutralize these people.

It’s very easy for people who have a lot of free time on their hands and can spend a lot of time online to dominate an online community — everywhere you go, you see this one person, and their views, and their ideas. You don’t want your community to be so out of balance. A lot of what you do is just try to maintain or restore a social balance without being heavy-handed about it.

I’ve seen a lot of people change. I’ve seen people get into online communities and think that the way to establish their identity is to be abusive and obnoxious, and to get attention that way, then eventually discover that they can get as much attention by just being regular and sincere.

I think ignoring people is the ultimate leveling tool. People have different tastes. Some like to see the rowdy comments — that’s the entertainment factor. For other people, it’s like fingernails on the blackboard; they just cannot stand it. So the more filtering options you can give to the users for how they experience the community the better — not only for who they have to listen to, but how they navigate within the different discussions. Those filters will allow people to tune the community to their own needs.

The flip side of that, which you bring up in your book, is that when everybody experiences a different reality, where’s the community?

Well, within any so-called community there are going to be a myriad of different subcommunities. The way that the Well worked was that you could link between different topics. A topic on abortion, say, could exist not only in a parenting discussion space, but also in a medical discussion space, and maybe a women’s discussion space. In that way you got cross-pollination among different communities.

Now if you haven’t got linking like that, you might find that you have a separate abortion topic in each subcommunity, and they might all be going in different directions. They might not ever intersect, and you might have very segregated subcommunities.

You talk about many different types of entities to which the word “community” is applied — what do they have in common?

I think what the Internet has given us, more than anything else, is a searching tool. It’s a way that you can encounter different people — find out about them, see what they have to say, see what information they put up on the Web, see what their interests are.

You can sort through a lot more people on the Internet than you can by going out on the streets to figure out who would be a likely friend and somebody to hang out with in real life. You can do it wholesale on the Internet.

So when you do have a site that brings together people around a common interest, some of them are going to be more interested in just downloading information than they are in the conversation, and some are going to be totally sucked in by the conversation, and they won’t really care to read static content.

If you were someone who had a Web page up somewhere, why might you want to take the next step and build an online community?

Some people do it because there’s an interest of theirs that they’re so stuck on that they want to hang a shingle out on the Web to attract anybody else who will converse with them about that interest. They set up hobby boards — these are not commercial sites, they are not going to make any money. I couldn’t write this book entirely about how to make money from a Web community, because in most cases, even the largest community sites have yet to prove that they can really make money over the long haul.

Which leads us to the eternal question: Who’s paying for this? And what are the viable business models when they’re changing all the time? When you charge users by the hour you have an incentive to keep them online; now that most services are flat-rate, it’s not necessarily to your advantage to have people tying up your modems or servers all the time.

No. You can see what happened with America Online, when it switched its revenue model. AOL built a lot of its population through keeping people online in chat rooms. And then as soon as they went to flat pricing they found themselves bereft of enough modems, and great crisis ensued. For several months they were fighting just to get modems installed.

As to the business models — if you’re looking at it from the point of view that you have to support yourself, I give examples of how this can be done. You can sponsor the community, which means that the discussion area, or community segment of your site, has to be valuable enough that your company is willing to subsidize it. You have to make money some other way, or donate money and figure that you’re deriving enough other value out of it to make it worthwhile. It can be a promotional expense, or if you’re a nonprofit it can be a place to engender loyalty to your organization.

The large community sites that I use as examples — what I call the “Web Worlds,” like GeoCities and Tripod and the Globe — give people the ability to set up free home pages. Those sites get their revenue through the advertising that is posted on all these pages, which get a lot of page views. But the jury’s still out on the advertising model.

I think a more logical structure for earning revenue through a community would be to provide people with filters for what they don’t want to see, and for what they do want to see. Maybe they should have filters to define what they’d be interested in buying, and ads that they’d be interested in seeing. Maybe turn it on its ear — rather than having the site say, “We’re going to present you with ads we think you’ll be interested in seeing, ” individuals should be able to say, “I would actually click on ads if they were about this and this, or from these vendors.”

You also have to consider privacy. When people are in online communities, they’re posting their thoughts and their opinions viewable by tens of thousands of people. At the same time, they’re extremely protective of their privacy — and well they should be. They would not readily give out a lot of information about what they want if they thought it was going to be misused. So it’s very important in communities that you make very strong and detailed promises about what you’re not going to do with information you find out about people.

You need a high and well-founded trust level.

Trust is all-important to keeping people coming back to an online community where people expose their feelings, their thoughts, their politics, their history. If you can’t assure them that their trust is being respected and their privacy is being respected, then you’re either going to lose the people or you’re going to get artificial behaviors where people are just role-playing. And that can be very confusing, unless everybody’s playing the roles. To have people come in and spoof each other about who they are — there can be a sense of betrayal.

Cliff Stoll used to be fond of saying that online community isn’t real. I think there are qualitative differences, but I think it’s very real, and causes things to get done in the real world.

I think that it can be, but you have to keep it in perspective. People might initially go overboard in believing how important it is to them. But there is a great community identity that comes with becoming a habitual user. It’s almost like having a nationality.

I think it’s definitely proven its value, and I don’t see how it’s going to go away. Today, we can communicate all around the world with people in different locations and different cultures who are basically breathing the same air, dealing with the same huge problems coming down the pike. I don’t think that we can solve them on a nation by nation, locality by locality basis. These are discussions that have to be carried on on a huge scale.

We’re developing the tools and techniques for moderating those conversations, and I think that will serve us well in the future as we start to actually have to deal with them — and get beyond just focusing on people’s sex lives.

Competing with Microsoft has been something of a career for Dubinsky, first at Apple and then at Claris before launching Palm. But the last straw was the Palm PC episode.

Dubinsky and Hawkins founded Palm in 1992, one of the myriad start-ups launched to fuel an anticipated boom in pen-based personal digital assistants. Their flagship product, Graffiti, ran on most of the PDA platforms of the time. Graffiti solved the perennial handwriting-recognition problem by deciding it was easier to train the user to learn a stylized script than to train the computer to recognize handwriting. Graffiti met with enthusiastic acceptance but failed to hold on to its investors amid the collapse of better-funded companies such as Go and Eo and general chaos in the marketplace.

By the time Hawkins had come up with the idea of building a pocket-sized device that ran Graffiti but also offered a breakthrough in speed and simplicity, Palm was out of cash. In late 1995, US Robotics acquired Palm (and was itself acquired by 3Com in 1997).

Thanks to the financial infusion from USR, Palm survived, and shipped the Pilot 1000 in early 1996. Within 18 months, it had sold a million units — stunning success in a market Microsoft had been trying unsuccessfully to penetrate for years with a succession of Windows-related technologies.

Then came the fall of 1997, when a raft of hand-held computers running the latest version of Windows CE — a Windows operating system designed for hand-held devices and other consumer appliances — took aim at Palm’s market. Microsoft’s name for the new platform: Palm PC.

“We’d been doing business as Palm Computing since 1992,” Dubinsky recounts. “We were very well known to Microsoft. The product was a huge success — Bill Gates was there when we launched it!”

“It’s obvious,” says Dubinsky, “they were trading off of our goodwill.”

Palm sued. Moreover, says Dubinsky, it shrewdly sued in Europe, “because the laws in Europe are somewhat quicker to resolve these issues than in the U.S., where they’re quite protracted. We won in Germany, and they had to change the name of that product.”

“It’s really inconceivable to me,” she says. “They claimed, in the course of the litigation, that they couldn’t think of anything else! Ethics aside, this is no class.”

Dubinksy and Hawkins have had the last laugh, so far. Today, says Dubinsky, the Pilot enjoys 80 percent market share in the personal information manager market, and 3Com is still having trouble manufacturing enough Palm IIIs to keep up with demand — although Palm hasn’t announced sales figures since the first million units.

How did it all happen? And why did Dubinsky and Hawkins leave 3Com? Dubinsky sat down with Salon and told us the story.

What is JD Technology, and why does it exist?

We’re going to be licensing the software that we did at Palm Computing to create new hand-held devices for, ultimately, a big company. There are going to be a whole lot of these in the next few years, and we know an awful lot about them, so we think there’s a great opportunity to build a big new company.

What can you do as JD that you couldn’t do as senior executives at 3Com?

First of all, I can have more independence. As a senior executive at 3Com, I really had to take into account the objectives and needs and goals of 3Com as a part of running Palm. At JD — [or] whatever it will eventually be called — we clearly can optimize for this opportunity as opposed to being a part of a bigger thing.

Do you have employees yet? Offices?

We’ve borrowed offices. We haven’t hired anybody other than the two of us, and we are negotiating a round of financing now with some venture investors.

As the father of the technology, what does Jeff Hawkins bring to the new company?

He’s got an incredible vision for what direction this business is going, and has an ability to take that vision and turn it into pragmatic products that people want to buy. That seems sort of obvious, but it’s pretty apparent that very few people have that skill set when you look at all the competitors that have come after Palm. The products have really not measured up at all. Even once you’ve shown the way, and how to do it, people still seem to have difficulty doing that.

One of your most obvious competitors is that large company in Redmond. Microsoft’s strategy is different from yours — they’re more or less promoting Win CE as a software-only all-things-to-all-people product. But clearly, any competition from Microsoft is something to worry about.

Absolutely. So far Microsoft’s strategy has proven to be an enormous failure, though. People aren’t buying it, literally. They’re not walking into the stores and buying those products — or if they are, they’re returning them. So in the end the strategy is not proving to be sound. Specifically, we believe that you can’t do one thing that goes across all those environments.

What you really need to do is optimize to deliver a great user experience on a device. Their devices are not standing up against Palm’s in the market because they are not great devices, and they’re a lousy user experience.

Every company you’ve worked for, pretty much, has found itself in a position of having a better product than Microsoft, competing with Microsoft and, at best, having a hellacious time. Has anything changed with Palm?

Well, I wouldn’t say we’ve had a hellacious time. We’ve succeeded.

But on the other hand, it doesn’t increase your peace of mind to have Microsoft coming after your market.

In one way it doesn’t, and in another it does. You could say that it legitimizes the market, to a certain extent, because they’re interested in it. But in the end, what matters is who’s buying what products, and Palm has an 80 percent market share. In the end, Microsoft’s losing in this, and they’re losing badly. They’ve spent tons and tons and tons of money. They’ve had lots of partners spend tons and tons of money. This is not their first try. They’re on their fourth or fifth try. There have been so many tries at this area, and they have failed and failed and failed and failed.

Nobody expects them to stop trying. We certainly don’t expect them to stop trying. We expect them to get better. Eventually they’ll get better. But so far we’ve been pretty amazed that each [new] version is not getting much better. (laughs)

Is it viable to try to be all things to all people, which seems to be at the root of what they’re saying here about TV remotes and car navigation systems running Win CE? That seems a little overbroad, especially when it’s supposed to be compatible with your desktop computing environment.

Think about it this way — if it were possible, what would be the user benefit in that? Why would a user care? You can argue that there may be a developer benefit, because you’re able to develop once for multiple environments, but then when you think about it, you’re going to want to change the user interface, you’ll want to change the experience — so is there even a developer benefit?

The really interesting thing about that whole marketing notion is that there’s no user benefit, there’s no developer benefit — there’s [only] a manufacturer’s benefit. They want to be everywhere. Therefore, they think it’s good! (laughs)

Palm is one of the clearest examples of getting away with doing something completely different from Microsoft — in a market Microsoft wants to be in — by starting from scratch with a brand new device. Is that a replicable strategy for other would-be start-ups?

The point is that we’re in a very different field. In the field we’re in, Microsoft’s strengths do not apply. You could have asked me the same series of questions, saying, Why hasn’t Sony been successful doing this? You chose Microsoft, but you could just as easily have chosen Sony or Sharp or Casio or any of those guys.

The bottom line is, consumer electronics guys don’t get it because it’s a platform. Microsoft doesn’t get it because it’s a consumer electronics device. It’s effectively a crossover of multiple worlds that has created a new kind of category wherein Microsoft’s strengths don’t do that much for them; they only get them part of the answer. The same is true of consumer electronics guys who come after this category and have failed miserably too. Now, is that replicable, or not? Absolutely, if there’s another example of a new emerging industry in which Microsoft does not have any strengths, clearly you can succeed.

In the long term do you see a bigger threat to Palm coming from the consumer side or the computer side?

I almost think it’s going to come from somewhere we haven’t even anticipated. (laughs)

In the way nobody anticipated Palm, really.

Nobody sat around a year before we introduced the first product saying, “Yeah, those guys at Palm Computing, they’re the ones to watch in this category!” We came out of nowhere, as far as everybody was concerned.

Indeed, you came after numerous spectacular failures like Go and Eo, which caused you to have serious problems getting funding, and essentially had to sell the company to US Robotics to keep it alive.

That’s right.

Still, you succeeded, where other companies with much better funding and other “advantages” failed. Why?

I think the real breakthrough in thinking was to say, Let’s stop thinking about this as a little miniature computer and start thinking about it as an accessory and complement to the PC. As soon as you started thinking of it as an accessory to the PC, you started designing a whole bunch of things very differently.

For example?

For example, when you’re thinking about it as the PC itself, you’ve got to be able to support printing directly. As soon as you’ve decided you’ve got to support printing, you’ve got an order of magnitude of complexity — there are a billion printers out there. You’ve got a testing nightmare to try to test those printers. You just get into a whole bunch of problems.

On the Palm device, we said, “You know what? We’re not going to support printing.” You can support printing very well out of the desktop. So the desktop machine is going to do the printing, and the device isn’t. No printer drivers.

So you just totally change the dynamic of what the device is going to be. In a sense, [Hawkins] redefined it as a window to the data on your PC, then built the software around a synchronization strategy between the device and the PC, and nobody else had done that before.

Everybody was trying to make a little PC that you carried around.

Which is still what Windows CE is.

In recruiting developers to the platform, what would you say to convince them that it’s better to develop for Palm than for Win CE?

Eighty percent market share, I have to say. All the developers are just glomming onto the Palm platform, and they’re not developing for the CE platform. They don’t want to develop for something that’s not selling.

Is it easier to develop for one or the other?

It’s probably equal. The Windows environment clearly has more tools than the Palm environment, but the Palm environment is pretty straightforward, so it’s not too complicated. A competent programmer can pick it up and be productive pretty quickly.

You certainly couldn’t make a strong argument that we’ve got a vastly superior development environment — that wouldn’t be true. But the reality is that the developers want to go where they can have an impact and where they can make sales, and you can’t make them in a place that has no hardware being sold.

The volume Palm is doing is absolutely stunning. The growth is spectacular, and that’s what’s exciting to developers. 3Com just added a third factory. It’s been extraordinary.

Would it be difficult for start-ups to get funding for hand-held devices now?

Nobody would get funding for anything in the hand-held market before. Now, all sorts of Palm developers are getting funding for developing on the Palm platform., because everybody’s beginning to understand that there’s a big market here. If it’s this big this early, it only means that it is enormous.

It’s just the tip of the iceberg today. I’ve plotted it against consumer electronics adoption rates, and there’s virtually nothing that touches the adoption rate of these things — not phones, not pagers, not televisions, not video cameras. Literally the only thing you can find that’s got a steeper curve is CD audio.

If you could change one thing about the business that would make what you’re trying to do easier, what would it be? Or, putting it another way, what do you see as the biggest obstacle in your path?

I think the biggest obstacle is just going to be communication and the noise from the competition out there. With the Microsoft threat, for example, there’s always this perception that, Oh, they always win in the end. Oh, they always win on the third time. I just point out to people that they’re on their fifth or sixth time on this one.

Debunking myth is just such a huge challenge.