Although you may have little interest in the niche market for person-to-person loans (previous coverage here), you should keep tabs on the websites of Zopa and Prosper to see how they build a community of borrowers and lenders.

The new Zopa homepage (see screenshot below) features several interesting community-involvement devices:

1. "I'd like to meet…" tool in upper left
2. Community factoid ticker running across the middle of the screen (see list of factoids below)
3. Community tab in primary navigation (top)

"I'd Like to Meet" tool
This tool, placed in one of the most-viewed areas of the homepage (upper left), allows users to find like borrowers and lenders. Using drop-down boxes, users may narrow their search to just borrowers in a single city, or those of a certain age or age range, and so on (see inset). 

Unfortunately, we were unable to see the results since our search queries just showed an endless "search in progress" graphic image.

Community factoid ticker
Even though scrolling tickers are annoying, they do draw attention. Since Zopa must make prospective users comfortable with its novel service, it makes sense to be mildly annoying to get the point across that Zopa is a vibrant and fast-growing community. However, the 3-minute cycle time (before stopping) is too long; a 30-second scroll along with a link to more factoids would be better.

In our test at 7:00 PM London time Oct. 18, there were 17 items running across the screen in this order: 

• 1,571 Johns have joined since we launched …
• 4,350 members have registered so far this month …
• 480 Zopa members have logged into their accounts today …
• 553 Sarahs have joined Zopa so far …
• Adrian from HULL has just joined …
• In the last hour, 8 new members joined …
• Lorraine just offered 50 to Zopa borrowers …
• Mark from OXFORD just had a loan reserved in the B market …
• More members come from London than anywhere else …
• The average age of a Zopa member is 36 …
• The last member from the Isle of Wight to lend was Laurence …
• The last person to join from Aberdeen was Clare …
• The most common name amongst Zopa members is David …
• There have been 4,875 requests for loan quotes in the last 24 hours …
• Thomas recently paid in using their debit card …
• We have 595 members from Leicester …
• Yesterday, 251 new members signed up …

Community tab
The Community tab in the site's main navigation leads to a page jammed with more community-building features and tools including (see screenshot below):

• Company blog
• Member discussion board
• Finance news as gathered by "Zopa and friends"
• Zopa newsletter
• Member story (monthly feature)

Summary
A good effort by the person-to-person lending pioneer. We look forward to the company's U.S. launch while passing along our regrets to the recent passing of its founder Richard Duvall (memorialized in this Oct. 17 Zopa blog entry).