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The New Wisdom of the Web
theodp writes "In a cover story, Newsweek takes a look at the new wave of start-ups cashing in on the next stage of the Internet by Putting The 'We' in Web. Sites built on user-generated content like YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Digg and Facebook have all taken a page from Tom Sawyer's playbook, engaging the community to do their work, prompting Google CEO Eric Schmidt to suggest he finds MySpace more interesting than Microsoft."
He said more interesting, not better.
thisnukes4u.net
Does user generated content like seen on the sites mentioned equal quality reading? is it worth hours of browsing other people's randomly submitted content to find a few diamonds? how often do you find yourself spending time on those sites?
so other people create your "content" for free, and you get advertising revenue for having those same people look at the "content" created by others. what's not to love in a business model like that?
Indeed, more heads are wiser than one. An old concept applied on a massive scale, and so far it works. The piece I personally like best in this article is from Craigslist's founder who points out that the reason his team is so scalable is because they provide self-service. Everything I ever built (including the latest Simpy) was like this, and I've always been happy not to have to hire a team of people to manage something that users of the system could handle themselves, or amongst themselves.
The other piece I like here is also from Craigslist guy, about not having to charge everybody. This reminds me of what I did with Simpy (see this Simpy + AdSense bit, and pay attention to the Q&A towards the end of the entry). People have been very happy with the simplicity of this concept, and no user has complained about ads - they don't see them... but others do!
Simpy
The internet was built by users, it only makers sense that as the tools to create content become easier to use more and more ordinary people are likely to create their own content. for all their creativity, large companies cannot create anything other than a standardized product, individuals on the other hand create content that companies would never even think of making.
Fool me once...shame on you, fool me twice...won't be fooled again (our president)
I've been working on a project called Appleseed, which is sort of a distributed version of MySpace/Friendster, but is turning out to be an amalgamation of gmail/flickr/myspace/livejournal. It's been slow going, but it's starting to pick up the pace, it's just been hard having to work full time and do this in my offtime.
That said, I'm disappointed that, with all of these social network oriented sites popping up, and all these new technologies being explored by commercial enterprises, that the open source community hasn't stepped up to the plate and offered free alternatives. Gmail? Flickr? Del.icio.us? Myspace?
I know the open source community can build reusable software that's as good or better than any of this, so why haven't we? Why are we still using SquirrelMail?
Just that it essentially boils down to theft. These sites are using copyright against the users, by having them submit content under the site owner's choice of license. Often, users are not aware of this. As a result, they see no difference between open sites and closed ones, and move between them based on nothing more than popularity.
Of course, those of us who know better look for a GFDL license, and find it on sites like Wikipedia, or one of the more Free Creative Commons licenses. One day, there will probably be a law that the licensing must be very clear to anyone who submits content, and hopefully everyone will prefer the sites where the content belongs to THEM.
I see no *revolution* on YouTube, Flickr, blogging, etc.. You could post, and share photos and/or videos on the Internet back in 1994.
;-)
IMHO - The "difference" between now and 1994 are just Demographics and Usability:
* Nowadays, we have much more people online than in 1994, 1998, or 2001.
* Back in 1994 you had to be a computer whiz to post photos/videos, etc... most "business" built then assumed their users had some kind of "computer skills" normal people usually lack of.
*IF* you lower your product entry barrier (making it easy to use), WHILE there's more and more audience available, you're business will likely succeed
mootion.com - Never underestimate VCs stock options (was: Web 2.0)
Do not confuse leveraged market share with any real contribution they are making to peoples' experience.
Tom Sawyer, according the the external narration of the novel, inadvertently found that on some level, the children liked painting the fence, so long as it was not obligatory. (I don't remember the exact wording, but Twain compared it to driving a buggy.) People like to show off what they know, hence Wikipedia. People like to go on about every thought that pops into their heads, hence blogs, including LJ and mySpace. People like to throw in their two cents about everything, hence ours truly, as well as Fark, America's Debate, 2, etc. If someone's under obligation to do these things, you get scholars, columnists, politicos, etc. complaining about their jobs.
There's nothing to be curious about.
I've had an account there almost since the beginning, and it's horrific. The UI is ugly. The site is prone to crashes, to making duplicate posts, to telling you that your attempt at posting failed (it actually succeeded! surprise!). My gaming group originally had a community there for the homebrew system we played, but we all eventually stopped using the site, due to it being a gigantic suckhole of poor code and design.
There's no need to put the 'We' in Web. It already has.
The "hey, if we give it away, we'll get eyeballs and mind share" concept is very 1999. There's only so much advertising revenue possible, since sellers have finite advertising budgets which are some fraction of their sales. An increase in one area means a decrease somewhere else. Or, more likely, lower advertising prices. Look what happened to banner ad pricing. And now Microsoft wants in. The only thing that makes this work is if the users are doing all the work and the infrastructure is cheap to run.
The eBay model and the Yahoo Store model work, because they're involved in the transaction and do some of the work of making it happen, in exchange for a cut. They have a real revenue model.
While I do love sites like flickr, I had a bit of a change of heart when they made it possible for others to buy prints of my photos. While I always knew that flickr made money off of my work through their advertising, selling physical copies of my photos made it a bit too real and a bit too obvious. I think that in the future of Web 2.0 the companies should recognize that their users generate their profits and share some of the wealth.
-CGP