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."

Comments

Re:Myspace sucks

[ThisNukes4u]

He said more interesting, not better.

User generated content = quality?

[jmke]

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?

Re:User generated content = quality?

[LiquidCoooled]

Your sat on a site with user generated content and asking yourself if its worth it?

Of course its worth it - Spending time in a community of like minded people is always worth it.

You have made 38 comments here (relative newbie), theres people with thousands of postings and reading loads of stories (myself included) and spending time here because this feels better than sitting bored watching tv - its interactive.

Re:User generated content = quality?

[legirons]

"If one throws a million darts at a dartboard, it's highly unlikely that none of them will hit the bullseye."

But can you tell where the bullseye is, by looking at the distribution of darts?

what's not to love?

[HunterAmor]

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?

Re:what's not to love?

[otisg]

It sounds rather simple, doesn't it? Unfortunately, it ain't that simple. The difficult part is scaling. With advertizing rates being as low as they are, you need a LOT of page views to make any decent money. In other to have a lot of page views, you need a lot of users, and a lot of regular/active users (Slashdot is a good example). Once you have a lot of users your expenses go up - more bandwidth, more CPUs, more app servers, more NAS, more clusters, more failover this and that, replication... and then you have to answer all those emails that start pouring in, you've got to have a blog to keep people updated, etc. And there are only 24 hours in a day. And you want to have a life, friends, and family. So you need to hire people. But you need money for that. So you go to VCs because your ads don't cover all these expenses. So, you see, it's not that simple. :) Moreover, some crazy people like me give away money from their advertizing.

Re: open source and web rush 2.0

[dominion]

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 the theft

[CarpetShark]

what's not to love in a business model like that?

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.

It's only usability...

[_eb0la_reston_]

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 ;-)

Making a redundant free browser contributes?

[expro]

Do not confuse leveraged market share with any real contribution they are making to peoples' experience.

To take the Tom Sawyer comparison a step further..

[O'Laochdha]

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.

The 'We' in Web

[jaafonso]

There's no need to put the 'We' in Web. It already has.

Re:Could just be a fad

[rinkjustice]

Remember when Internet dating was cool? Now it's a bottom-feeder thing.

You might have that mixed up. 5 + years ago, internet dating was totally uncool, now it's a fast growing multi-billion dollar industry and a logical avenue for meeting people (because lo and behold, it works) , and thusly socially acceptable.

Internet dating has never and will never be cool however, just like find a job or doing your income taxes has and will never be "cool". It's a facet of mortal existance, just done in a different way.