A Grand Unified Theory of YouTube and MySpace

Ant writes "Paul Boutin's Slate article explains the factors contributing to the success YouTube and MySpace: they are easy to use (usability), and they don't 'tell you what to do.'" From the article: "Both YouTube and MySpace fit the textbook definition of Web 2.0, that hypothetical next-generation Internet where people contribute as easily as they consume. Even self-described late adopters like New York editor Kurt Andersen recognize that that by letting everyone contribute, these sites have reached a critical mass where 'a real network effect has kicked in.'"

Comments

Re:Web 3.0

[interiot]

And, for the subject of user-created quality, I recommend listening to this week's This Week in Tech podcast, where Kevin Rose talks about some of the inards of Digg, and how they have to do a lot of ongoing work to avoid letting Digg becoming a vehicle for spam, and that they implement an internal system of Karma. There are multiple parallels to both Slashdot's karma system, and Wikipedia's work that is done to prevent wikipedia from being used to promote spam, etc.

(which is relevant, because once you have other people deciding what is quality and what isn't, the spammers want to jump in, pretend to be anonymous, and say Hey! my adverts are quality stuff everyone should look at!)