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."

User generated content = quality?

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?

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?

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

Re:User generated content = quality?

"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?

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?

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 [simpy.com] from their advertizing.

Just the theft

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.

orkut

Google has its own pet project - the social networking site orkut [orkut.com], which has at least 14 million users which has been in beta for almost 3 years now...this appears to be in line with Eric's comments about the user-generated content web idea.

Re:orkut

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.

more interesting than microsoft

I find watching paint dry more interesting than microsoft... what's you're point?

I agree though, user generated content means that users will be more likely to frequent the site.

More heads are wiser than one

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 [simpy.com]) 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 [simpy.com], 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!

This doesn't make senese...

Why is everyone so happy in Silicon Valley again? A new wave of start-ups are cashing in on the next stage of the Internet. And this time, it's all about ... you.

Where's the "we" in "you"? If it's going to be about "you", that means all the "me" baby boomers are finally getting out of the picture. Does that mean there's no "I" in "we"? I'm confused.

More interesting from whose perspective?

All MySpace is is a means of sharing personal information. Microsoft makes tools that can be used to drive the development of a variety of cool things, and enables MySpace indirectly with Internet Explorer. To a typical teenager, MySpace is more interesting because .NET is not interesting. To a person who wants to actually make something novel and interesting, Microsoft is a far cooler company than MySpace.

Making a redundant free browser contributes?

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

user generated content inevitable

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.

Re: open source and web rush 2.0

I've been working on a project called Appleseed [sourceforge.net], 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?

Nice to see imeem getting a mention

Unlike all the other purely web offerings imeem [imeem.com] is built around a client and a distributed data model - making it technologicly the most interesting of the sites in the article. It's not been too successful so far but a lot of the smartest people I've met are using imeem - mostly because they're developers. It's really a shame, but the best technology rarely leads the market in popularity.
As a company imeem is doing good things for open source, I see that they're really pushing the development of mono, particularly on OSX where they're using it as a platform to run the same .Net code as powers the windows client.

How Many Of These Sites are Fads?

There are clearly some good ideas out there right now and some of them are making good money. Personally, I think MySpace is lame, but I'm not 15. There's another site I've seen called catch27, which allows people to create fake trading cards of themselves and try to collect a deck of the most popular people. It seems silly, but it turns a profit. I have to wonder though how long a site like that will remain popular? Will MySpace be making money 5 yrs. from now?

It's only usability...

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 ;-)

Re:It's only usability...

Yes. And I see no revolution on this *web* thing you people've been doing.

You could communicate with people far away instantly (hello telephone).
You could write or receive written content from fiends / work for a long time (letters are pretty old stuff).

The only "difference" between those and 1930 is just Usability / Demographics / Price.

Demographics and Usability are EVERYTHING (specially since they are key factor to price )

Haha.

Wonder if my site counts, since I'm giving free access to those willing to sort and categorize pictures... the metadata is more important than the pictures themselves.

To take the Tom Sawyer comparison a step further..

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.

profitable?

how do youtube, flickr and digg expect to make money? i don't see ads on any of those sites and i can't imagine that many people are paying for flickr's premium service.

deviantART someone?

Incredible. A 5-page article dealing with user-created content on the Web, and not a single word about deviantART http://www.deviantart.com/ [deviantart.com] the #1 art community (Flickr is not an art community).

Nor about SourceForge, which is also a great user-created content website, although it's left to the geeky "elite"

The 'We' in Web

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

youTube

The poster mentioned youTube. I frequently visit youTube when I get bored but I have never seen a single ad there? Where are the revenues coming from?

This was bound to happen......

This was bound to happen. As soon as a new generation grows up knowing the Internet the same way that they do their television, it couldn't be stopped. There have also been reports of teens that think voicemail is 'so last week' and for 'old people' because texting is all they do, it is a part of their life, part of how they interact with their friends, and things that happen on the net spread faster among social groups than anything else, well at least as fast as anything the olsen twins are doing.

Once it becomes a part of the social life of humans, it will necessarily need to become socially oriented, or it will be relegated to the same place that books explaining air bags go. If you have been keeping up with wireless news around the world, with news of the Internet around the world, you will not be surprised by this. The one really good thing that social networking sites have going for them.... they really didn't have to hype it much... no FUD, no 'smoke n mirrors', no 30 second commercials, no billboards. The sites just work, and news spread by word of mouth... I understand that in some circles, if you don't have a myspace address, some teens just don't know how to relate to you... in other words, it was adapted so quickly, and so readily, that not being part of it is a sort of self imposed ostrisization.

Anyway, to me, its not a surprise at all, and if the reality lives up to the hype, the semantic web, and some of the web 2.0 stuff will make the world a very different place. I can see a future where a teen, in her friends car gets a text message on her phone, and pleads over the phone to get her friends mom to spend $80 on shoes that just went on sale at xyz-store, and her mom to pay her back later. Yes, I foresee changes in social interaction on many levels if we get the next generation of the Internet correct.

What does qualify as valuable content?

What qualifies as a worthy read? Something that makes your professional value go up? Something that makes time go faster (i.e. it is fun?). But what is the real value that you get from playing Counter-Strike, posting or reading a rant, or some sexually confused girl's myspace blog (okay, maybe she is attractive)? What value does it add to your life? A candy bar tastes good, but it only makes you fat and probably doesn't do anything valuable for you, other than provide you with the five minutes of pleasure that it took to eat it. Perhaps, you could argue that eating healthy and working out provide long term value, because it makes you feel good in the long term. But does being fat make you feel good in the long term? Does 20 gigs of pr0n? 20 gigs is a lengthy bit of media, perhaps that does qualify as long term.

What!? No mention of...

zombo.com?

Could just be a fad

Remember when Internet dating was cool? Now it's a bottom-feeder thing. That may well happen to blithering your life story out on Myspace. Craiglist is already collapsing under the weight of spam.

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.

Re:Could just be a fad

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.

myspace ??

I wonder why they didn't find any other blog to give as an example. the blogs on myspace are the most cluttered and ugly ones I have ever seen. I can think of a lot of other more interesting ones like wordpress.com and blogger.com just to name a few.

Flickr and digg are good examples. What about slashdot.org ? This is also driven entirely by the readers albeit with some strict moderation in accepting stories.

It's not like the audience is doing all the work..

Just Friday, I started putting up a copy of LiveJournal on our webserver for internal company use (the boss says we can't trust Other People with our internal corporate communications, kind of like, um, email).

LiveJournal is an extremely NON-trivial bit of software. It's easier to build Apache with OpenSSL and Frontpage extensions. And the dependencies! Oh the dependencies!

So while the nice people at LiveJournal headquarters are getting all this "free" content, they're spending copious amounts of time making it easy enough for the web using public to make it all happen. And then there's the hardware requirements...

Web 2.0 Share the Profits

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 [flickr.com]. 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 [colingregorypalmer.net]

Of course MySpace is more interesting

MySpace has thousands of pictures of scantily-clad 16-year old girls. Microsoft.com, not so much.

User-generated content not new

User-generated content has existed for years on EBay, Amazon, and even Slashdot. All of these sites understood that they could simply aggregate data and then distribute it. Ok, it's actually not that simple, especially for the larger sites, given the amount of logistics involved to coordinate it all. But it's been around far longer than MySpace or YouTube.

One of the dangers with this model, as others have pointed out, is the fallacy of collective intelligence, that we can some how vote on facts. Had Wikipedia been around in the Middle Ages, the entries on astronomy would have presented a geocentric view of the universe. There is much less quality control on these sites than in traditional media. While the editors of Slashdot do a better of managing content than say, the Internet as a whole, this webpage is not the Wall Street Journal. It's a good starting point, but definitely not the last word.

Re:Myspace sucks

He said more interesting, not better.

Re:HyperHype bull

Flickr is profitable. So are you saying they won't be microsoft? That's probably true. Are you saying craigslist will? That's probably not.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=179294&cid=148 52866 [slashdot.org]

http://www.flickr.com/forums/help/9191/?search=pro fitable [flickr.com]