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."

Re:Myspace sucks

[ThisNukes4u]

He said more interesting, not better.

Nice to see imeem getting a mention

[illectro]

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.

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.

Re:orkut

[Requiem]

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.