Dion Hinchcliffe’s post entitled Ten Ways To Take Advantage of Web 2.0 is worth reading. I’ve had some fears about Web 2.0 – with a tonne of new online applications rolling out every day, I’ve wondered which ones people will find useful in the long term.
Why has delicious survived? It’s not primarily because it’s social – above all, it’s because there’s obvious individual benefit. I can grab my bookmarks even if my computer dies or even if I’m on a different computer on the other side of the world.
Dion expounds this further:
Encourage Social Contributions With Individual Benefit. This is one of the key ingredients for creating good social software and should really common sense when you think about it, yet it is neglected far too often. The social bookmarking service, del.icio.us, however does this perhaps better than anyone else. The idea is that most people will not spend the time to contribute content or enrichment to a web site unless they are getting something out of it. With social bookmarking, it’s the fact that your bookmarks are uniquely valuable to you personally, regardless of whether they are socially shared. Never mind the fact that they can provide you even more value through sharing with others via affinity services and other add-ons. The core concept here is to provide personal motivation to the individual to contribute information or get involved in other types of participation that continually improves the entire service for everyone else.
I’ve blogged about this before – I’d rather write my own reviews, events, classified on my blog preferably using a structured blog post and someone can aggregate my content. For example, I love to read books but I haven’t really felt the urge to write a review on Amazon.com, even though I find benefit in reading others’ reviews. I’d much rather write a review on my blog where people can discuss my thoughts, than over at Amazon – I’m not personally getting much out of contributing a review there.
This and the other principals are a must-read for anyone developing new online applications.
your thoughts
Antony
Rachel – a genuinely useful post. Thank you. I’ll be chewing on this.
Michael Whitney
I totally agree. Regardless of the social aspect the most important thing is that the user must gain something. At Seekum though the users collaborate to make the search results better, the individual benefits by having better results thanks to the group.
Rachel
Oh, what a small world Michael – I was driving today with my husband and said that people are developing a social search tool which might just rival Google one day – and telling him that lately I’ve been using delicious often as a search engine. All the best with your endeavours.
I’m still wondering how people might abuse the system to their advantage (artificially inflating their site’s ranking)…
del.icio.us as a search engine — cre8d design blog
[...] Ah, it’s a small world! I was driving around in the intense heat this afternoon with my husband, talking to him about the whole “Me first” concept. I was talking about how lately I’ve been using del.icio.us as a search engine more and more. It’s probably not suitable for all types of searches just yet, but are the links on delicious of a better quality and more relevant to me than, say, on Google? Are relevant links being discovered faster by the massive delicious user-base than search bots? Are there less link-farms, unnaturally-rank-inflated sites on delicious? [...]
Michael Whitney
People definately will try and exploit the system. The more people that use the system, the less the spammers will be able to effect the overall results however. User administration tasks can be added to help also. A user might say mark an item as spam, and after a decent percentage of people mark the item it disapears.
Mark Wilson
Fantastic post. And thanks for the link through to Dion. I blogged about you here: http://reblogger.wordpress.com/2006/02/08/ten-things-to-think-about/