clipped from: mashable.com Joshua Porter made an excellent observation a few days ago on what he calls the “del.icio.us lesson”. This is the idea that personal benefit should come before network effect - it’s definitely something you should bear in mind if you’re creating a social app. He writes:
Services based on user-generated content can, I think, be grouped into three categories:
1) The selfish service as described by Josh Porter - people generate content because it’s useful to them (i.e., del.icio.us, flickr, myspace). This is the predominant template.
2) The unselfish service - people generate content out of a pure sharing impulse. Wikipidea works on this principle. This structure only works if there is a truly massive user base. The ratio of contributors to read-only users of Wikipidea is, I would bet, well below one percent.
3) The nakedly selfish service - people generate content to promote their personal brand or to earn money (squidoo).
All three can work, and all are vulnerable in different ways to splog(?) abuse [Note - I think we need a new term for user-generated content abuse - slug?]