웹2.0을 넘어 웹3.0으로

구글, 드디어 위키 서비스 시작하다

cykaneys — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 07:45:05 +0900

Knol: Google Takes on Wikipedia

Written by Frederic Lardinois / July 23, 2008 12:50 PM / 4 Comments

Google just opened up Knol, its Wikipedia competitor, to the public after announcing a private beta of the service last December. Unlike Wikipedia, Knol puts a stronger emphasis on authorship and even encourages users to start different 'knols' for the same subject. Google is also serving up AdSense advertising on the site, whereas Wikipedia stays away from any advertising on its site.

In many respects, Knol is similar to Jason Calacanis' Mahalo, though its scope seems even more ambitious and its tools a bit more refined. It does, however, validate the Mahalo model.

Authorship/Identity

Knol puts a lot of emphasis on authorship and, somewhat akin to Amazon's "Real Name" scheme, authors can validate their identity on Knol through either a credit card or phone number.

The default setting for every Knol is "moderated collaboration." In this mode, anybody with a Google account can suggest changes to an knol, but the author has to accept these changes before they go live.

Authors can also invite others to contribute to their articles and given them the same rights as the original author.

There is also an option for authors to write a short bio of themselves in Knol. While this is interesting here, it will be even more interesting to see if Google might start sharing these Knol identities (and maybe even the users' reputation) among more of its properties.

Usage

Setting up a Knol is as easy as clicking the "Write a Knol" button. The text editor, too, is pretty straightforward, especially in the face of the often cryptic mark-up language most wikis use.

Knol uses a rich text editor, which presents users with all the typical editing functions, including basic formatting options, links (all set to 'nonfollow'), and the ability to add references.

As of now, you can not embed any videos or other content, except for the New Yorker Cartoons that Google incensed for this project for reasons only Google knows.

Users who don't want to write their own articles can review and rate knols. There is also an option to leave comments on every knol.

Creative Commons

Users can choose between three licenses for their articles, the Creative Commons Attribution License, the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, and an "All Rights Reserved" license. The Attribution license is the default setting. Users can chose a different license for every knol.

Advertising

Authors on Knol can enter their AdSense data into Knol. Besides the cut Google already takes from the advertising through AdSense anyway, authors will get the regular AdSense payout for every click on an ad. This seems like a smart way to reward users who write the best (or most popular) content, while still making money for Google.

In the competition with Wikipedia, this might mean that some authors could divert their attention from editing Wikipedia articles to Knol. However, the question will also be if spammers can find a way of abusing this.

New Yorker Cartoons?

While there is no option to embed any videos or other content into the site, authors can embed cartoons from the New Yorker. This is done through a rather cumbersome process where users have to first search for a cartoon in the New Yorker store and then enter the ID number of the cartoon into Knol. Why Google chose the New Yorker's cartoon archive for this is anybody's guess, but chances are that Google will announce more content partnerships in the near future.

Is Google Going After Wikipedia?

Given how often Wikipedia results appear as Google's top results, it would make sense for Google to look at this and decide to start its own competitor. By incentivizing authors through AdSense and by giving its users simple, but powerful tools to start their articles, Google might just be on the right track. While Google keeps reiterating that Knol is not meant to compete with Wikipedia, it's hard to see how that wouldn't be the case.

Knol, of course, has far fewer articles now than Wikipedia, but as it grows, it will be interesting to watch if Google is going to give preference to its own pages over the Wikipedia results. After all, Knol carries Google advertising and Wikipedia doesn't, so Google would clearly have an incentive in doing so, though the potential public outcry if Google would try to do this might prevent them from even attempting it.

0 TrackBacks

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/4511

Comments

Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts

We can see where this wouldn't quite go head to head competition wise with Wikipedia. It seems it has a different objective in terms of authorship which pretty much makes the site much differant than wikipedia.

Posted by: Nick Stamoulis | July 23, 2008 12:59 PM
...man, these guys are greedy.

Posted by: chris | July 23, 2008 2:16 PM
I work for HubPages.com, a prominent user-generated content site with an AdSense revenue share program that is probably more similar to Knol than Wikipedia is. Spam and inappropriate content are always a problem for sites like ours, and we're extremely interested in how Google will handle the moderation issue. They're probably also going to have to find a way to make content easier to find (we use keyword tags to help visitors locate what they're looking for more easily), and ensure that good content bubbles to the top in searches.

Over at HubPages we have HubScore and an efficient flagging system to this effect, but at least on Blogger, Google hasn't shown a great track record for eliminating splogs and bad content.

We'll be watching with interest.

Posted by: Maddie Ruud | July 23, 2008 3:07 PM
If anyone is interested in purchasing www.oondi.com which is a website similar to Google Knol, send an e-mail to info [AT] oondi [DOT] com. The time is now for these types of websites; the business model has just been validated. oondi.com also focuses towards other languages such as Dutch and French, which is unique in comparison to Squidoo, HubPages, Google Knol, etc...

Posted by: Ken | July 23, 2008 3:28 PM

The Facebook economy

cykaneys — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:05:58 +0900

The Facebook economy

The No. 2 social network is fast evolving into a new kind of software platform - and the race is on to figure out how to turn users' every move into dollars for enterprising developers.

By Lindsay Blakely and Michael V. Copeland, Business 2.0 Magazine

August 23 2007: 7:31 AM EDT

(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Talk about a killer app. Two years ago Jia Shen and Lance Tokuda wrote, just for fun, a goofy Web application for MySpace that could turn anyone's photos into live-action slide shows. It succeeded - horribly. Within days of its launch, hordes of users at the then-superhot social network discovered the app, added it to their profiles, and communicated it to their friends. It spread like a case of Ebola at the Super Bowl. Within a month Shen and Tokuda had 100,000 users, and traffic was doubling every 24 hours.

The servers - those digital canaries in the mine shaft - crashed, and crashed again. "It was crazy," Shen says. "We were down 17 of the first 30 days." Then it got worse. With traffic peaking at 1.5 million users, server costs topped $20,000 a month. And there was no way to monetize their creation.

The gatekeeper: Facebook platform manager Morin is busy keeping tabs on more than 2,500 applications.

Drawing power: Kantor (center) and brothers Tim and Ted Suzman turned to advertising to monetize Graffiti's 5.9 million users.

Mini moguls: Goldstein and partner David Gentzel run SocialMedia, one of the biggest startups dedicated to Facebook apps.

More from Business 2.0

Live chat: your new online salesperson

The hijack-proof truck

Server farm goes solar

Fastest Growing Tech Companies

Current Issue

Subscribe to Fortune

Still, they soldiered on for more than a year, keeping afloat with tens of thousands of dollars in loans while hoping to figure out a way to turn their enormous fan base into a brilliant business. It never happened - at least not on MySpace.

This spring, however, Shen and Tokuda spent a few days porting their MySpace hit over to Facebook. The upstart social network began as a hangout for high school and college students and last September allowed anyone to join.

Eight months later, Facebook did something MySpace still hasn't done: It opened up its network to developers and made it easy for them to make money from their applications. Which is exactly what Shen and Tokuda did when they rewrote their app and let it loose on Facebook.

Two months later, the duo had generated more than $200,000 in ad revenue. By late July they had 14 other apps up and running, with more than 22 million users. "When we started, we had no idea what we were doing," Shen says. "Now we have a whole suite of applications, and that's where our power is."

It's an increasingly common tale as the Facebook economy picks up steam. In just 10 weeks, hundreds of developers launched more than 2,500 new applications, triggering 139 million downloads. While a possible Facebook IPO or acquisition could change things overnight, for the moment it's a free-for-all.

The apps have names like FoodFight, Zombies, (fluff)Friends, and Fortune Cookie, and they let users indulge in everything from scrawling graffiti and sending virtual cocktails to buying music, brokering loans, and joining charitable causes - usually without leaving their Facebook homepages. Some apps have attracted hundreds of thousands of users, and a select few have pulled in millions.

One venture capital firm, Sand Hill Road-based Bay Partners, has set aside more than $12 million to bootstrap 50 new Facebook applications. "The current apps only scratch the surface of what is possible," says Salil Deshpande, a partner at the firm. "We're looking for much more sophisticated applications that can make money."

MySpace testing targeted ads: money time for social media?

Developers like Shen have already proven how to use Facebook - and other social networks - to pull in a mass audience. But figuring out how to profit from those viral applications is another matter. So far, most of the revenue from Facebook apps comes from fairly primitive forms of advertising, such as Google (Charts, Fortune 500) AdSense. Yet a few developers are building applications to sell real and virtual goods. And others think they'll be able to charge major brands for access to the highly targeted Facebook crowds they've started to assemble. "We intend to build a giant company on top of these social operating systems," says Slide CEO Max Levchin, who's already made one fortune as a co-founder of PayPal. His startup specializes in photo slide shows that pull in more than 129 million users a month. "It's an opportunity for all of us to build the next Electronic Arts, Intuit, or Adobe."

The Facebook economy was born one afternoon in May, when the insouciant boy hero of social networking, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, told a crowd of developers in San Francisco what they had been dying to hear: that hackers deserve a real piece of the action in a market with ad revenue alone approaching $1 billion.

"Right now, social networks are closed platforms," Zuckerberg told the assembled entrepreneurs. "Today we are going to end that." That day Facebook began allowing programmers like Shen to build as many apps for Facebook's 32 million users as they could dream up - and to pocket whatever money they made doing it, with Facebook providing access to both the audience and the programming tools needed to draw them in.

Programmers talk about Zuckerberg and Facebook in the same terms they once used to describe Bill Gates and Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500), so great are the power that social networks wield and the perceived stranglehold Facebook has on its growing audience. MySpace, by far the largest of these networks, with more than 100 million users, was the first to see them as software platforms, allowing users to customize their profiles by adding simple apps. But when it came to sharing revenue, MySpace held its cards close to its chest: it would quietly permit developers to make money only when their users left the MySpace network.

Zuckerberg has turned the MySpace business model upside down: Not only is he giving developers their own real estate within Facebook - both inside users' profile pages and on piggybacked application pages - but he's allowing them to make money from their apps any way they can, from ad sales to direct purchases of services and merchandise. For example, download iLike, an app that lets you sample and purchase music, and the developer gets a 5 percent kickback if you end up buying songs from iTunes or Amazon.com (Charts, Fortune 500).

To incentivize developers, Facebook is also breaking ranks with rivals by sharing crucial data - such as a user's age, interests, and friends - that enables more sophisticated applications. Zuckerberg also set up a speedy approval process that allows most programmers to load their apps into the network in a matter of days.

Josh Kopelman, a Philadelphia-based venture capitalist and investor in such startups as LinkedIn and Yapta, sees more users coming Facebook's way (ComScore reports Facebook grew 270 percent last year, while MySpace grew 72 percent) - and even more developers. "If you were a venture-backed Web startup," Kopelman says, "and had to decide whether to focus on a site that welcomed you in and let you keep 100 percent of the revenue you generate, vs. a site with a vague policy that doesn't let you generate any revenue, it's not even a decision. It's an IQ test."

What's next for the Internet

The real IQ test, of course, is figuring out how to create an app that takes off and makes money. So what defines a killer Facebook app? Senior platform manager Dave Morin says the stickiest applications are those that tap into the "social graph." That's Zuckerberg's oft-quoted term for the web of connections between users and their friends. "Most apps are only interesting if there is much more content below that widget," Morin says. "It needs to take you someplace different, do something more."

Morin's favorite example is (fluff)Friends, which lets the user place a cartoon image of a penguin, pig, squirrel, radish, or other cute object on his or her profile page. People can pet it, buy a habitat for it (with fake dollars), even buy a real T-shirt (with real dollars) bearing the virtual pet's image. That's all pretty standard stuff these days.

But this app's clever twist, Morin says, is the way it gets you to reach out to your friends. First you adopt a pet and invite your friends to pet or feed it. Then you pet their pets, or see all the pets that your friends have adopted within Facebook - all while racking up virtual currency to engage in more (fluff)Friend silliness. "I call it interaction capital," Morin says. "The more users interact with the application, the more virtual credit they get." And if they sell a lot of T-shirts or advertising, that's more cash in the (fluff)Friends creators' pockets. The app cleared 1 million downloads after just seven weeks and now adds more than 10,000 new users a day.

There's a science to achieving perfect viral alchemy, and it's getting more sophisticated by the day. One place every Facebook developer frequents is Appaholic.com. Created by San Francisco-based programmer Jesse Farmer, Appaholic breaks down Facebook applications by popularity, growth rate, and even "virality," as measured by growth in a single day. On a recent day, Farmer ticked off the leading app in each category: Top Friends, a Slide application that lets you rank your friends; Griddle, a word game; and What's My Chinese Name?

Appaholic has developers glued to the site's analytic tools, looking for secrets that reveal what makes one app soar and another tank. When a new feature suddenly boosts an application's number of users, "you quickly see other developers rolling out similar features," says Paul McKellar, the San Francisco-based programmer behind the hit app SocialMoth, with more than 400,000 users. "You have to, if you want to keep up."

In the short time since the new Facebook platform went live, Farmer has already spotted a few telltale patterns. One attribute that's death to an app, he says, is complexity. Facebook and all its homegrown applications are relatively simple; those who create something that requires too much thought or explanation quickly run into trouble.

Farmer learned the hard way: Bookshelf, an application he helped develop, lets you list, share, and search your books, movies, music, and games. It went nowhere. "We were decimated by applications that didn't do nearly as much, that were far simpler, like iRead," Farmer says. "Within a week they were 10 times our size. Any application that is more complicated than the most complicated feature in the core of Facebook will be penalized."

Applications that augment or mimic existing features on Facebook - such as the wall (a space for writing messages) or a poke (a way for friends to say a quick hello) - are also more likely to take off. And those that stumble on even the smallest bug are likely to become roadkill. Matches, a flirting application, fell into a hole when a time-out bug, a Facebook glitch, stopped the app in its tracks. In the week it took to fix it, Matches lost about 100,000 users and ceded the category to a rival called Crushes. The lesson, Farmer says, is "users don't care why it doesn't work or whose fault it is. They will leave and probably not come back."

20 of a kind

Armed with those sorts of insights, some startups are positioning themselves as Facebook app factories. "Netscape browsed the Web, Yahoo organized it, Google searched it, and now Facebook has made it social," says Seth Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia, a small shop in Mill Valley, Calif., that's already turned out such Facebook hits as FoodFight (throw a virtual lobster at your buddy) and Happyhour (send that buddy a cocktail). How does he plan to cash in on all those widgets?

At the moment, advertising opportunities are unproven - which is why Goldstein is leaning toward sponsorship as a simpler path to profits. FoodFight, Goldstein says, is an ideal mechanism for food companies to market themselves. Instead of throwing a chicken drumstick at a friend, a user could throw, say, a drumstick sponsored by Tyson Foods. "I had an ad agency representing a buffalo wings chain approach us with an $80,000 ad buy," Goldstein says. "It's starting to happen."

Shen and Tokuda's outfit, meanwhile, has become a lot more than a slide show. The company, now called RockYou, has more than $10 million in venture funding, more than a dozen developers, and one of the largest portfolios of applications. Its 15 apps include Horoscopes, Emote (icons for your status box), and Glitter Text (sparkly fonts). This time around, the revenue model is getting as much attention as the code. In late July the startup launched its own advertising network: RockYou is offering its user base and Facebook pages as a way for advertisers and other developers to reach more users. "We don't know which approach is going to work best yet," Shen says, "so we're trying them all."

So is San Francisco-based Slide, which has 12 Facebook apps and a growing audience to offer advertisers. Slide is also launching an ad network that will let advertisers brand its apps. CEO Levchin thinks that because users volunteer their ages, interests, locations, and other specific personal information, Facebook has the potential to be the best ad platform on the Web. "Until recently, Facebook had all of this ad inventory to itself," Levchin says. "Now it's saying, 'Go nuts. Sell it any way you want.'"

Not everyone is drinking the Kool-Aid. Andrew Chen, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures, thinks the revenue opportunity is still unproven. "The question is whether large-brand advertisers will feel like it's a good idea to buy space on still relatively small pieces of real estate," Chen says. "I would imagine they'd want to deal directly with Facebook." The company, after all, already generates an estimated $150 million in ad revenue on its own.

Developers face other risks: Should Facebook go public or get acquired - as has been widely rumored - new circumstances could force Zuckerberg to give up his share-the-love revenue model and keep more of it in-house. The company might also rip a page from the Gates playbook and launch its own versions of the most popular applications. Or Zuckerberg could kick everyone out and go home.

As a hedge, developers aren't limiting themselves to one platform. Bebo, LinkedIn, MySpace, and several other large social networks have signaled in recent months that they will likely follow Zuckerberg's footsteps. "They will all open up," says Charlene Li, a marketing analyst at Forrester Research. "It's inevitable." MySpace, for its part, is said to be working on substantial changes to its platform. While company officials declined to respond to specific questions about its plans, they did say their goal is to work more closely with outside developers.

Anticipating that day, Palo Alto-based Box.net, which sells online storage and sharing, recently created a Facebook app for its service and a subscription package for Facebook users. But that doesn't mean the startup won't be showing up on other networks when their doors open. While the networks all have different software protocols, the apps are small, and the time and effort required to retool one for, say, LinkedIn or MySpace doesn't scare developers. "Facebook has done the best job opening up," says Box.net CEO Aaron Levie. "But we are not about building a business on any particular platform."

For folks like McKellar, though, simply owning a few Facebook apps is just fine. He has yet to make any real money from SocialMoth, but he's willing to fork out $500 a month in server costs just to hold on to his audience in the hope that he'll figure out a revenue model soon enough. "I go where the users are, and where they make it easy for me," McKellar says. "Right now, that's Facebook."

Four ways to make money

1: Sell ads

The play

Just about any Facebook app can get into the ad game, but only those with the biggest audiences will earn serious money. Several easy-to-use ad networks are already delivering the ads for a cut of overall sales.(See "Tools," below.)

The front-runners

Graffiti (5.9 million users). This highly viral drawing tool spread quickly because of its simplicity and originality.

iLike (5.4 million users). Users can set up their music and video libraries in mere minutes.

The Simpsons Photos, Quotes, and Trivia (60,000 users). Pearls of wisdom from the first family of Springfield.

The payoff

Apps currently generate less than $1 for every 1,000 pageviews. But that amount will likely increase as demographic targeting becomes more refined and the ad models move from simply racking up pageviews to measuring users' engagement.

Tricks of the trade

1. Establish your base. Hold off on serving ads until you have at least 10,000 users. Bombarding users with too much advertising can scare them away and hurt your growth in the long run.

2. Test different ad networks. Putting up ads is a simple cut-and-paste operation, so you can afford to be choosy and pick the network that gives you the best deal.

3. Don't clutter up app pages. "This is definitely a challenge for developers," says Mark Kantor, one of three developers behind Graffiti. "The most important thing is to preserve user experience."

4. Renegotiate as you grow. Demand a bigger cut of the revenue share as your traffic jumps. Says Kantor, "It might be better to go with a small ad network if you think you'll stand out."

Tools

Dozens of ad networks are cropping up to serve the Facebook developers. Here are a few.

1. Lookery (lookery.com). This new Facebook-specific ad network aims to offer developers demographic profiles of their user bases. More targeted advertising could soon fetch a higher price.

2. Userplane (userplane.com). AOL-owned Userplane pays per minute of exposure rather than just per pageview, so it's good for applications like games that keep users highly engaged.

3. Google AdSense. Not new, but many developers consider it the best means of supplying relevant ads.

2: Attract sponsors

The play

Advertisers are already sponsoring apps. Besides being widely used, your application needs to offer companies a natural way to interact with their customers.

The front-runners

Likeness (2.9 million users). Offers quizzes that generate top-10 lists - an ideal branding vehicle - and matches them with those of friends with similar preferences.

FoodFight (2 million users). Virtual lunch money buys you food to throw at friends. Next up on its menu: chicken wings from a major food chain.

HotLists (1.6 million users). This app lets users define their personas by posting brands' logos, cleverly dubbed "stylepix," on their profiles.

The payoff

Building direct relationships with brands takes more time and effort, but it means higher-quality advertising and more control over how your users interact with it. Expect to earn multiple-dollar CPMs instead of the pocket change you'd get from the ad networks.

Tricks of the trade

1. Don't pitch big brands without big numbers. You'll need a large traffic base - at least a few million users - before top brands will pay attention.

2. Know who's looking at your pages and why. Analyze your user demographics so you can pitch your audience effectively to sponsors.(See "Tools," below.)

3. Let your users do the work. Incorporate brands that your users identify with, and they'll willingly spread the word.

4. Don't overdo it. Too much brand presence will scare away Facebook's sometimes advertising-averse audience.

Tools

Where to find help analyzing your traffic and users.

1. Google Analytics. Embedding Analytics into your apps is easy, and it churns out useful stats about where users are coming from.

2. Gigya (gigya.com). This startup tracks metrics like app stickiness and user adoption rates.

3. Appaholic (appaholic.com). This site tracks traffic growth by the hour, day, or week - critical when launching a new ad campaign.

3: Sell services

The play

As apps become more about utility and less about fun, opportunities will arise to sell digital services of lasting value to users. Eventually, they'll make purchases without leaving their profiles.

The front-runners

Files (43,000 users). Offered by Box.net, this online file-storage service turns a Facebook profile into a repository for members' digital media.

Picnik (206,000 users). A Facebook version of Photoshop.(Hello, Adobe?) Basic tools are free; advanced features are offered for an additional fee.

The payoff

If you're selling a real service, then you can have your cake and eat it too- try selling subscriptions and ads to double-dip on your traffic.

Tricks of the trade

1. Start with a free version. And make switching to a paid offering an easy process. Don't force users to leave Facebook to sign up.

2. Set logical limits. Decide carefully what you'll give for free and what you won't. And even the freebies must be valuable enough for customers to be willing to spend their time.

3. Research your price points. Box.net already had storage plans for businesses and professionals. But when it moved onto Facebook, the company rethought its pricing models and created a $25-per-year plan that's comparable to the cost of an external flash drive - the way most college students store important files.

4. Be tactful and timely. Box.net alerts its users when they're nearing their file or storage size limits, politely reminding them about its for-pay premium service.

Tools

Where to find a platform to process payments.

1. PayPal. A starter plan will cost you 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction.

2. Google Checkout. The standard processing fee is 2 percent plus 20 cents per transaction.

3. Facebook. The company is rumored to be launching its own payment platform soon.

4: Sell products

The play

As Facebook increasingly becomes the center of people's digital lives, it's also becoming a venue for selling things - digital and otherwise - to its fast-growing audience.

The front-runners

Amazing Giftbox (127,000 users). Sends virtual Amazon merchandise.

Band Tracker (29,000 users). Searches upcoming concerts and links to ticket vendors.

Visual CD Rack (20,000 users). Lets users browse and buy music from a virtual CD rack.

The payoff

Most developers are going the affiliate route, offering product wish lists and then sending users to sites like Amazon.com or iTunes. Others, however, are directly selling such items as ringtones and T-shirts.

Tricks of the trade

1. Be a middleman. iLike makes its music-sampling apps simple and hands off sales to iTunes or Amazon via affiliate partnerships. Those directly selling hard goods need to prepare for the complexity of payment and delivery.

2. Keep it simple. Facebook has not yet become a place where people are likely to buy, say, a digital camera. But users are starting to purchase items that don't break the bank and extend Facebook's utility. XLR8 Mobile, for instance, is looking to sell ringtones and wallpaper on Facebook via custom storefront widgets. "We don't want to bring people to the store," says XLR8 Mobile CEO Perry Tell. "We prefer to bring the store to the people."

3. Give it away. Going viral is always the goal. One great way to get there is by offering free samples. Whether it's a digital download of a song or the image of an item, give your customers a taste of what they'll get before asking them to commit.

4. Don't rule out the odd. "Sometimes wacky, unusual, off-the-beaten-path stuff sells huge," Tell says. "Everyone is looking for the next Crazy Frog, so you must be willing to try lots of things."

Tools

1. Clearspring Technologies. This analytics service tracks exactly who's downloading an app and what they're buying through it. It also suggests when to double down on an item or sales approach that is working or, conversely, kill off those that aren't.

2. Garage Sale. Developers can use this Facebook shopping cart system run by Buy.com, which takes a 5 percent cut of sales.

3. Facebook Marketplace. The largest classified-ads community on the network, it's a good place to monitor buying trends.

Facebook Platform: The Fanfare Revisited

cykaneys — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:02:24 +0900

Facebook Platform: The Fanfare Revisited

Written by Alex Iskold / July 15, 2008 11:35 AM / 9 Comments

When the Facebook platform debuted last year it was touted as the next big thing. Media, VC, startups and big companies shared the enthusiasm for its future. And no wonder: Facebook enabled access to 50 million users. You no longer needed to bring the audience to your app. Instead your app could be delivered to one of the largest audiences around the web. And not just delivered, but injected into a massive social network.

While it started great, it turns out things are not that simple. Three fundamental issues surfaced:

Technical: Should the app be just a teaser that leads users to their site or should it be a duplicate and have full functionality?
Business: If e.g. New York Times builds a Facebook app, will it be economic for them (since there's little revenue in Facebook)?
Provider costs: Does it pay for Facebook to maintain the platform? As a business with a huge valuation, Facebook needs to maximise profit.

With these issues out in the open for the last year, the platform is suddenly not so compelling. How could this great idea go wrong?

The Technology Behind the Platform is Solid

There is little doubt Facebook's platform is revolutionary. Overnight it opened access to a massive audience. Big companies and startups just needed to write an app, submit it to the gallery and they have access.

From the development view the platform is good. Sure there are quirks, but people can build apps. Security and scaleability are wired into its core and there are APIs and libraries in popular languages.

Teasers vs. Native Apps

Right now there are two types of Facebook applications: teasers and native apps. A teaser exposes partial functions of the application and offers users a click to leave Facebook to go to another site. Native apps are developed to run on Facebook.

The problem is, any existing site wants to build a teaser application. Most sites make money on ads and they have existing ad infrastructure in place and all they need is traffic. This is a product management nightmare because it isn't clear what info should be exposed. And the user experience is bad because users dislike jumping between Facebook and other sites.

Some companies built copies of their apps that live entirely on Facebook and mimic the functionality of the real one. This solution creates both engineering and marketing problems. Maintaining a duplicate code base is costly, and messaging users to come to the website or Facebook page is confusing. And the issue of monetization on Facebook remains.

The applications that live only on Facebook are clear winners. These are custom-designed for the platform.

Show Me The Money

Unlike Apple, Facebook did not build an infrastructure for paid applications. The only way to monetize the apps is via advertising. Yet social networks aren't natural for targeted ads. Certainly ads are served in pages, but their effectiveness has still to be determined .

Specifically, if talking about a large news site like New York Times, there's no way it can match its native ads on Facebook. New York Times sells high-CPM ads and has polished its targeting mechanism. Plain Facebook ads can't match that.

An app is free to serve more ads on its own Facebook pages, but then the reader will be seeing two types of ads and the ratio of ads to content becomes unbearable.

It would be an advance if Facebook would enable companies to plug in their own ads into the sidebar areas, but currently there's no such infrastrucure. We're not seeing clear and comparable monetization on Facebook as it exists on original sites.

The User Problem

Out of thousands of applications, only a handful gain sizable audience. Whose fault is this? Again this isn't a simple issue. How many apps can a user want? The apps that win audiences initially get progressively bigger, making it harder for new apps. Because there's no pay-to-play, there's a lot of noise.

Users have too much choice. What seems like a great idea (let users choose the apps) quickly leads to this: users try a few apps and conclude that apps aren't interesting. Users are confused with the amount of choice.

What's the solution? Not really clear, but the current situation can't last much longer.

Platforms Are About Risk Management

With the platform not working out well for either Facebook or its users, the company is taking action. The changes are aimed at simplification and toning down the apps.

At this point it will be a welcome change for the users, but application makers will feel screwed just a year after the fanfare and all the money spent on building the apps. Providers have done nothing but good for this platform, making things work quickly.

Platforms, Web Services and APIs are not just money makers. Platforms come with responsibility. Amid the never-ending marketing war, the rush and pressure tends to push out stuff that's half-baked.

Perhaps it's time to take a lesson from the 90s. Back then, when companies bought libraries from software vendors, these came with commitment. Solutions were customer-driven because people paid to use them. Vendors worked hard to make things backwards compatible. Platform providers understood and respected the risk people took relying on their systems, and they assumed responsibility because they were paid.

Perhaps if Facebook charged for access to its audience, things would be more businesslike. Once again, free comes back full circle and backfires.

Conclusion

The Facebook platform was certainly a big event in technology. As the first open system to enable access to a huge audience, it's a triumph. But its future is clouded because of its business infrastructure, improper user education, and almost anarchic delivery of the applications. With the imminent changes, larger players will have even less incentive to plug in.

Only time will tell what it means for the futrure of the platform. Hopefully Facebook leadership will find the right path.

Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?

cykaneys — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:31:30 +0900

Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / July 15, 2008 6:49 PM / 20 Comments

You know what little startup companies need these days? They need to hire more people! It may be a frightening thought, but in an increasingly social world - being social is becoming an important full time job.

"Community Manager" is a position increasingly being hired for at large corporations (see Jeremiah Owyang's growing list of people with that kind of job) but what about smaller companies? We asked a number of people what they thought and the following discussion offers some great things to think about, pro and con.

What Is a Community Manager?

A community manager can do many things (see below) but the most succinct definition of the role that we can offer is this. A community manager is someone who communicates with a company's users/customers, development team and executives and other stake holders in order to clarify and amplify the work of all parties. They probably provide customer service, highlight best use-cases of a product, make first contact in some potential business partnerships and increase the public visibility of the company they work for.

True believers can't emphasize the importance of the role enough. John Mark Walker, the Community Manager at CollabNet articulates this perspective well: "I firmly believe that the community manager should be one of the first hires - right after a solid engineering group and before you invest in corporate marketing people."

Not everyone sees it that way, something that causes substantial distress for people in the supply chain who are advocates for the CM role. "Start ups and all companies that exist online need to be looking at a community manager as a salaried position," said Dylan Boyd of eROI. "We have been working with big brands and it kills me when they just give 'social media' to someone that already has 10 other roles...At Omma Social last month in NYC that topic came up asking all the people in the room from Big brands if they had a community manager. 90% of them did not and are still trying to find out how to spec out a job description in order to hire for it."

Dissenters: Community Management Does Not Need to Be a Full Time Job

Others see community management as something that doesn't need to be a full time job. "Community management is essentially a public relationship issue, so whoever picks up that gauntlet is on point for representing their company to the rest of us," consultant Peat Bakke told us. "It doesn't have to be a specific person or a full time job, but it is part of starting and running a business, almost by definition: if you're in business, you're doing community management whether you like it or not."

Some would go so far as to call an explicit community manager position a bad idea in the early days of a startup. Darius A Monsef IV, Executive Editor & Creator, COLOURlovers.com told us he thinks that in the early days founders need to be in the thick of managing their own communities.

Jonas Anderson voiced concern about community managers being caught between loyalties to the company and its users, while being tripped up by employer nondiclosure agreements. (Others though, such as former BBC blog producer Robin Hamman, point out that having a community manager can greatly reduce legal risk when a company engages extensively with its users.)

Startup founder Sachin Agarwal splits his time between community and other work. Though he wishes he had more time for this kind of work, a full timer isn't neccesary, he says. "Our contact us page encourages people to ask each other and post on other sites before coming to us - we're happy to help, but I'd wager that other users know how to get the most out of our site better than even we do."

Similarly, Twine's Candice Nobles says after some consideration being given to the position, her company found that their users have been incredibly self-organized and regulating so far.

While those thoughts might seem valid, consultant Dawn Foster emphasized that for some companies - making one person ultimately responsible for community work can be essential. "For startups where community is a critical element of the product or service," she told us, "I think that a community manager should be an early hire. Without a community manager, the frantic pace of the startup environment can mean that the community gets neglected simply because no single person is tasked with being responsible for it. This neglect could result in failure for the startup if the community is critical."

Can Founders Manage Their Communities?

We talk to a lot of CEOs on the phone here at ReadWriteWeb and we'll try to be polite in answering this question. Andraz Tori, CTO at Zemanta answers this question diplomatically. "The [community manager] role can be played by one of the founders early on, but as the project grows you need a person that knows how to listen," he told us. "Founders have a vision and might be a bit stubborn about what their product represents and offers (that's why they are founders). Someone a bit more distanced might be much better community manager since he has a lot more empathy for users and their problems and can relay that to developers and managers. And vice versa."

Pete Burgeson, director of marketing for online marketplace crowdSPRING says that a good community manager can help raise the voice of the users themselves. "We want to be able to build a platform for our community to have a voice, showcase their talent and become as active in speaking for crowdSPRING as we are speaking for ourselves."

Still others believe that users may not want to talk to the founder or a community manager, but some one with tech chops and focus. "I think a startup should put a developer in the community as opposed to a 'community manager'", Rob Diana told us. "Even though the developer may not be as good of a communicator as a marketing guy, there is a different type of understanding of what people want."

What Does A Community Manager Do?

There are many ways that a community manager can benefit a startup company and it often varies from company to company. Eva Schweber, co-founder of CubeSpace says "it depends on the community and what needs to be managed...the style and distractability of the folks in the startup, how they like to collaborate with peers and how they define their peers."

It's a complicated job, but one that can help bring cohesiveness to the life of a company. "Any opportunity to interact with the community forces one to think about the product/feature considerations and ramifications of one choice over another," says Nagaraju Bandaru of SmartWebBlog. "In many ways, community manager is the evangelist for company's products and the voice of the customer in internal discussions. It's critical to react to online discussions with skill, consistency and aptitude; The role is hard to understand from outside but impossible to miss once a startup is in execution mode."

This coherent communication can have business development benefits as well. This seems to us to be one of the most important benefits of the position. Graeme Thickins, VP of Marketing at doapp explains:
"Their world includes the online community that represents both prospective customers/users, as well as strategic partner companies, possible future investors, future employees, and more. Perhaps thinking in terms of a 'listening manager' would help a lot of startup founders better come to grips with what this job is all about."

Carol Leaman from AideRSS says investing in a community manager position has helped her company "gain maximum benefit from our early adopters and growing base of users, as it's a key link between them and our development team. NOT having someone on this full-time would impede our growth and success. We consider ourselves fortunate to have both realized this need early, and to have found an amazing Community Manager to fill the role."

Does that have to be one person in particular? AideRSS's Melanie Baker explains that specialization is as appropriate in this role as in others. "While especially at startups there's a shortage of bodies and it's all hands on deck, not all hands are best suited to all activities," she said. "No one would want me writing code, and I wouldn't necessarily want just anyone talking to frustrated users, for example. It's also totally a hybrid role. My background involves marketing, web, QA, and writing, and I use all of it as a community manager. Someone with a more specialized background can certainly learn what it takes, but might have a hard time wrapping his/her head around the customer service/marketing/business analysis/tech support/software testing/documentation/journalist needs of the role."

"You need someone who understands the fundamental distinction that while you want to grow your user base, a user base does not equal a community," Baker said. "The best success involves growing the former while making every effort to evolve them into the latter. Because communities grow themselves organically a lot more easily than user bases do."

Isn't it ultimately about marketing? Kim Bardakian, Sr. Communications Manager, at the wonderful music site Pandora put it this way: "Pandora just created this position about four months ago and it's been INVALUABLE to our company, in such a short time! It's opened a whole new world of communications for us! Lucia Willow fills that role for us and she's great. With the iPhone/Pandora launch on Friday, the Twitter network and followers were making tons of buzz! It was very exicitng.. "

Is Community Management the New PR?

Hutch Carpenter points to an example of community management leading to extensive new media press coverage and saving money on PR.

Others see PR evolving towards a community management type of role in this increasingly social world. "I particularly liked the reference to PR as 'public relationships', interjected Kathleen Mazzocco ClearPR. "[That] conveys the directness and transparency of today's new PR. How can it not be given the open conversations going on? That's why Community Managers are the critical new PR position."

PR has long got a bad rap, though, and if PR pros are going to get into social media (they are already here in large quantities) then there may be some challenges to their ability to play a community management role. "The idea of a 'community manager' is a good one as long as that person has the freedom to discuss the negatives as well as the positives of the company's efforts," says Dave Allen of Nemo Design. "If we consider all the aspects of social media as PR 2.0 then I would argue that it is a very important position given that companies would hardly have gone without PR 1.0. I posted a top 10 list of what you might call a 'community manager's' activities might be like here."
(Disclosure: the author has a consulting relationship with Nemo)

Is This Worth Paying For?

Why would a busy little startup spend precious money on this kind of role?

"While a Community Manager isn't the same as a traditional PR role, ideally they should work together," says Meredith from A Little Clarity. "Startups are in a blur; often they're being run by engineers with VCs looking over their shoulders -- they don't know from community managers; so there should be some accountability, and that's the tricky part. Do you measure connections? Responsiveness? Transparent 'public relationships?' Whatever it is that your company will value, get it out there and agree on it, because one thing startups don't always have is time to do it right after getting burned."

You want tangible? Semantic web researcher Yihong Ding will give you tangible! He says that community managers are tasked with tending the most precious asset that many startups have staked their future on - user content.

"As we know, most of the Web 2.0 companies are built upon user generated content," he told us. "Philosophically, User Generated Content is embodied human mind. This embodied mind is generally the fundamental asset for the company. Maintaining a proper community so that users may embody their mind with high quality is thus a central issue for the growth of the company. The duty of community managers is to supervise and maintain the high-quality production of the fundamental mind asset used by the company. Therefore, I would say that community manager is a critical job title for most of the Web 2.0 companies."

We agree with Yihong. User data and community content are the foundation that web 2.0 style innovation and company valuations rest on. Failing to focus meaningfully on tending those assets is a foolish choice.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this conversation. We hope readers will contribute their thoughts in comments below.

Lessons From the Center of Collective Intelligence

cykaneys — Tue, 8 Jul 2008 08:14:05 +0900

Lessons From the Center of Collective Intelligence

by msaleem on December 10, 2006 - 3:49pm.

Why has collective intelligence become such a big deal? With the rise of social media (wikis, social bookmarking sites and socially driven news and content aggregation sites), it seems that everyone wants to get on the bandwagon.

The principle behind collective intelligence is that a conclusion reached in collaboration with and from competition among multiple individuals will be more intelligent than any conclusion reached by an individual, no matter how smart.

Before we can harness the power of collective intelligence, we have to understand a few things.

1. What is collective intelligence?
2. Why do we need collective intelligence?
3. How do we harness collective intelligence?
4. How do we make sure we don’t get collective stupidity?

I recently interviewed Stephen Buckley from MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence. He used the example of global climate change to explain the necessity of collaboration:

“One of the problems that we have identified, and want to help people study, is global climate change. This is a problem that really spans a whole lot of disciplines. There is the scientific aspect to it, and then there are the economic and political aspects of it. Now that we have classified the existence of the problem, how do we navigate the scientific challenges, the organizational, economic and political challenges, still has to work itself out.”

As Buckley points out, some believe collective intelligence is a magical concept that can be applied to any problem, no matter how simple or complex. And then others believe collective intelligence efforts (like Wikipedia) will fail because the collective ultimately becomes a mob and leads to collective stupidity.

“There are some instances of entries in Wikipedia that aren’t perfect, and those tend to be the entries around which there are controversies. For example there was an article recently, about campaign organizations for two opposing politicians in Connecticut, running for the Senate, were manipulating each other and in fact sometimes deleting them completely, in order to gain advantage.”

Buckley stressed that in order to make collective intelligence work, we need to understand the circumstances that naturally lend themselves to collaboration and collective intelligence. Then we need a set of incentives that can motivate people to participate.

The incentives, of course, will vary but so far it seems incentives don’t even have to be monetary. Most people that participate on Wikipedia do so because they feel the need to make that information freely available to others. The motivation in computer programming (Linux development) is slightly different. Most people contribute to the open source operating system because they have a sense of purpose and as mentioned by Buckley, under the engineering culture, the strongest motivational tool is to design something that will be the object of adulation for one’s fellow engineers.

Incentives can even be built into systems through rewards for positive contributions as well as punishing negative ones. There are several examples of this already in practice: Amazon and eBay feedback systems, Digg and Reddit ranking systems, and so on.

Abuse is one of the biggest problems open source sites face. If someone can interact with a site and be completely anonymous, there is a higher chance that people will be destructive, than in a case where one’s identity is public knowledge.

“Just from experience, when people can be anonymous, and unaccountable for their actions, they tend to be more disruptive then they are when they have to establish their identity. A prime example of this is: Driving to work today, there’s a guy in his car, I don’t know who he is, he gives me the finger and cuts me off. If I bumped into the guy in the street he wouldn’t stand in front of me and give me the finger. Just because he can simply drive away, he behaves badly.”

Wikipedia, for example, is a project that by in large provides good information, but has its limitations because of annonymous abuse.

“There are some instances of entries in Wikipedia that aren’t perfect, and those tend to be the entries around which there are controversies. For example there was an article recently, about campaign organizations for two opposing politicians in Connecticut, running for the senate, were manipulating each other’s and in fact sometimes deleting them completely, in order to gain advantage.”

This does not mean that Wikipedia is a failure, rather that Wikipedia is not perfect, and more specifically, it is not a good tool for conflict management — where there is subjectivity with regards to the content, Wikipedia fails as a tool for content management to harness the wisdom of the crowd.

MIT deals with the problem of abuse by making people request to participate in their project which officially launched a only a month ago. Although they haven’t denied access, the requirement works as a filter to weed out people who have completely malicious intentions.

Understanding the questions helps us to harness this collective intelligence while keeping in mind its limitations.

Muhammad Saleem is a Netscape Navigator and writes on his own blog The Mu Life where he studies the social bookmarking phenomenon.

Wikipedia’s Success Story of an Individualistic Community

cykaneys — Mon, 7 Jul 2008 21:40:51 +0900

Wikipedia’s Success Story of an Individualistic Community

Wikipedia has revolutionized the world by decentralizing information. For individualists, wikipedia embodies the inherent success of individualism. For those whom fear decentralization, wikipedia embodies the growing lawlessness. This is truly a matter of perspective and interpretation. Yet I still believe that the fears of wikipedia are inflated. Allow me to elaborate.

Central Charges Against Wikipedia

The central charge against the open-source editing of wikipedia is the potential of inaccurate information. While it is true that there is potential, having potential does not inherently mean Wikipedia is full of inaccuracies. Any vandalism that occurs is quickly removed and pointed out.

In 2006 for example, staffers for Rep. Martin Meehan (D-Mass.) and officials from the National Institute on Drug Abuse were removing criticism from their respective wikipedia articles. When the articles were fixed, more criticism was included, this time pointing out their attempts at removal of criticism.

In another case of vandalism, someone continually replaces George W. Bush’s photograph with a picture of a giant penis; however, it is continually corrected in less than five minutes. Meanwhile, more subtle vandalism is repaired in a few hours (still remarkably quick compared to a normal encyclopedia that has to issue a correction in another book, often never obtained by owners of the encyclopedia).

If you still have doubts, consider than in 2005 the journal Nature compared scientific articles in wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica for accuracy. Each article was sent to panels of experts in the appropriate field. The average number of errors for each wikipedia article was four parts per entry, only one behind Encyclopedia Britannica’s average of three parts per entry. Then consider the amount of articles each contains. Wikipedia boasts 1.7 million English articles, with 6 million total; Encyclopedia Britannica does not even approach 100,000. That is quite good accuracy for the volume of articles produced.

Wikipedia's Secret to Success

What is wikipedia’s secret to success? They have formed an individualistic community where anyone can edit any article.

What prevents the majority of people from intentionally sabotaging the project to promote their ideological views? A market-based system of reputation. When you post quality information, the community praises you; when you post inaccurate information, you are shamed. As a result, wikipedians strive to produce quality articles.

Wales, the founder, has a laissez faire philosophy on regulation. The community works out its own issues. Pro-lifers and pro-choicers have found a compromise on the wording of the abortion article; mainland Chinese and Taiwanese have done the same.

In fact, when the Chinese government censored wikipedia and demanded censorship, Wales let the Chinese contributors handle it. After all, it was against wikipedia’s philosophy (besides being impractical) to censor information when it could be easy re-added. Eventually, China uneasily unblocked wikipedia. Another case of the individuals solving the problem themselves instead of using regulation.

Wikipedia continues striving to form an individualistic community where diverse viewpoints are respected as each side works toward mutual compromise in creating a neutral article.

[도서] '조직없는 조직력' 디지털 집단지성의 힘!

cykaneys — Mon, 7 Jul 2008 19:27:45 +0900

'조직없는 조직력' 디지털 집단지성의 힘!

■끌리고 쏠리고 들끓다(클레이 서키 지음, 갤리온 펴냄)
■파워풀 타임스(이몬 켈리 지음, 럭스미디어 펴냄)

인터넷·휴대폰 등으로 무장 조직 결성·유지비용 최소화
단순 정보 수용자서 벗어나 직접 생산·유통까지도 맡아

최근 뉴욕에서는 택시에 놓고 내린 고가의 핸드폰을 찾기위해 인터넷을 이용한 사례가 사회적인 이슈가 됐다. 핸드폰을 잃어버린 사람은 핸드폰을 갖고 있는 사람이 10대 히스패닉 미혼모라는 것을 알게 됐다. 그녀가 핸드폰을 순순히 되돌려주지 않자 핸드폰 주인은 인터넷에 그 미혼모의 신상정보와 주변인물에 관련된 정보를 추적해 조직적으로 인터넷에 올렸다. 이 문제는 인종갈등이라는 미국 사회의 뇌관을 건드리면서 일파만파로 커져 뉴욕 타임스 등 주요 언론 60여개가 취재할 정도로 관심을 불러일으켰다. 100만명이 넘는 네티즌이 다녀간 인터넷 사이트로 인해 급기야 그 미혼모는 체포됐고, 그는 핸드폰을 찾았다. 이 과정에서 개인정보의 무단 공개, 핸드폰을 돌려주지 않은 미혼모의 비양심적인 행동 등을 놓고 벌어진 토론이 인터넷을 뜨겁게 달궜다.
특정 언론사 몇몇에 의해 여론이 형성되던 시대는 이미 역사가 됐다. 정보의 수용자였던 개인이 이제는 직접 정보의 생산과 유통까지 맡고 있으며, 기업이 제작한 상품을 얌전히 쓰기만 했던 소비자는 불만사항을 조직적으로 대응하며 기업에 맞서고 있다.

세상은 바뀌었으나, 아날로그 세대와 디지털 세대가 공존하는 오늘의 사회를 주제로 다루고 있는 책이 잇달아 번역, 출간됐다.

클레이 서키 뉴욕대 인터액티브 커뮤니케이션 프로그램 교수는 ‘코즈의 정리(Coase Theorem)’ 즉, 사회적 행동이 집단성을 띨 경우 조직 결성과 유지 비용이 목표와 성과보다 경제적이어야 한다는 개념을 근거로 들며 새로운 사회적인 도구의 등장으로 조직결성과 유지 비용을 최소화 할 수 있는 사회로 진입하고 있다고 설명한다. 인터넷ㆍ휴대폰ㆍ메신저ㆍ블로그ㆍ메일링 등이 새로운 사회적 도구의 좋은 사례다.

저자는 최근 인터넷에서 벌어지고 있는 대중의 움직임을 ‘조직없는 조직력(the power of organizing without orginazation)’이라고 정의를 내린다. 기업의 횡포에 적극적으로 대응하는 소비자들, 브리태니커보다 더 강력한 백과사전 위키피디아를 자발적으로 만드는 성과를 도출해 내는 대중이 오늘의 사회를 이끌어가고 있다는 것. 특히 저자는 조직 혹은 배후가 없으면 불가능했던 일이 이제는 조직 없이도 더 강력한 조직력을 발휘하는 변화에 예의주시한다. 저자는 그 특성을 ‘끌리고 쏠리고 들끓다’로 정의내리고 있다.

‘파워풀 타임스’는 컨설팅 회사 ‘모니터그룹’ 내 글로벌비즈니스네트워크(GBN)의 최고경영자(CEO)인 저자가 향후 10년을 예측한 로드맵을 담고 있다.

저자들은 과학기술이 발전하면서 탄생한 무형의 경제로 유형의 물리적 인프라에 의존하는 선진국 경제는 큰 변화를 맞게 될 것이라고 예측한다. 또 인터넷 활용으로 사회적 투명성이 요구돼 이를 유지하기 위해 위성 등 다양한 도구가 등장해 사회적 비용이 지나치게 늘어날 것이라고 추측하고 있다. 그 밖에도 세계 군사력, 종교, 지구 등 다양한 분야의 미래를 전망하고 이를 바탕으로 세가지 시나리오를 도출한다. 하나는 미국이 지금보다 더 강력한 나라로 성장해 세계를 다시 한번 손아귀에 넣는다는 것, 두번째는 미국의 파워가 패치워크식으로 조각조각 흩어질 것이다. 그리고 미국 등 기존 권력이 아니라 새로운 질서의 등장 등이다.

어떤 사회로 바뀌든 저자는 시장기반 경영과 윤리경영이라는 큰 테두리는 변하지 않을 것이라고 보고 이를 바탕으로 윈-윈할 수 있는 전략을 제시한다.

웹2.0을 넘어 웹3.0으로

구글, 드디어 위키 서비스 시작하다

Knol: Google Takes on Wikipedia

Authorship/Identity

Usage

Creative Commons

Advertising

New Yorker Cartoons?

Is Google Going After Wikipedia?

Related Entries

0 TrackBacks

Comments

The Facebook economy

The Facebook economy

The No. 2 social network is fast evolving into a new kind of software platform - and the race is on to figure out how to turn users' every move into dollars for enterprising developers.

Facebook Platform: The Fanfare Revisited

Facebook Platform: The Fanfare Revisited

The Technology Behind the Platform is Solid

Teasers vs. Native Apps

Show Me The Money

The User Problem

Platforms Are About Risk Management

Conclusion

Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?

Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?

What Is a Community Manager?

Dissenters: Community Management Does Not Need to Be a Full Time Job

Can Founders Manage Their Communities?

What Does A Community Manager Do?

Is Community Management the New PR?

Is This Worth Paying For?

Lessons From the Center of Collective Intelligence

Lessons From the Center of Collective Intelligence

Wikipedia’s Success Story of an Individualistic Community

Wikipedia’s Success Story of an Individualistic Community

[도서] '조직없는 조직력' 디지털 집단지성의 힘!