[Sigia-l] Web 2.0 99% bad

[Christopher Fahey]

Andrew Boyd wrote:
> ...numbers of people outside of the immediate 
> context have no significance at all if that context 
> is big enough to support the associated community.
> ...
> Social computing does not need to be 
> totally everywhere for it to work for me or anyone 
> else - it does need to be big enough to be useful.

Let's be very clear here: Saying, as I have, that "hardly anyone has any
interest in contributing to social computing" does NOT mean the same thing
as saying "social computing isn't useful" (or for that matter your summary
of Neilsen "Web 2.0 is a waste of space, 99% of content is provided by 1% of
users").

I wasn't saying that, and Jakob Neilsen wasn't saying that, either. We're
both simply pointing out that *contributors* are a special kind of user, and
they comprise a tiny minority of social computing consumers. If you do not
incorporate this *fact* into your social computing strategy or your design,
your do your users and your business a disservice. That is Neilsen's advice,
and it is rock-solid (so rock-solid, in fact, that it is, as Ziya pointed
out, patently obvious). 

I don't think Neilsen would disagree with your statement that "Social
computing does not need to be totally everywhere for it to work". Just
because someone argues that *some* common assumptions about social computing
(the assumption that all users want to be contributors) are wrong does not
mean that they are total morons who think that social computing as a whole
is a silly useless fad. Web 2.0 is not a religion.

The bigger question we need to examine is this: Will the small ratio of
contributors to consumers last forever, or will something new cause a spike
in the numbers of contributors in the future? My gut tells me no, based on
my 13 years of subscribing to mailing lists where similar supermajorities
remain permanent lurkers (even among very tech-savvy users). But social
computing is something new & different from listservs, so I make no
predictions.

-Cf

Christopher Fahey
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