[Sigia-l] Web 2.0 99% bad

[Anthony Hempell]

If I can comment this late in the game, the analysis of user behaviour
is flawed in that the total user group is most likely based on
statistics of registered users.  Lots of people register and don't see
the value, or register only because a friend sent them an invite, etc.


Counting these people as the "90%" of users is like doing a study of the
habits of gym users in the summer and including all the people who sign
up for gym memberships in the New Year. 

But Jakob needs a straw man to continue to sell his books and seminars
to a new generation of middle management who are trying to figure out
how to spend their marketing budgets.



> -----Original Message-----
> From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On
Behalf
> Of Christopher Fahey
> Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2007 8:23 PM
> To: 'SIGIA-L'
> Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Web 2.0 99% bad
> 
> 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
> ____________________________
> Behavior
> biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com
> me: http://www.graphpaper.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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