Monthly Archives: October 2006

Participation Inequality on the Web

Jacob Nielsen, in his usual stellar style, has published an excellent article, on participation inequality in Internet communities:

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

  • 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
  • 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
  • 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

…
There are about 1.1 billion Internet users, yet only 55 million users (5%) have weblogs according to Technorati. Worse, there are only 1.6 million postings per day; because some people post multiple times per day, only 0.1% of users post daily.

Here is a shameless plug for our older post of the size of blogosphere (Jacob Nielsen’s numbers match pretty well with our numbers).

Some of the participation inequality is driven by inherent human nature. As a result even physical communities display lop-sided participation characteristics. Internet, though, I think exacerbates this problem. Following are some of the reasons:

  • People are inherently selfish. Contributing to a community does not come naturally to most people unless there is a reward associated with contributing. The mechanisms for providing reward for participation are largely missing from the web at this point in time.
  • The default substrate for interactions on the Internet is anonymity. It takes an extra effort to get them to drop the cloak of anonymity and express their opinions. This happens only when they feel really-strongly about the topic of discussion.
  • Bad UI design that discourages users from participating. One of the most annoying issues here is requiring users to register before they can leave a comment.
  • Read-only web interactions used to be the norm for most web 1.0 interactions. We are just starting to focus on the community participation and user generated content etc. and I suspect over time these statistics will change for lesser inequality.

Jacob Nielsen focuses on the effects of participation inequality on the web:

  • Customer feedback. If your company looks to Web postings for customer feedback on its products and services, you’re getting an unrepresentative sample.
  • Reviews. Similarly, if you’re a consumer trying to find out which restaurant to patronize or what books to buy, online reviews represent only a tiny minority of the people who have experiences with those products and services.
  • Politics. If a party nominates a candidate supported by the “netroots,” it will almost certainly lose because such candidates’ positions will be too extreme to appeal to mainstream voters. Postings on political blogs come from less than 0.1% of voters, most of whom are hardcore leftists (for Democrats) or rightists (for Republicans).
  • Search. Search engine results pages (SERP) are mainly sorted based on how many other sites link to each destination. When 0.1% of users do most of the linking, we risk having search relevance get ever more out of whack with what’s useful for the remaining 99.9% of users. Search engines need to rely more on behavioral data gathered across samples that better represent users, which is why they are building Internet access services.
  • Signal-to-noise ratio. Discussion groups drown in flames and low-quality postings, making it hard to identify the gems. Many users stop reading comments because they don’t have time to wade through the swamp of postings from people with little to say.

He also goes into what can be done to address the situation somewhat:

  • Make it easier to contribute. The lower the overhead, the more people will jump through the hoop. For example, Netflix lets users rate movies by clicking a star rating, which is much easier than writing a natural-language review.
  • Make participation a side effect. Even better, let users participate with zero effort by making their contributions a side effect of something else they’re doing. For example, Amazon’s “people who bought this book, bought these other books” recommendations are a side effect of people buying books. You don’t have to do anything special to have your book preferences entered into the system. Will Hill coined the term read wear for this type of effect: the simple activity of reading (or using) something will “wear” it down and thus leave its marks — just like a cookbook will automatically fall open to the recipe you prepare the most.
  • Edit, don’t create. Let users build their contributions by modifying existing templates rather than creating complete entities from scratch. Editing a template is more enticing and has a gentler learning curve than facing the horror of a blank page. In avatar-based systems like Second Life, for example, most users modify standard-issue avatars rather than create their own.
  • Reward — but don’t over-reward — participants. Rewarding people for contributing will help motivate users who have lives outside the Internet, and thus will broaden your participant base. Although money is always good, you can also give contributors preferential treatment (such as discounts or advance notice of new stuff), or even just put gold stars on their profiles. But don’t give too much to the most active participants, or you’ll simply encourage them to dominate the system even more.
  • Promote quality contributors. If you display all contributions equally, then people who post only when they have something important to say will be drowned out by the torrent of material from the hyperactive 1%. Instead, give extra prominence to good contributions and to contributions from people who’ve proven their value, as indicated by their reputation ranking.

I couldn’t agree with him more…Providing the right incentives to participants is the key to cracking this tough nut.

Jigsaw Data

Interesting article in the SF Chronicle about Jigsaw Data, a company with an unusual social network for buying and selling business contacts:

Here’s how Jigsaw works: You can pay a subscription of $25 per month to access the database or you can enter 25 contacts per month. Members get two contacts back for each one they enter. All information is entered anonymously.

It seems like they are expecting strong growth:

Since it started operations on Jan. 1, 2004, Jigsaw has amassed a database of 3 million contacts at 150,000 companies, and the company expects that to grow to 5 million by year’s end. Only 131 of its 105,000 members sell points, Fowler said. “Almost all trade data to get data.”

It just seems like the wrong way to build a social network. Getting your contact added to Jigsaw feels like a breach of trust…A typical way your contact can get into Jigsaw is – you send a communication to a professional contact, who in turn, sells your information to Jigsaw (similar to somebody selling your information to a spammer). Sure you can opt out if you like, but I would rather have an explicit opt-in mechanism.

Anyone, even nonmembers, can go to the site to see if they’re listed. If they are, they can set parameters for how they wish to be contacted. A person could even say: “Never contact me.” Fowler’s own guidelines tell people never to call his mobile phone, keep e-mails short and not pitch wealth management or other financial services.

I guess the basic assumption that Jigsaw is making is that all professionals, just because they are employed, are going to want to be contacted by other professionals. I personally can see the value of sharing my contact information with people in the same field. But I can imagine other people who will object. Also who is going to make sure that information is not misused? What is there to prevent Jigsaw from becoming a super data base for spammers?

There is also a valid question about the quality of the data, raised by Bob Blakley in his post on the subject along with his new business card (:-)):

BTW, check out if you are in Jigsaw here.

Social networks and the profit motive

The Blog Herald had an interesting review called Diggs for sale in organized fashion

User/Submitter is a new service that connects publishers with diggers. Have a story? Then hand over the cash and User/Submitters’ dig users will digg it for you – and you might even end up on the frontpage of Digg. That’s serious stuff, The Blog Herald knows that.

Publishers get to pay $20 and an additional $1 per dig, and digg users can get paid $0.50 for every 5 stories they digg. It seems real enough but I don’t really know, we’ll find out soon I’d reckon since the blogosphere tends to flush out the frauds.

Similarly there was another startup called PayPerPost profiled at TechCrunch.

The service is a marketplace for advertisers to pay bloggers to write about products for a fee. Commenters to our original post were polarized into those violently for and those againt the product. The key area of controversy is the fact that advertisers can mandate that posts be positive on the product, and disclosure of payment is optional for the blogger (screen shot at end of post shows sample available writing opportunities).

The main issue here is how can we incorporate the profit motive in the social networks? If a social network becomes useful enough, somebody will try to make money from it. Take comment spam as an example…No sooner did the blogs gain some popularity, spammers were creating splogs and comment spam to make money from them. So what can be done about it?

I think the answer is not a whole lot can be done to completely eliminate people from trying to make money from social networks. The issue is that in physical communities, in all interactions, users have to identify themselves. In online communities, it’s easier for users to participate without the constraint of location or without even identifying themselves. The communities pay for this ease of use and participation in terms of enabling various profit driven actors. There are still a few simple things that can be done with the design of the communities to be more effective in handling profit driven participants:

  • Community oriented monitoring of content
  • Incentivize positive participation
  • Penalize negative participation

This is not going to eliminate the profit motive from the social networks but it will help communities be more effective dealing with the issue. Slashdot did all these things and as a result is a whole lot more spam-proof than Digg. Also as expected, Slashdot pays a price for its sophisticated community design, in terms of more sophisticated user interaction model that reduces ease of use.

User Owned Product Preferences

Interesting piece from Kim Cameron and Dave Winer of the scripting news

Doc talks about a Vendor Management Systems, to balance the other side’s Customer Management Systems. I, of course, like. A prototype for this is a movie review system where I own and control my data. Today, I rate movies on Netflix and Yahoo, but I can’t get them to share the data with each other, so they make recommendations without info the other one has. If I had a place where I kept my movie ratings and gave each of them a pointer to it, they could read it and I would control the data. It would be very easy to set up, the technology is no trick at all. The hard part is getting enough users to do it this way to gain critical mass. This is also the idea behind Edgeio and Marc Canter’s People Aggregator. Open systems, users own the data, silos smell of sulfur.

The user’s ownership of her or her own data sounds like a great idea. It will work great for a number of interactions, where the services provided by the vendors are commoditized and the users preferences are well established. E.g. travel preferences (E.g what kind of seat you prefer (Aisle), what airlines etc.), on-line shopping for clothes, shoes (sizes, colors, cuts), movie rentals, computer upgrades etc. This would lead to user advertised needs rather then suppliers generated demand…

Doc Searls frames the problem:

We need to serve market (not marketing) relationships that arise from decisions customers have already made to buy something. They have money in hand, and the intention to book a hotel, rent a car, buy a basketball backboard. Whatever they want, marketing’s job is done. Sales needs to show up now. But how? That’s the question. And the answers that work can’t come from the sell side. We need new means to the buyer’s ends, coming from the buyer’s side.
What I want is for vendors in an open and free market (not a proprietary silo like eBay or Amazon or Travelocity or some other intermediator with a walled garden) to respond to the intentions (or gestures, or expressions, or whatever) of the customer. On customers’ terms. I want to turn the tables on the lame customer management systems every big vendor has, and which have no idea how to relate. Especially to humans who would rather not be “managed”, thank you.
To be fair, until now the full burden of customer relationship management fell on vendors. They had no choice about being lame, because they had to relate to everybody, and to limit the variables involved. I want to change that, from the customer’s side, with a Vendor Management System under the customer’s control that is so richly useful, and capable, that vendors have no choice but to relate to it — on customer terms that will prove mutually beneficial out the wazoo.

Doc’s model sounds great for fulfilling demand for simple products, but how do businesses make money in such an environment? Typically businesses want to create product/service differentiations so that they can charge a premium. How will complex products, where multiple trade-offs are involved, be sold? And how did the demand get created in the first place? My guess would be that some business invested money for creating the demand. Would they have invested the money if they did not expect to be able to recoup that investment via higher margins and premium pricing for their unique features? And without the marketing arguments for new products that can improve people’s lives, would we have the Internet or even the telephone?