Two interesting examples of businesses fighting their communities came up this morning in my reading.
Example 1. Amazon is selling Bill Clinton's new book, Giving. They also deleted about 20 reviews from the product page. Presumably, these reviews were mostly low, mostly given by folks who don't agree with Bill's politics. Amazon, however, is in the business of selling books, and low reviews posted by people who are clearly not the target demographic do not help them make money. Thus, the reviews go away, and people get angry. Would better moderation interfaces, or different moderation policies affect the need for this type of "censorship"?
Example 2. Yahoo! Answers developers post a blog entry that basically says: stop using Yahoo Answers as a social space, and start asking intelligent questions. There are two prominent sub-communities of YA that are clearly not about Q&A discourse. There is the polls community, where people ask questions like "which pair of jeans should I wear tonight", and the politics community that focuses on flame wars. Why doesn't Yahoo! seem to care about these thriving sub-communities? Well, perhaps they don't promote Yahoo's vision of social search, where a huge Q&A database helps Yahoo reclaim the #1 search engine slot.
These examples illustrate to me the challenges that businesses face in leveraging users' work as part of their core business.
Max
We have often asked the question: in an online system, does participation in social features cause greater attachment to the system, or is it merely correlated with greater attachment? This research addresses this question directly, with powerful results indicating a causal relationship:
http://www.futureofcommunities.com/?p=12
Max
B.J. Fogg's students at Stanford have created a fun set of short videos about the use of persuasion in popular Web 2.0 sites. The videos are here: http://www.captology.tv.
I have only watched a small set of the videos, but I particularly enjoyed ShaneWalker112's piece on starting up a social network on sites like linkedin.com. Videos about Web sites can be dull, but ShaneWalker112 uses Lionel Richie tunes to nice comedic effect. Overall, I was very impressed by the quality and information content of the videos that I watched.
