This is my first report from the Web Directions South Conference 2007 that is currently taking place in Sydney.
Rashmi Sinha’s presentation “The Perils of Popularity”
I won’t waste any time on introducing Rashmi, she herself does a good enough job on that one, hehehe! Have a look at Rashmi’s blog.
I think she was a very good speaker to kick off the conference, offering the right mix of easy entertainment and often deeply conceptual and inspirational content. She talked about social spaces on the web, and portrayed some very interesting observations.
1.) People on the internet meet over objects. For example, Flickr as a community works so well, because their photographs give them something to talk about, something that they can connect over. My personal observation of Second Life agrees with this: I think that a reason why Second Life never really took off after the hype was that people just had no real reason to interact in that space.
2.) The Facebook phenomenon is interesting as it only facilitates meeting, but basically lets other companies provide the objects over which people can meet. I am personally not entirely sure if that is correct. I find that the social experiences that people had with others in real life could be seen as the objects over which to connect in Facebook. Yes, things like the Rock-paper-scissors Roshambull application, or the Drinks application also offer some sort of object to some extent, but I do not perceive them as the core of Facebook.
3.) The successful internet phenomena consist of three interacting concepts:
The graph (which is more or less the actual crowd of people)
The object (the thing people can connect over)
The place (the actual facility that people use to hang out on the internet)
4.) She made a very interesting point when she compared Digg with Flickr. Digg encourages mob mentality, where only the material that has proven to be hugely popular floats to the surface. That means that users put stuff up simply for the reason of getting to the top. Flickr on the other hand supports individualism, as people mostly upload material that they personally find interesting, not caring so much about the potential of being that this sought after first page… There was a smart question from the audience after this, asking for a value statement about which one was “better”. Of course there was no answer, but Rashmi pointed out that one has to be careful when establishing new online communities: which behaviour do you want to encourage, and how do you have to treat “success” in these environments?
5.) She had another comparison, which was sort of similar: YouTube with Facebook. And again we see this mob mentality in YouTube, where success comes from being praised by the masses, whereas Facebook doesn’t seem to have a “success” definition at all.
When the floor was opened up to questions, one asked how owners of such systems should react if they see that users tried to cheat the system to float to the top. She emphasized strongly that there was a strong need to remain agile in the decisions, and be able to make quick decisions to avoid disaster. However, she also said that it was important to remember that it was also important to hand over at least part of the control (or the dynamics, I find) of such spaces to the users, to simply see how they want to use the facilities. Coming from a university web background, I found this point very important, as our institutionalized channels of decision-making are painfully slow, and would not perform so well with these levels of required flexibility.
Overall, a very good presentation, and I will be watching her blog for more input!
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