Power to the People
Excerpts and paraphrases from the Power to the People panel:
Moderator: Kevin Werbach, Supernova
Craig Newmark, Craigslist
Saul Klein, Skype
Tina Sharkey, AOL
Mena Trott, Six Apart
Gil Penchina, Wikia
Q: These companies rely upon user involvement for their success. How do you facilitate users gaining value to participate?
AOL: We provide the context, users provide the conversations. Now they can create the applications as well. We want users to help build our service, now that we’ve opened it to the open web.
Six: Most people at the company came in because they blog. The best ways to develop our product is by using it. We’ve learned more by using it daily than we did during development.
Skype: The US is an important market, but it’s growing fastest in Europe and Asia. We focus on enabling people to have conversations. Voice is central to a connected conversation in a way that IM isn’t. We put voice at the center, and allow people to build out with video and SMS. Now people are hosting skypecasts.
Wikia: We provide a place to create content that isn’t educational reference material. These are sections of content that aren’t appropriate for wikipedia. We’ve taking trusting users to the next level, with software that is written by users, content written by users, and the home page controlled by users. They control the site, as well as what’s on there.
Craigslist: I don’t know what users are, but I do know what people are. We need to engage the people that we serve, even if they drive us crazy.
Q: Is the community an undifferentiated mass that pulls in different directions?
Six: We disagree with the idea that most communities scale into large groups. Large groups have a purpose for some things. But most people function in smaller groups. You can have conversations of 6 –10.
AOL: On our auditorium chats, people come to hear one person. The community was built in your row. People may want to be members of many small communities. Natural leaders emerge. Communities moderate themselves. Social media is a great model to facilitate other people’s experiences. Let the community shut down the obnoxious ones. P
Q: What is the value in scale? MySpace, etc., built on scale.
AOL: The people who use IM have clusters of buddies, but not more than 100.
Wikia: We think larger projects inspire more people. You can rant by email or blog, but our goal is to bring people together around large, inspirational topics. We don’t let people fork off and start their own splinter groups. Things work better when people collaborate.
Six: It’s about observers vs. participants. Most people want to observe and not participate. It’s the auditorium, vs. the living room. It depends on your goals for the community.
Q: When skype came along as an internet based service, it was free and that was an advantage. But one thing that drives adoption is that it works a lot like IM.
Skype: By bringing voice to the Internet environment and letting people talk by voice, text, IM, video, skypecast, we have a presence available on people’s web sites, so they can choose to engage or not.
AOL: In terms of presence, one thing we deal with is the proliferation of screen names. People want to interact with their communities using different personas.
Q: Is the notion that the services are open and user driven a myth? It works because there is hierarchy and structure in place.
Wikia: It’s true that we’re a participatory democracy. We align around a particular topic. The bulk of the work is done by a small group of people. That group is elected by the community. We select those who we think are best able to write about the topics. Each page has a hierarchy to help filter some of the passion and the inaccuracies. Debates happen. Administrators try to resolve the debates. Then if they’re at an impasse, they pass the buck up. The more we participate, the better the democracy. If anyone can add or remove pages, you can be vulnerable to a few bad people. But if there are enough good people, they find the bad ones. Big cities have more crime because they’re complicated. We try to create a small city feel.
Six: We’ve been doing this for five years, and we see patterns. People feel like small groups have less noise and more comfort. I don’t want a debate on my blog. That adds unwanted stress. You forget about the good people an start to hate the noise.
AOL: eBay was smart in letting people sell online and be responsible for shipping. The seller reputation is their badge of honor. As the first large scale social media platform, their reputation management was critical. People want to bring the eBay seller profile with them to other platforms. Reputation management will be critical in all these communities.
Q: Are you willing to consider that most people are not basically good? There’s spam, phishing, pornography, sex trade. There’s a lot of bad behavior on the web. What happens to our business when real life happens?
Wikia: eBay proved that most people are good. We don’t trust everyone absolutely. A few well organized bad guys can be trouble. But I’ve been doing this for nearly 10 years, and I believe people are good.
Craigslist: The technology lets a few people do a lot of damage. We find them and stop them. Even in our dodgier categories, I won’t take a stand on whether or not the behavior is bad.
AOL: Serving our communities means making sure the lights are on and someone is watching. We have community managers and community action teams. We shut people down all the time. The numbers are decreasing. Users shut each other down. With no audience, they can’t thrive. We learn to serve the good people and give them tools to shut down the bad ones.
Six: I can see the blog post: Panel of naïve fools think social media users are good. There are interactions that you want to be public, and those that you want to be private. That’s why we let users restrict who can see their blogs.
Q: Startups spend time listening to their community of users to aid product development. Should we participate in the conversations or just listen from the sidelines?
Skype: We have forums, blogs, beta testers. We try to create a participatory environment around skype. We get direct feedback. If you can contribute to the conversation in a meaningful way, then we encourage people in skype to do that. If it would be helpful to the customer and the conversation, participate.
Q: As your communities scale up, won’t your focus have to change to find new ways of filtering with whom you interact. You need collaborative filtering of both content and the communities themselves.
AOL: We think about social media as being like people searching. We use it as a way to give context to the conversation. When you surf in profiles, you might search blog content, photos, shared interests. That way, you discover new blogs to read, new music to listen to, etc. It’s about the collections that people curate, allowing their friends to discover new things.
Skype: Because we’re built around the notion of the contact list, that becomes a tool for discovery. There’s a hug opportunity for people to have large networks predicated on small groups and contact lists.
Q: As platform providers for your communities, the service delivery infrastructure is critical. What are you looking for in functionality from the incumbents?
Craigslist: We’re looking for a level playing field – Net Neutrality. We also need a break from the ISP when we’re going after bad guys.
Skype: We’re interested in how broadband gets adopted, whether that’s wifi, 3g, fixed line, etc. With the widespread adoption of broadband, the next generation of infrastructure will need to work with devices of all kinds.
AOL: We want users to be able to connect wherever and whenever they want to. So the infrastructure providers need to scale the platform.
