Future of Web Apps – Tom Coates

Tom Coates from Yahoo! presented about Social Change on the Web. His presentation was great and his presentation style really kept the audience engaged. Here are some notes from his presentation (comments are raw and unedited):

Tom discusses MySpace as a unit, not at the individual pages. Social software is a long line of software and started all the way back with things like alphabet and writing. Doing more together than we could do apart. Social software definition: Using software to enhance our social and collaborative abilities through social mediation.

• An individual contributed should get value from their contribution (individual motives)
• These contributions shold provide value to their peers as well(social value)
• The organization that hosts the service should derive aggregate value and be able to expose this back to the users (business value)

Concensus – many contributions make one voice (wikipedia)
Polyphony – Many voices with emergent order

Wikipedia works because of the process and order they have even though the Concensus model does not work and is not replicable

Polyphony model offers much more ability to succeed. Offers infinite communities. Tom talked about the motives for why people share in a community.

Why do people contribute to open source software?

• learning to code
• gaining reputation
• scratching an itch
• contributing to the commons
• stick it to microsoft

Another way of looking at why people contribute

• Sharing without really knowing it
• Saving for personal use
• Sharing with friends
• Sharing with interest groups
• Self expression and showing off
• Good of the world

Things that don't work well:

• Be wary of clumsy incentives like money, points and competition

Open up social value:

• expose every axis of data you can
• Give people a place to represent themselves
• Allow them to associate, connect and form relationships with one another
• Help them annotate, rate and comment
• APIs are cool

Problems:

• Be very careful of user expectations around how private or public their contribution is
• Be wary of creating monocultures
• Remember not all your users need to participate to generate social value

Business value – wheres the money

• Attention and advertising
• Premium accounts
• Building services around the data
• Using user-generated annotations and contributions to grow own information

Rise of aggregate data:

• proprietary data sources own a space
• they license their data initially selectively
• increasingly fluid and commoditized services emerge with flat-rate data provisions

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