Web 2.0 and Its Communities

Web 2.0 is the new fairly old buzzword flying around on the Internet for a while. O'Reily defines Web 2.0 as using "the Web as a platform" and "harnessing collective intelligence".

To me, Web 2.0 is doing the Internet from the bottom up. For example, blogs allow you to publish your own unfiltered and unedited content. Wikis typically have more editors than administrators. And social news sites, such as Newsvine, allow the users to post the majority of the news.

Now, if the majority of content on these sites is created by users, it is probably important to know what sorts of communities these sites house. That's what the focus of this article is, for the most part. The following sites are places that I have a user account in, and have used for at least a little while. I won't go into a huge explanation of anything, as I simply want to outline the communities using broad strokes.

With that in mind, let's get started then.

Xanga

Xanga was the first site where I ever had a blog. According to Wikipedia, Xanga had its beginnings in 1999 as a place for people to share book and music reviews. It then eventually evolved into a place for people to host their own blogs.

As of May 3, 2006, Alexa Internet rated Xanga the 21st most popular English-language website, and the 42nd most popular website in the world.

To me, Xanga seemed like it had only the most basic of features. People can customize their blog layouts, add shout-out boxes, have comments, and 'subscribe' to other people's blogs (and have all new posts shown on one page).

Xanga's community is at once easy and hard to define. At a broad level, Xanga can be called the Myspace of blogs, as from what I've seen, it's very popular with the high school crowd. On the other hand, every community has its exceptions, but I can't really think of any off the top of my head (mostly because I haven't used it for a few years).

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that was originally created in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger to be a compliment to their other project, Nupedia. Nupedia had articles/edits submitted by users but approved by accredited editors. Wikipedia was originally only meant to be a place where users could work on articles before submitting them. In the end, Wikipedia skyrocketed and Nupedia died. Final tally: Nupedia - 24, Wikipedia - 1,212,194.

Wikipedia is a radical new idea in that it places total and complete trust on the user. Anyone, and that means anyone can edit any article (for the most part). But I'm sure you've heard this already, so let me outline the community.

The community of the English Wikipedia is probably one of the most diverse groups of people I've seen on the Internet. People from many different countries, from all age groups, and any demographic contributing to the articles. Obviously, disputes break out from time to time, but there are numerous different ways to get conflicts mediated and solved.

Overall, Wikipedia is fun to edit and the community is pleasant most of the time.

LiveJournal

LiveJournal was originally created in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick as a place where he could share his activities with his high school friends. In 2005, it was purchased by Six Apart, the company that makes Movable Type.

I currently use LiveJournal for my blog. Aside from the fact that it has a pretty good set of features, I like the community.

Now, I can't say that I've delved too much into the community, but from what I've experienced, the Livejournal community is mostly people who are computer savvy, many of whom are geeks like myself. There's not as much immaturity as I've experienced on other blog sites, like Xanga.

Plus, Livejournal is one of the first websites to implement OpenID.

Myspace

Myspace, oh Myspace. Everyone's heard of it. It's the first widely successful social networking site for everyone (come on, it's not like Friendster was that successful). Everyone knows how it works, and everyone knows all the problems with it, including the 14-year-old girl whose parents recently sued Myspace for 'allowing' a man to pretend to be a high school senior.

The community is about as bearable as watching Napoleon Dynamite. The majority of the people on there are kids in High School, which is fairly understandable. However, the problems begin when the immaturity of these high school kids is blown wide open for everyone to see.

If Xanga is the Myspace of blogging, then Myspace is the AIM of social networking. In my opinion, it's not well developed, and the only reason I use it is to keep in contact with certain friends who only go on Mypsace anymore. The website is poorly designed, in my opinion, and half the functions go offline weekly for maintenance.

For just one example, see my other article, about how the old annoying e-mail forwards have, in a sense, migrated to these sorts of communities.

Digg

Almost everyone on Newsvine has probably been to Digg first. Digg originally started out as an experiment in 2004, when it was created by, among other people, Kevin Rose.

I think that we can all say Digg was a good and novel idea, and that Newsvine probably benefited from it being there.

Unfortunately, the community slips further and further into oblivion, not to be confused with Oblivion, every time I check up on it. Sometimes, 'intelligence' of the masses isn't quite as intelligent as previously thought.

Comments sometimes end up being very immature, and people vote down any comment that disagrees with their point of view, even if it brings up a valid point. That's part of the reason that I'm not a big fan of being able to vote comments down.

Newsvine

Newsvine, our favorite website ;).

Newsvine was originally founded in 2005, but opened up its floodgates to non-invite users in early 2006. It has quite a few unique features that sets it apart from Digg and Slashdot. I won't really go into them because we should all know them.

In my opinion, the community at Newsvine is much, much more mature than the one at Digg. Comments are much more rarely inappropriate, and logic tends to prevail more often. Perhaps it's just a function of having a small community, but I'd like to think that's it more of just having a more mature demographic around and that it'll stay that way. Perhaps the motto "get smarter here" was very aptly chosen.

And that ends our brief tour of a couple Web 2.0 websites. Unfortunately, the masses sometimes don't act very well, especially over the Internet. Good for us, though, that a few safe havens exist where we can have intelligent conversation. These places are addicting like no other.

Sweet Fennel! (Couldn't resist)

This has been another fluff article brought to you by Ilyanep not knowing what to write about :). Most information comes either from Wikipedia, general knowledge, or personal experience.