Trust and Web 2.0: is the model broken?
The Web 2.0 model is essentially built on the wisdom of the crowd. Rather than relying on experts users are encouraged to rate or recommend other people as friends, products or software applications. But does the model scale? And can the crowd keep growing for ever? Is their a finite level at which wisdom becomes aggregated to the lowest common denominator? And are we reaching that point now?
Putting it another way how many social software sites can we manage? Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Slideshare, Blip.fm, Blip.tv, YouTube, GoogleWave, Linkedin – the list goes on. And how many ‘friends’ can we follow?
But perhaps the most obvious example that the model does not scale is the Apple Aps store. A year ago I used to regularly surf the latest apps for my Pod touch, looking at user ratings and reviews. Now with over 120000 apps on the site it is a waste of time. There is simply too many apps with no way of finding what might be useful. furthermore the ratings system does little to help. Most have a rating of 3 or 4 as one might expect. furthermore, Apple has just suspended 100 apps due to suspicions that the reviews are being fiddled. Increasingly the only way to find new applications is to use review sites – in other words to go back to a reliance on so called experts. Although on a lesser scale, the same problem exists with Wordpress plug-ins. And there seems to be a move with Wordpress away form free and open source plug-ins towards commercial software. Trust through payment?
So what is the way out of all this? Probably we will see more specialised social networking sites, targeted at particular interests or groups. In that respect Linkedin, which always seemed a bit staid and boring, may well prove to have got the model right. And trust relationships will become more important. Recommendations will be based not on the numbers of the crowd but on who the people are. To an extent that is already happening through Twitter. Instead of trying to keep up with the flood of new blog entries on a Feedreader we are choosing to follow recommendations from our trusted friends of what to read. And I suspect that the word friend will come to mean more what it used to. Instead of blindly accepting friendship from anyone who offers it, we will develop smaller networks of those we really trust.
In what sense does sourcing recommendatins from “friends” suggest that the Web 2.0 model is broken? Crowdsourcing id not based on anonymous data but on trusted networks which have been carefull crafted (J. Surowiecki 2005. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few).
Does it scale? That’s where the semantic web comes in.