Multipurpose Room

Lower Barriers of Participation

by Bradley Horwitz – VP Product Strategy

Yahoo Developer Network, Methods & Practices, Research Berkeley, Advanced Products Group, Technology Development. But we need to get everyone, all 12,000 involved.

Hack Yahoo! Invites all sorts of people. Inspired by JotSpot. Everyone gets involved. Credo is mashup or shutup.

Observation: Three classes of participants. 1% creators, 10% synthesizers and 100 consumers. Results from Google Groups. Same with del.icio.us. Helps pick up what is hot.

Goal is to get everyone involved.

Anyone with a ___ is now a ___: keyboard, author; camera, photographer; ipod, dj; browser, publisher. Problem is that a lot of these people are not artists.

Tim O’Reiley did post on interestingness with Flickr.

• (1) User Generated Content
• (Computer vision is very, very hard – digression)
• (Bumped into ESP Game – rouse public blind tagging game. Remarkable thing.)
• (2) User Organized Content -breakthrough is lower threshold
• (tag space grew organically)
• (takes picture of hotel room and tags it – culture of generosity)
• (3) User Distributed Content (see third party blogs)
• (4) User Developed Functionality (APIs)

LinkFlex – like Google Page Rank. So Flickr uses interestingness. Eg. views, lots of comments, recency, favorites, etc.

Distinguish between tags like jaguar car from animal. They look at secondary tags to cluster.

“Better search through people”

posted by Ray @ Wednesday, August 16, 2006