Web 2.0 Question & Answer Sites – MetaFilter

I’ve long been a fan of MetaFilter for tapping into a part of the Internet meme, long before the words “social networking” and the gawd-awful meaningless “Web 2.0″ were coined. MetaFilter is “Web 2.0″ long before anyone knew that was cool.

So it’s not surprising that I found this thread to be interesting. When one of the pre-Web 2.0 sites is commenting on yet another more recent spate of Web 2.0 sites, well, you’re bound to get some negativity. But it also tells me something else — that Web 2.0, user-empowered communities are meaningless without some implicit meaning or structure. Flickr — photos. YouTube — videos. Delicious (I never know where to put the damned periods) — Links. Wikipedia — encyclopedia. Myspace — music. Yes, that’s right, it found its original popularity because of sharing music amongst unknown artists. It spilled into the teen peer group precisely for this reason. And then on to the rest of us.

Yahoo! Answers and Wondir — Well, apparently anything goes. And while Yahoo! can sustain such a service (think Yahoo! Groups, Mail, etc.), I question whether other general purpose services can endlessly tap into people’s well-meaning intentions, free time, and willingness to help others indefinitely. Wikipedia may also suffer from this concern, since you have to ask how long will people just continuously care about a project that isn’t their own. The answer is, nobody knows.

Sites focused on a single technology or topic will likely have an easier time with the future than those that try to be all things to all people. Once the atypical becomes common (and, in fact, overwheliming to online users), I think there may be a backlash to so many sites relying on “user generated” content to make money off of, without limits. Remember, the sites aren’t in it to give “users a voice” — they’re in it to make a profit.

I remain undecided about the future of such sites, but am probably still a little bearish on “Web 2.0″ sites without purpose or clear direction. Sure, for every Myspace, there’s a site like Facebook trying to cash in on the same idea to a different audience. But there are also the Friendster’s and Orkut’s of the world — sites virtually left in the dust after initial acclaim.

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He is an author, researcher and expert in mental health online, and has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues -- as well as the intersection of technology and human behavior -- since 1992. Dr. Grohol sits on the editorial board of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking and is a founding board member and treasurer of the Society for Participatory Medicine.

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    Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 15 Aug 2006
    Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.