Social software is ripe for a major wake-up call. Right now, just like in the early days of the portal wars, everyone is focused on traffic and page views (the much maligned eyeballs). MySpace has XX users! Facebook has XXX pageviews/user! YouTube is growing at XX% per month! While the economic and business model are not clear for these social networking sites, there is a lot of excitement and money flowing into these companies based on pure traffic numbers.
But ultimately, just as Google figured it out with PageRank, GoTo figured out with auction-based keyword advertising, quality has the potential to beat quantity, and in a sustainable way. And with social software, the key will be providing a mechanism to separate the quality content from the crap content, and to do it in a scalable manner. As a sign that there is a major innovation waiting to happen, there are numerous simpleton attempts at this, with many variants of using # of thumbs up and thumbs down for a particular post to bubble up & down post quality.
But as early as 1999, epinions.com used the “popularity” of a product review to bubble up & down content, and was quickly overtaken by organized spammers who formed log-rolling circles who voted each other highly with little regard for the true quality of reviews.
But whoever is first to figure this quality question out in a scalable manner, will be the one to make the next leap in Web 2.0 history.
