12.13.09
Posted in collaboration at 2:51 am by Bani
Or why products are launched in private betas.
A few years ago Eric Raymond postulated the “Law of Linus”, which goes as:
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow
So why should a company limit the number of eyeballs allowed to interact with their new products? Clay Shirky gives us an important reason to start small and try to improve from there: community.
If you want to create a community from scratch, you can’t expect it to start big. Scale kills conversation, so you need to start small and not grow faster than the community can sustain. It is also important that the founders create a relationship with the first thousands of users, knowing them and being available for them. But they also have to keep in mind that the users won’t behave the way they want them to and limiting the way users can collaborate with each other is the worst way to lead a new product.
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10.19.09
Posted in collaboration at 3:46 pm by Bani
One week ago I was at Open Hack NYC. The keynote by Clay Shirky was great and I plan to write a blog post about it soon. But today I’m here to share what I saw during the Ignite NYC presentation that happened that same night. There were many interesting 5 minutes talk on several subjects, and you can see them all in the video bellow:
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08.21.09
Posted in collaboration at 1:38 pm by Bani
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08.01.09
Posted in collaboration at 10:34 am by Bani
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10.03.08
Posted in collaboration at 10:33 am by Bani
I’ve been following the discussions about license proliferation that have been going on the past few weeks.
I’m really glad that they are bringing up all those issues now because they are very closely related to the subject of my master’s dissertation and it will surely enrich my research.
But one thought that crossed my mind today was that everyone participating in that discussion knows somehow what licenses should be recommended. But if they just say “ok, here are the licenses” people will complain that they just made that up. So what they are doing is a methodology to choose licenses, and apparently this they can just make up, expecting much less complains.
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08.17.08
Posted in collaboration at 5:05 pm by Bani
Just a rant: when you aren’t going to do things right, let other people do it.
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08.06.08
Posted in collaboration at 1:07 pm by Bani
Today the Wikia Search team announced something that dramatically changed how easy it is to help build a better search engine. It is a new Firefox toolbar that lets you add sites and metadata about them to the Wikia Search index in a few clicks, without ever leaving the page. You can also add search results from Google or Yahoo directly to Wikia Search.
Now, if only they could figure out a way to better handle the diversity of languages spoken in the web, that would be great. It bothers me a little how much German gets in my way when doing Wikia Search stuff, and also I’d like to add more Portuguese content, so this area has lots of room for improvement. As far as I know Google is the only search engine that tries to address language issues in search results, but I don’t like how they do it either, because you can’t choose multiple languages when searching.
I’d say let’s wait and see, but actively shaping it is much more fun than waiting 
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06.18.08
Posted in collaboration at 9:56 am by Bani
Looks like the viral marketing has been working well for Firefox 3. You can keep track of the progression at the download counter page.
It would be interesting if they released a graph of downloads per hour.
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Posted in collaboration at 9:40 am by Bani
Two weeks after my last rant, I just would like to say that I feel things are working better in the project now. People are being able to discuss ideas and there is better communication about what is going on.
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06.03.08
Posted in collaboration at 10:01 am by Bani
Today a message has been sent by Jimmy Wales to the Wikia Search Mailing List:
Just pinging this list to make sure everyone here is seeing the new
launch today… lots of new features, new and much better index, etc.
Getting favorable reviews so far…
My first question is how the other people who wrote reviews knew about it already. Did they find out by themselves as soon as the got up in the morning, or were they told about it? And in this second case, they were told by whom? Anyway, the real question is how come the list of people who are really interested in the project never knows what is going on in it?!
Is Jimmy Wales following Jason Calacanis strategy and thinking the main advantage of having a community is doing viral marketing of their product? But hey, the people subscribed to the Wikia Search list knew that the new features of Mahalo were being launched before it was publicly announced! So looks like Calacanis is doing a much better job at that. To be fair, Jeremie Miller told us they planned to launch the new features sometime (almost one month ago), when John McCormac asked if there was any updates. Now let’s compare that with the almost daily updates that I received when I was in the Mahalo list.
So, basically, this is how it works: if you are a developer, maybe you can find your way through the code (after you find the code itself, which isn’t exactly a straightforward task), and then you can try to contribute. From the activity I see on the dev lists they don’t talk much to each other, but it is enough to get things done. However, there is one not so little problem with this approach: although they say the project is open source, there is no license! And if you aren’t a developer, your contribution is limited to promoting the site and using it.
Now, about using the site. They really have new cool features! The interface improved a lot and you have much better control over the search results. You can not only give a rating to each link, but also edit, delete, add, etc. I think this is how it should have been from day one. There is even a feature in which you can change the background of a search result to add a relevant image. On the other hand, the index doesn’t seem to be that much better. It’s still missing lots of sites and sometimes the same site appears more than once. So I’m not sure it is really ready to be used in large scale yet, what is important to get the critical mass needed to make collaborative production work.
Wikia Search started as four organizational principles: Transparency, Community, Privacy, and Quality. But the real work is done by a small group, cathedral style, ignoring feedback that comes from the outside. So far the search quality isn’t high and even the privacy isn’t that much respected considering anyone can see the IP of the people who edited anything on the search results.
But it is slowly getting better. Let’s see what comes next. Maybe they will even figure out how people can actually play a larger role in it.
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