[Friday Watch 1] What does it take to be Flickricious? Sony might find out

By Richard Koman - April 15, 2005

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Crowd-Graphed.jpgThe other night, dinner discussions centered on platforms and communities — and the spontaneous nature of community formation. Companies these days would kill for communities of users of the unusual sort that arise on Flickr and Del.icio.us. Yet there is no way to create Flickrlicious communities - they have to arise by themselves by interacting with open and open-ended technology. You can prepare the ground; but you are at the mercy of random events and factors.

We laughed at the memory of Friendster, which about two years ago tried to ban “fakesters,” a large community of users that were using fictitious names and acting out outlandish personas, such as a guy called Pure Evil.

That's right, stamping out a spontaneously formed, growing, community of users because they were not doing what they were supposed to do as a Friendster user. That wouldn’t happen today, I would think. Now, it’s the online communities that set the rules of what is acceptable and doable.


Aberrant behaviors…

I was wondering how large of a population is needed before a community starts exhibiting spontaneous, unpredictable, aggregate behaviors. Is it 500 people, 15,000? Dalton Caldwell, chief technology officer at Imeem, a personal network software company, figures it is probably about 10 to 15,000. He said he noticed that on Dogster, the Friendster for pet owners, a group of users talking in the voices of their dogs started up at around that population number.

What about the PSP?
Richard's take: Speaking of which, what will Sony do about the outpouring of creativity around the PSP? They could take measures to shut down the hackers, possibly by delivering a firmware update that blocked the hacks. They could be determined to maintain control of the device. But they would be well-served by letting the thousand hacks bloom and see what kind of community forms. Indeed, they should foster the hack community by taking a page from Flickr and provide an open API for developers to write PSP programs. It was Sony, after all, whose name is on the Supreme Court decision that allowed the past 20 years of technological creativity to flourish. Could the PSP be the next Betamax, the next way that Hollywood actually makes money despite best efforts not to? That might be difficult if the Court overturns Sony Betamax this summer in the Grokster case.
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By Richard Koman - April 15, 2005 | Permalink | Category: Friday Watch
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