Last week, I wrote about what I loved about Fwix:
Fwix doesn’t even bother with the pretense of asking its users for original content. As far as I can tell, there aren’t any places within the Fwix.com site where you can post stories.
There’s a good chance that Fwix actually will introduce tools to post original content, but why should they bother? Right now, you’re expected to post them on your Facebook or Twitter feed, but that’s where everyone would rather be posting news links anyways. In fact, that’s where people are already posting news links!
The mental cost of switching can have huge ramifications about user adoption, and leads to rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer effects. Friendfeed suffered, for example, because it had too high of a mental cost of switching for most people, even if it was very easy to use Friendfeed together with other services.
It’s refreshing to see a site that doesn’t even pretend that you’re going to want to use yet another tool on the web.
Yesterday, I read about Artwiculate:
Every day a new word is chosen, and simply sending a tweet containing that word will enable your update to appear on the Artwiculate site. Once there, other users can vote whether your usage was “liked” or whether it was inaccurate.
Artwiculate is another member of what I now call the Chop Suey class of application that doesn’t require people to do anything besides what they’re already doing. This class of application isn’t really new. Google’s flagship search product is literally a textbook example of adding value to crowdsourced data, and Tim O’Reilly, Kevin Kelly and many others have been evangelizing collective intelligence for well over a decade.
But it’s now getting to the point where you’re at an obvious disadvantage when you do anything but use things that are already there. Artwiculate works even if no one uses it, and that’s a crucial distinction that may help it survive the valley of despair.
Unfortunately, the Chop Suey approach has largely not yet been absorbed in academic settings, and is lagging behind the vanguard even in the best case scenarios.