Question
Should Quora implement action links on their Facebook Timeline app?
Answer
Hell no, but they may not have a choice.
Why no? Joel Spolsky's post on Building Communities with Software has some really good (and controversial) thoughts on the subject.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ar...
This particular bit is very relevant
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Q. Could you make a feature where I check a box that says "email me if somebody replies to my post?"
A. This one feature, so easy to implement and thus so tempting to programmers, is the best way to kill dead any young forum. Implement this feature and you may never get to critical mass. Philip Greenspun's LUSENET has this feature and you can watch it sapping the life out of young discussion groups.
Why?
What happens is that people go to the group to ask a question. If you offer the "notify me" checkbox, these people will post their question, check the box, and never come back. They'll just read the replies in their mailbox. The end.
If you eliminate the checkbox, people are left with no choice but to check back every once in a while. And while they're checking back, they might read another post which looks interesting. And they might have something to contribute to that post. And in the critical early days when you're trying to get the discussion group to take off, you've increased the "stickiness" and you've got more people hanging around, which helps achieve critical mass a lot quicker.
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Offsite partication mechanisms are an orthogonal leakage mode to the better known leakage mode of evaporative cooling. The former bleeds quantity the way the latter bleeds quality. I'd Speculate that you would end up replacing Reed's Law network effects with weaker Metcalfe Law effects.
Why does this matter? The Social Web has matured. A network effect is now just table stakes. To win, you now need a better network effect than the competition. Quality AND quantity-wise.
Nevertheless, this may still be forced on Quora because people increasingly want to dashboard their lives around a few identity anchoring services. Now people don't always get what they want, but in this case, it is in the interests of a hegemon (Facebook) to help them get it.
Which means Quora will need a second-order social network strategy. I had some hope early on that it could be first-order, but I think that window of opportunity has closed. That game is now locked away by Google, Facebook and Twitter. Even the mobile networks cannot break into the first order game.
So my recommendation to Quora: resist as long as possible, try to play the big guys off against each other a bit, and then find a graceful way to cede some UX control, and exact a good price in the bargain.
Who knows, there may even be clever mechanisms (like overloading Facebook's group model with Topics) that allow Quora to Reed the cake and Metcalfe it too.
Why no? Joel Spolsky's post on Building Communities with Software has some really good (and controversial) thoughts on the subject.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ar...
This particular bit is very relevant
---------
Q. Could you make a feature where I check a box that says "email me if somebody replies to my post?"
A. This one feature, so easy to implement and thus so tempting to programmers, is the best way to kill dead any young forum. Implement this feature and you may never get to critical mass. Philip Greenspun's LUSENET has this feature and you can watch it sapping the life out of young discussion groups.
Why?
What happens is that people go to the group to ask a question. If you offer the "notify me" checkbox, these people will post their question, check the box, and never come back. They'll just read the replies in their mailbox. The end.
If you eliminate the checkbox, people are left with no choice but to check back every once in a while. And while they're checking back, they might read another post which looks interesting. And they might have something to contribute to that post. And in the critical early days when you're trying to get the discussion group to take off, you've increased the "stickiness" and you've got more people hanging around, which helps achieve critical mass a lot quicker.
----
Offsite partication mechanisms are an orthogonal leakage mode to the better known leakage mode of evaporative cooling. The former bleeds quantity the way the latter bleeds quality. I'd Speculate that you would end up replacing Reed's Law network effects with weaker Metcalfe Law effects.
Why does this matter? The Social Web has matured. A network effect is now just table stakes. To win, you now need a better network effect than the competition. Quality AND quantity-wise.
Nevertheless, this may still be forced on Quora because people increasingly want to dashboard their lives around a few identity anchoring services. Now people don't always get what they want, but in this case, it is in the interests of a hegemon (Facebook) to help them get it.
Which means Quora will need a second-order social network strategy. I had some hope early on that it could be first-order, but I think that window of opportunity has closed. That game is now locked away by Google, Facebook and Twitter. Even the mobile networks cannot break into the first order game.
So my recommendation to Quora: resist as long as possible, try to play the big guys off against each other a bit, and then find a graceful way to cede some UX control, and exact a good price in the bargain.
Who knows, there may even be clever mechanisms (like overloading Facebook's group model with Topics) that allow Quora to Reed the cake and Metcalfe it too.