Here are some more of the insights that we gained from our Sessions discussion…
Michael Parekh makes the point that all peers are not created equal…
“Another thing, the term peer to peer, one of the things that’s implicit, unfortunately, is that everyone is participating in an equal way, and the reality is in terms of all these others people talk about, from Napster to Wikipedia, the number of people that are actually doing — contributing content, it’s typically a much lower percentage. … If you look at the number of people who read blogs versus write blogs, the number of people who put comments in and who actually have their own blog, I mean, typically you’re talking about percentages that are a fraction of the whole system. And one of the things that I’m trying to figure out in a lot of these examples is which of the systems that have lower friction points. Like Del.icio.us, where you would assume that a lot more people, because it’s easier to put tags in, are participating and contributing to the system as opposed to just taking things out, and one of the things we need to be mindful about in all the peer to peer conversation is how do you make these systems more efficient? How do you get more people to participate, whether it’s trust factors, shyness factors, learning the tools.” .
Tim O’Reilly reminds us that the systems with the least friction are the ones that we participate in unconsciously…
“Everybody participates in Google, because they figured out how to leverage what people do implicitly”
We agree with Michael and Tim that the sponsor of any peer produced service should always be trying to make it easier to participate… to reduce friction, but we would also note that it is not necessarily a bad thing that a small number of producers can create value for a large number of consumers. Leverage in any system is key to the creation of value. It is a good thing that hundreds of thousands of active taggers at del.icio.us have created a utility That helps millions discover things on the web that they could never find with search.
The key insight here is that there are a number of ways to create leverage in a peer produced web service, and that the leverage will be different depending on the service. Services that create value for large numbers of users with a small number of active participants have a lot of natural leverage, but that is only on way to create leverage. Reducing friction to facilitate participation is another. Skype, however, appears to create leverage with a model that assumes that a large number of participants will share their idle bandwidth and CPU with the small number of consumers who are active at the moment.