You might want to look at this link from ACSIhttp://www.theacsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=220&Itemid=236(American Customer Satisfaction Index) which introduced indexing of social sites this year:
"Satisfaction is measured with four social media websites—Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, and YouTube—plus an aggregate measure of smaller sites...
Given the popularity of the four measured social media sites, each boasting hundreds of millions of users worldwide, the first round of ACSI scores offered some surprises. *At the top is Wikipedia*—the massive, multilingual, user-produced encyclopedia run by the Wikimedia Foundation. With an ACSI score of 77, Wikipedia is *more satisfying* than most of the ACSI-measured news and information websites. Like Google, *Wikipedia’s user interface has remained very consistent over the years, and its nonprofit standing means that it has not been impacted by commercialization and marketing unlike many other social media sites*...
*[C]ontroversies over privacy issues*, frequent changes to user interfaces, *and increasing commercialization have positioned the big social networking sites at satisfaction levels well below other websites and similar to poor-performing industries* like airlines and subscription TV service..."
In other words, it seems a major survey picks out non-commercialization and a strong approach to privacy as a key factor to pleasing users, and increasing commercialization as a reason why other social sites may become less popular.
FT2
On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 11:27 AM, Arlen Beiler arlenbee@gmail.com wrote:
I don't think I could stand it if we picked up advertising. I hate the way
wikia looks, and therefore have an aversion to contributing in any way to its progress. Can you imagine! We actually link to Wikia sites and give them traffic (though I guess that is better than filling up wikibooks and wikipedia with useless junk)! Wikia is like the no good jerk up the street. Imagine us turning to ads after all these years! I am sure it could be a revenue source for some, but we are different, we are better. We create the best family of websites in the world, let's not mar them with ads. You know, wikia should sell itself to the Wikimedia Foundation so that Wikimedia would get the money. Then too, I guess the board members need some way to make money. What actually might be a better idea, would be for wikia to pay the board, since it is a for profit company. Or am I missing the point entirely? I read what that Greg Kohs said about it, and while I agree that it did sound like a conflict of interest, I don't know how much of this is proper or not. Anyway, those are my useless ramblings, so bye.
On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 9:39 PM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 8:18 PM, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@googlemail.com wrote:
Hello,
Adverts do not make content wrong, but create mistrust. Have a look what Lawrence Lessig tells about:
After the first few minutes it turns into a long drawn out infomercial supporting US "campaign finance reform".
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