I’ve seen enough online communities come and go that I’ve noticed a pattern to their life cycle.  It usually goes something like this:

1. A community starts to be created around some new site or service. Early adopters bring in their friends, and theree is a flurry of initial creativity.
2. The community  is “discovered” by a (tastemaker/early adopter/alpha blogger). The (site/app/service) is hailed as the “next big thing” by that (tastemaker/early adopter/alpha blogger). Expectations are inflated, often with the aid of the company that has launched the (site/app/service).
3. The hype bubble attracts large numbers of additional users, whose expectations are colored by the hype.  Many of them have no idea why they’re there, other than it’s cool.
4. The (site/app/service) loses its shiny newness, strains under additional use, changes to accomodate additional use, and/or fails to live up to the inflated expectations, dissapointing the (tastemaker/early adopter/alpha blogger), who then declares the (site/app/service)is (doomed/not good/not as good as the latest thing that came out).
5. Early adopters decide that it’s time to find something else to do with their time.  Only a few “old-timers” hang on, mostly for the sake of complaining about how good the community was before all these “newbies” showed up.
6. A newer, shinier place is found, and community is created around it, and the cycle starts again.

Something like this pattern is  currently playing out with Quora, a Q&A crowdsourcing site.  I recently introduced it to consumer readers on TechGoesStrong as the first salvo in a series on the whole genre of Q&A sites, which are legion. Unlike sites like Mahalo and Answers.com, anybody can answer a question on Quora (much like Yahoo! Answers (which is notorious for its spam) and Facebook Questions).

But unlike Yahoo! Answers and Facebook Questions, Quora’s answerers have been, at least initially, pretty high-caliber people who actually know what they’re talking about. Mostly. And Quora accounts are tied to Facebook and Twitter accounts, so there’s an extra social fabric to things. It’s sort of like a cooler, smarter Facebook Questions…started by two guys who left Facebook.

Anyway, Quora got heavy buzz early from alpha blogger Robert Scoble. He called it “the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years.”  And, lo, Quora saw a flood of new users pouring in.

Then, recently, Scoble reversed his assessment of Quora:

Turns out I was totally wrong. It’s a horrid service for blogging, where you want to put some personality into answers. It’s just fine for a QA site, but we already have lots of those and, in fact, the competitors in this space are starting to react. Mahalo just released a new version that has been getting lots of praise and at DLD I met the CEO of Answers.com and he said to expect a major update from his service (which has 1000x more users). Stack Exchange is growing faster than Quora and has many many times more questions and answers, plus I’ve found the answers are broader in reach, and deeper in quality (especially for programmers).

Also, he noted, people were getting “pissed” that moderators were mucking around with their stuff, and that people were lowering the importance of their answers to questions by voting them down or marking them as “not helpful”.

In this case, however, the usual hype/diss cycle took a different turn. As David Chen details in his post, The Ridiculous Takedown of Robert Scoble, the rabid pack of technorati turned not on Quora, but on Scoble, who was forced to back down from his less glowing assessment.  Another alpha blogger, Michael Arrington,castigated Scoble for “Scobleizing” Quora (in the original meaning of the term “Scobleized,” as anyone who ever attended a conference Scoble worked on in the late ’90s and early 00?s would use it):

“It’s a horrid service for blogging,” says Scoble. Yup. I agree. Quora isn’t a very good place for blogging. Because other people can edit or remove your stuff. It’s the sort of place where you have to behave yourself if you want to be heard. That’s exactly not blogging. The thing is, most of us have always known that. Quora is ostensibly a Q&A site. But that’s like saying a car is a device for burning gasoline.Or, in Robert’s case, he’s mad that his car won’t cook him dinner.

Touché, Mr. Arrington.  Scoble had a specific vision of what he thought Quora was, and then it didn’t work that way, and he lost his enthusiasm.  His misconception of how he could use Quora (primarily to extend his own personal brand) led to his dissatisfaction. Arrington is right.

However, one person’s “crowdsourcing” approach to make “a better Wikipedia”, as Arrington puts it, is another person’s “mob rule”.  A group with an agenda can, acting in concert, manipulate which questions get promoted to the top and which get buried…much like what used to happen on Digg. Remember Digg?

The problem with any community that depends on the kindness of the crowd is that the people who make the most noise generally end up having the least to contribute.  Instead of the “network effect”, you get the “unruly mob effect” — the value of the conversations happening in the community is diluted, and the interesting and useful content is drowned out by the noise of the crowd.

So…Scoble is right, too.  Sort of.

Yahoo is apparently looking to release the social linking service del.icio.us into the wild (after never really finding a way to monetize it, I suspect, and finally deciding that Yahoo is not an Internet charity but in fact a business).  Of course, since it’s the vessel for a great deal of social content, there’s obviously been some concern–if you had spent the last decade storing all your favorite web bookmarks in a cloud service, you’d be kind of upset if they were to suddenly go poof, I’m sure.

I’m not a big del.icio.us user.  Back when I worked with a certain Gillmor, he raved something about del.icio.us and the “attention-economy” and what-not.  I found it to be interesting when combined with other social media of the time (I think we called them “blogs” back then), and it demonstrated itself to be innovative enough that it gained a few copycats along the way. But I had this other way of sharing bookmarks with friends: by posting them to my blog and tagging them.  That way, I owned the data, and it was searchable, and anyone who cared about what I thought could subscribe to my RSS feed or see it on my blog (or eventually on Facebook or Twitter). And I had permalinks and all that jazz. Oh, and I could do that for free with several blog platforms. But that wasn’t playing in the attention-stream, I was told.  I guess I have attention deficit disorder or something.

Fast forward 10 years.  We have so many cloud-based social media tugging at us, wanting us to connect to friends and share that del.icio.us has long been lost to most people in the din of Facebook this and Twitter that.   Del.icio.us has evolved a little, but other services like StumbleUpon and Reddit.  And, while some brave pioneers have hung around, the fickle masses have wandered on to other things.

No wonder Yahoo has gotten bored with del.icio.us and has labeled it “sunset”.   It’s that attention thing again, or a lack of it–people have stopped paying attention to what people pay attention to on del.icio.us and would now rather pay attention to what their friends are doing in Farmville.  And since  del.ico.us  lives at the whim of a provider, with no terms of service and no export tool other than code-scraping, there’s the potential for all the attention that’s been spent on curating del.icio.us — curating, the latest buzzword for collecting links –there’s the potential that it’s all been in vain, for naught, and bound for the bit bucket in the cloud.

Of course, that’s the whole problem with magical cloud services, anyway. There may be terms of service out there, but there is not a whole lot that looks like a binding contract between cloud provider and user.  I could wake up tomorrow and find that Yahoo has lost interest in Flickr, and all my photos from the last 5 years have evaporated into so many purged pixels with no contractual recourse than, say, a refund on what’s left of my annual pro fee.  Google could turn off my mail. Facebook could declare me dead and purge my page. Like the Maryland Lottery, it could happen to you.

Do I have your attention?

At least providers like WordPress let me back up and export my site, and I have the code to run the blog someplace else, where I own (or at least lease) the server. But if the cloud is going to be both a metaphor for where applications live and a description of the substantiveness of legal protection that we have as users of the thing from having our digital works exist or not at the whims of questionable business models, then we need to have a way to own our data and move it and replicate it to cover our pixilated assets.

Wikileaks adds new focus to that — it is a model of what data portability should be.  Government siezes your URL because you pissed them off? No problem! The Bolivians will gladly give you a domain, and you can mirror–because YOU own the data, and can move it or duplicate it at will.  Sure, it costs something — money, in WikiLeaks’ case, to pay for hosting and domains and lawyers to fight extradition. In your case, it might cost sharing some of your data, and maybe your…attention.  To advertisements, or to other people’s sites, or whatever.

We pay sites like Facebook with our attention and our data. Mark Z. and his crew keep our attention with new features, and extract value from our data and our ad views to pay the rent.  We should have the ability to take our social network data and replicate it elsewhere, both while we’re using Facebook and when we leave, because it’s part of our identity.  There’s phone number portability by law… why not data portability?