Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers

Bradley Horowitz, head of the Technology Development Group at Yahoo! Search & Marketplace, has posted a great analysis of what it takes to make an online social networking community work, entitled Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers. (Thanks to the social software weblog for the heads-up on this).

Key points: a successful online community has at least 1% contributing content, 10% actively participating (adding content or commenting on existing content), meaning 89 to 90% of the community can lurk and the community can still be successful.

At last a meaningful definition of critical mass in the context of modern-day online social networking. The literature on computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) has a lot of publications on this topic (e.g., Lynne Markus who published on this as far back as 1987 with "Markus, L., Towards a 'critical mass' theory of interactive media: Universal access, interdependence, and diffusion"), but it's never been clear whether earlier research would still be valid as the technological environment morphed in radical ways and a new generation of netizens emerged.

My favorite read on this is Jonathan Grudin's article Groupware and Social Dynamics: Eight Challenges for Developers, which was published in '94 but still definitely holds true today. One of his challenges was the critical mass problem, though he did not quantify it as nicely as Horowitz has done.

David Maltz of Carnegie-Mellon wrote in the same year about a collaborative filtering system for Usenet News in which 24 of 40 users voted on documents, but the system did not achieve critical mass because the number of online documents was so large relative to the size of the community ("Distributing Information for Collaborative Filtering on Usenet Net News"). So in addition to the proportion of users participating in one form or another, there is also a relationship, as-yet-unquantified as far as I can tell, between the community size and the size of the information space. Got to think about this some more...