Few months back I wrote about the future of search and how I wholeheartedly believe that until the idea of the semantic web will take off, in the heavily cluttered www, search through people is 100 times better than the best algorithm.
Recently Google Answer has been shut down and as far as I know, the fate of Yahoo! Answer is quite similar (although there was one significant difference between them - google was a paid-for service while Yahoo!’s is free and open to all to ask and answer, and not surprisingly it is full of crap and stupid questions).
Now LinkedIn created the same application a couple of weeks ago. Question is, why would the people behind LinkedIn will venture into something that the two giants have unmitigatedly failed?
IMHO LinkedIn have a good chance to succeed because there is purpose and cause in creating such application for professional networking community (side-note: recently I’m getting a bit noxious when I hear this word…it’s way way overused by bloggers and clients alike -everybody wants a community…read more here ). While LinkedIn got rid of two key barriers - unlike google’s it’s a free service and unlike Yahoo!’s it is much more community based service than the amorphous open-to-all previous services - their success is not guaranteed.
There still exist the #1 challenge to “better search through people”, i.e. the motivation to contribute.
Stop for a second and seriously ask yourself - why would I take 5-15 min off in the middle of the day, log on to LinkedIn and see if someone posted a question I might be able to answer?
Drawing on some lessons from social psychology, there are two key motivators in group context:
1. People will have stronger motivation to contribute when their contribution is recognized and the benefit they provide to the collective is made salient.
Take Amazon reviews system. People write reviews (of their free will) and the rating system is used to identify amazon’s most helpful reviewers. It’s a system that allows the development of some hierarchy and status of contributors. Both Yahoo! answers and now LinkedIn are using the same mechanism in the forms of numbers and stars.
2. The more people are attached to the group, the more likely they are to contribute
That makes obvious sense and you can see this underlying psychological mechanism in every vibrant community based forum - passionate people who have a strong internal sense of motivation to contribute, rather than some external motivator in the form of points and stars, becasue they strongly feel that a successful outcome of the group is also their own.
The linkedIn interface is somewhere in between and draws on both assumptions. I think that the success of this service is depends on it’s ability to create a sense of community by staying fairly confined in professional categories and sub-categories. Naturally, I cannot be bothered with people who needs help on governmental policies and stuff. Even marketing as a category is too wide a category to motivate me to check in the questions and see if I can help.
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