I'm not ashamed to admit that I've been blindsided. Via the Twitter-stream, I caught a whiff of a founder's debate over whether or not to open source one of their projects, which in turn led to a description of their newest business venture.
But let's begin at the beginning. Fog Creek Software co-founder Joel Spolsky had--and to a degree still has--a rather diverse set of forums on his blog, Joel on Software. In my Sys. Admin. days, it was a decent place to hang out when I had nothing better to do during backups and such. In fact, two of my Facebook peeps are JOS alumni. That's not to say that things didn't go a little crazy every so often. For instance, I remember when the moderators threw out one of their own, and the lopsided food-fight that ensued. And I remember Mr. Spolsky closing down one of the forums because it was too troublesome. But the JOS forum universe was generally a good place to toss around ideas...or to just plain waste time.
We've probably all witnessed how a single person can poison an online community and how more than one troll can even kill it. Mr. Spolsky mused on various technological and sociological workarounds for this problem, both via his blog and in tandem with Jeff Atwood, (lately his partner for StackOverflow) on their weekly podcast of the same name.
StackOverflow.com is a "free" alternative to paid question-answer sites like Experts Exchange. As I see it, it is also Spolsky and Atwood's leveraging of their follower base, as well as the leveraging of the lessons of the JOS forums. The lessons of StackOverflow, are in turn being leveraged in the pay-for-play StackExchange web application. StackExchange is a version of StackOverflow meant for other, possibly non-technical audiences. Without knowing anything beyond what's on the website, it sounds suspiciously like an attempt to revive the concept of knowledge management software, with the value-add being that the "bugs" of human interaction have largely been worked out.
I'm not discounting the value of single data points--what Twitter terms are trending, what Facebook groups draw the most members, how often does the tag "peanut butter" coincide with the tag "jelly," etc. But the fuzzier data (such as what conditions trigger an online community to splinter, or which techniques are best for IPM'ing trolls, comment-spammers and similar scum) may be more valuable in the long run. That's something that the Stack Overflow founders seem to think is the "monetizeable" part of Web 2.0.
I'll definitely give them both credit for long tail thinking. But if thinking about MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. just made you feel like a lab rat, you have me for company in that.
