I began my career many years ago developing and teaching software system development methods. One of the principles my colleagues and I stressed is still valid today in the context of social networking but often ignored: data is only as good as it’s most frequent usage.
Why does frequency of use effect data quality? Data that is frequently used is apt to be good data, since people are looking at it regularly and using it for some meaningful real-world purpose: If an error is present in the data to start with, or if the data changes, someone notices it quickly and it gets corrected. Data that is infrequently used is typically of lower quality for the same reason: It isn’t used as often, so when errors or changes occur they take longer to notice and fix. Consider phone numbers: if you build a web site and require visitors to enter phone numbers, how many of them are valid to start with? How many initially valid ones are still be good after a year? After five years? Unless you are regularly using those numbers to call people, the quality declines with time.
Social networking sites often seem to forget that data, like fish, can go bad. And I’m not referring to the fact that lots of sites try to collect profile information that will never be used (like asking for my phone number when you have no intention of ever calling me). I’m referring more to crowdsourcing: social networking sites set up to collect user generated content (UGC) intended to help solve some kind of problem. While some UGC is long-lived (“how do I turn on/off a setting in a popular application,” for instance), much UGC has a much shorter shelf life (“where’s the cheapest place to buy gasoline this week,” for instance). Everyone has had experience wandering into a forum, discussion group, or blog where there has been no activity for many, many months. And if you are like me, when I wander into such I site I tend to wander right back out again.
Like stale fish in your refrigerator, stale UGC on your social networking site can spoil other sections by driving away visitors. So a word of advice to organizations setting up crowdsourcing applications: keep the freshness of data in mind. Throw out new interesting topics frequently to keep content fresh and retire old topics when they’ve stopped attracting new content. Move old content to archives so that users don’t accidentally confuse fresh content with older content.
And while you are at it, stop asking for my phone number.
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