How Much Should You Rely on Your Users to Do Your Job?

Read any advice about bootstrapping your start-up company and odds are you'll find a tip about using your loyal user base to contribute services to your company. It sounds like a great idea in theory: you have all these people who love what you are doing and want to help. Your users may be willing to code for you or design for you or help localize your app by translating all your pages into languages they speak. The question left after relying on these people is how much you should rely on them to do your job.

The recent news about a Mozilla plug-in may be a warning about letting users code. We are in an space where the API is an ubiquitous offering from almost every 2.0 company. Use our API! Add functionality! Build a plug-in! Mozilla has succeeded where other iterations failed by switching to an Open Source model for developing the basic browser, and then letting anyone build plug-ins to enhance the feature set. We've been trained like Pavlov's dog to click the "This is okay! Go ahead and install it!" button every time we add a plug-in to Mozilla, but as some users discovered this week, you can't always trust the code you are installing. All versions of the Vietnamese language pack that have been downloaded since February of this year were infected with a virus. And this was a language pack that could be installed directly from Mozilla's own servers. With no oversight of these plug-ins, users are installing them at their own peril. This time it was just a virus, but the opportunity exists for injection of malicious code based on the current model.

Facebook is apparently having some issues of its own. As our own Svetlana discovered, the Russian language version of Facebook has its own issues. Facebook relies on its users to translate the site into other languages for them. You'd think that a company with Google-esque perks could afford to pay for localization, but most companies will take advantage of free services wherever they can get them if you ask them. The problem is that because Facebook relies on its users to translate the site for them, they don't employ anyone to actually check the translations, nor read any of the ads fed to users who are using the localized versions. As a result, an ad is currently running on the Russian language version of Facebook that advertises pornographic images of teen girls.

It sounds like good business sense to get free services whenever you can, especially when you have a devoted user base willing to provide them. But do you really want to rely on them when your company's image is at stake? And can you bet that in every case free services provided are doing more good than harm?

Update: Filing under "great minds think alike," Drama 2.0 was thinking the same thing today and referenced the Data Portability logo design issues as another example of crowdsourcing gone wrong.