Web 2.0 Industry As a Perfect Example of Crowd Thinking

Back in my university years when I studied philosophy I once wrote a paper on crowd thinking and behavior. That experience taught me that crowd is a very dangerous phenomenon because a crowd rarely can be reasonable and people can be easily manipulated to follow guidance from any leader clever enough to issue orders a crowd will understand.

Unfortunately now that I watch web 2.0 as an industry I often notice classical examples of crowd thinking here where people who are actually intelligent and reasonable enough are easily manipulated into whatever this or that leader tells them to do. This is so natural that we rarely even stop for a moment to think about it and make a thoughtful decision based on our own understanding of reality instead of following what someone else tells us to do.

Take micro-blogging, for example. When Twitter was launched there was no demand for such a service and no one realized we actually needed a tool to broadcast our thoughts in 140 characters or less. But then people like Robert Scoble evangelized the idea and since we tend to follow the leaders (we call them A-listers here), the service quickly attracted mass following and has become one of the most discussed subjects in the blogosphere.

These days we have at least one Twitter killer (or analogue or competitor or whatever we choose to label them) launched every couple of weeks (and I remember one week when I got invitations to try out 3 micro-blogging tools in a row). Some of them are launched completely unnoticed and only get a couple of posts on some second-tier blogs while others get at least a couple of days of popularity and attention everywhere. Why does that happen? Simply because some A-lister chooses this service is worth initiating a buzz around it and so all the supporters of this particular person consider it a must to quickly jump on the bandwagon, send out one shout (or one plurk or any other word the service creators choose to identify it to make the process a little different) to the crowd and immediately follow all the familiar faces.

The recent example that got me thinking about it was Rejaw - quite a neat service that seemed to vegetate in obscurity for a few weeks completely unknown to the crowd until Leo Laporte decided to mention how cool it was on Twitter and FriendFeed. All of a sudden the service received a lot of supporters and even fans. Lots of blog posts were published - some claiming Rejaw will inevitably kill Twitter since it is so perfect, others proving Rejaw has no chances to kill Twitter at all because Twitter is our long-time darling and we are quite fine with the existing functionality (if Twitter is not down, of course). But anyway everyone registered and tried Rejaw out and realized it was possible there to find friends from Facebook and Twitter - thus the crowd easily gathered over there again to exchange messages with the same people as on Twitter but in a new interface.

The same happens to any new service and clever startups understand our psychology well enough to never launche without at least some functionality to import friends from email address books and at least some social networks, like Facebook or Twitter. And that’s wise: if some bloggers choose to cover this or that new service, only some people of the standard crowd will read the posts and even less people will choose to actually try the covered service out. But if this small number of people registers and finds they can easily connect to their already registered friends and invite others easily, they will most certainly do just that - at least to further established their own positions as early adopters.

In fact, the much-hyped concepts like Data Portability and Google Friend Connect seem to be intended to further facilitate our crowd behavior - for us to constantly find the same people everywhere. I am sure that if you have been mixing in this crowd for a while now, you find the very same faces to add as friends or follow in every new service you register with. What’s more, I suspect that a vast majority of these faces and avatars are people you’ve never met in real life and absolutely don’t consider to be your real friends. These are simply the socially-connected people that follow each other everywhere and that probably enjoy talking to each other - and all the new services they register with simply serve as new (more comfortable, more functional, better-looking or shinier) places for the same activities and conversations.

Another example of this crowd thinking is technology blogging and the way Techmeme operates. Whenever someone many bloggers are willing to listen like Michael Arrington starts a discussion of some peculiar topic no one even cares about or thinks of as worth covering on blogs, other bloggers are more than willing to join in the discussion and all of a sudden we get lengthy Techmeme discussions with people ranting about a topic no one cared about an hour before that.

The same is true for new articles as well. If an event happens and some big name in blogging picks it for coverage and clearly expresses a positive or a negative opinion, you will mostly here the very same opinion repeated everywhere. Sure, it is easier to rephrase the same opinion instead of giving the new product or announcement some critical thinking to build an opinion of your own. And even if you do have a different opinion, other bloggers will hardly want to listen to this opinion (unless you are not an A-lister yourself, of course). As a result, bloggers prefer to either agree with the initial opinion or stay neutral not to irritate others if you think bad news is actually good or spoil a holiday for everyone if you think what everyone describes as perfect actually has some serious flaws.

Is it bad that people online show this trend for crowd thinking? Actually, I think there are both good and bad aspects about it. The aspect that I think is the worst one is the fact that this trend damages our opportunities for discovery of new services, new voices and opinions, new content. And unfortunately those voices that you’ve been listening to for a long time already will hardly ever bring anything that can be considered as new or different. Besides, it is also very difficult to reach any success if you don’t belong to the crowd - the only thing you can do to achieve any visibility is get noticed by the big names in the industry.

But there is one thing that is good about it (at least for a certain type of people) - easily manipulated crowd can be used for very efficient marketing and promotion. The only thing you need as a marketer to make your product a success is connections to the best-known internet personalities. And once you persuade these celebrities your particular product deserves their attention, they will bring the rest of the crowd to you without any particular efforts on your part.

But how does it feel to be a part of the crowd? I believe it is not the most pleasant of feelings to know you can be manipulated this easily by a handful of people whose opinions you’ve chosen to trust simply because they are already trusted by so many other people. So I believe it will not hurt to stop every few weeks and think for a moment if the startups we’ve lately joined and brought our friends in were actually interesting to us personally or were merely recommended by some internet celebrity. After all, reasonable decisions have never hurt anyone and hopefully if we have diversified opinions here, the entire industry will benefit eventually - even though the influence those A-listers enjoy may be diminished.