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Betsy Devine notices that the Web 2.0 buzz of user-generated content now has a new name: crowdsourcing. An excellent example is the flora of user-built applications for the Facebook platform.

I’ve been on Facebook for a few months by now, and it is in my opinion the best community so far. Most important is of course the international scope – my previous experiences with communities (LunarStorm, Helgon and Spexforum, most notably) lack the necessary mass of members. Facebook is the best simply because “everyone” is there, from several different social gatherings in my real life. Like the Adium instant message app, Facebook offers me a collection of all my friends.*

The other pro with Facebook is the brilliant combination of crowdsourcing and community. The sheer number of members means that there is incentive for programmers to build content, in the now well-established way of uploading pictures, sharing links etc. However, Facebook makes this user-added content meaningful by using tags – in a different way than for instance Flickr or Bloggar.se. As a user, I am not interested in pictures or blog posts of/about “cars”, “sailing” or “A birth-day party”, but rather in pictures and posts with the cars, sailing and birth-day parties of my friends. The social network is a much more meaningful model of organization than the content tags otherwise so popular in Web 2.0.

And finally, the applications. Facebook has embraced the entire concept of Web 2.0, since users can not only add content but also add new ways to use the content. The applications of Facebook are, just like the basic functions of photo sharing etc, drawing strength from the combination of crowdsourcing and community. Trivia quizzes and arcade games have existed on the web since the first Java Scripts, but are pretty boring if you cannot compare the results with your friends, only with a top list of unbeatable scores. Movie ratings on IMDb have little value since they are mass votes with no sender. The Facebook apps solve this problem by restricting the scores and ratings displayed to the ones of your friends.

* Of course, there is a difference in meta-level, but the result is similar.