“Regrettably, much of Web 2.0 now is working in the opposite direction… the wall gardens of Facebook, etc. are concentrating the clicks and dollars to fewer and fewer fat cats.”

Posted 09 Feb 2010 at 8:50 am By Michael

While it might not appear to be the case, I strongly believe in community. I also believe in working with people to build the best possible product. You excel at asking the current population of FPF what can be done to improve the product.

We could go back and forth , not just wanted to clear up any misconceptions. My take is that FPF is simply another type of “walled garden” your phrase, but fitting…

But I do think it’s noisy and crowded and the amount of junk is growing faster than the amount of good stuff… rendering some channels not-worth-the-effort.

Of course blogs are part of Web 2.0, as you point out. And good ones are wonderful. There’s a huge percentage of auto-generated junk blogs too though… the equivalent of spam… hunting for search-derived traffic.

About the lost cat, I’m sorry but I respectfully can’t agree with you that a link to a photo in an FPF posting would be bad. Just the opposite. FPF publishes hundreds of links to other sites (including lost cat photos) every week. Linking is popular and a win-win for all involved. Some prefer a Facebook-type strategy of capturing people and keeping them on one site for everything you can possibly think of. But that’s not FPF’s approach.

I find is fascinating that when I ask questions on this type of forum you love to focus on obscure corner cases, and ignore the core suggestions I make.

I asked where blogs fit into this “Web 2.0 is a bad thing” world. Blogs number 2 or 3 on the Web 2.0 landscape and you are a frequent user of this media/communication platform.

I asked “would a picture of the lost cat be bad?” – I cannot imagine how that would be bad. Flickr is not a noisy channel, simply sharing pictures. Please, tell me answer me and say that in the lost cat post a link to what the cat looks like would be bad.

You feel the need to put all Web 2.0 technologies into the same bucket, which would be like putting all TV stations in the same bucket. If you keep lumping them all together, I can see your frustration – how about isolating those that help, and ignoring the others? You have done that in a way by using this blog, and I know you read other blogs – I have seen your posts elsewhere.

In terms of email and specifically FPF – I do care about my neighbors and I know you get lots of positive feedback and add value to lots of folks. I do, I get it. I said in an earlier post if 50% of signed up users are happy, an unusually high number, I am willing to start there – you are still missing 84% of the market/ neighbors.

You are making an assumption that I must read every email within FPF, there is no subject line, who is talking, what they are saying. I respect my neighbors, but I would have like the choice to know who is sending what, and choosing whether I want to listen or not. You took the filter away.