HARNESSING COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
Welcome to my first blog in INB347 Web 2.0. In this blog, I’m exploring the harnessing of collective intelligence in Web 2.0. Tim O’Reilly said the idea of harnessing collective intelligence is all about user participation and network effects. This means providing useful data to the users of a site, which will allow the users to collaborate and participate more with the website, which will ensure that the website can collect high-quality information. Several Web 2.0 sites, such as Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, benefit from collective intelligence in the creation of content. If a better experience can be provided to the users, this can help increase the site’s retention rate.
I have chosen Instagram as the example for this blog.
What is Instagram?
All of us likely know what Instagram is, but we need to provide a clear definition. Instagram is an online photo and video sharing Web 2.0 platform website. The idea behind Instagram is to allow users to upload photos and short videos on a daily basis for other Instagram members. Users can edit their photos through the verity editing features, such as filtering, rotating and recoloring. Moreover, users have the opportunity to follow friends, celebrities, brands, and other interests. Instagram users are allowed to offer their opinions about pictures using comments and hashtags.
What is the relation between harnessing collective intelligence and Instagram?
Based on the following statistics that I found, Instagram is a perfect example of harnessing collective intelligence:
– Monthly active Instagram users: 150 million
– Number of daily users: more than 75 million
– Number of photos shared: 16 billion
– Average number of photos posted daily: 55 million
– Number of likes per day: 1.2 billion
Impressively, Instagram was only launched in October 2010, and it is still growing and growing, which is the aim of harnessing collective intelligence. In additio, one major reason for this success is that Instagram allows users to share photos and videos with other social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter,Tumblr and Flickr.
References:
Tim O’Reilly: Harnessing Collective Intelligence
http://mashable.com/2012/05/29/instagram-for-beginners/
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/Instagram
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/I/instagram.html
http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/important-instagram-stats/#.Ux0-29zZVg0
Yazeed Alharbi 