Wetpaint social wiki’s launch - user generated content silver bullet?

Posted 22 June 2006 11:13am by gareth knight with 1 comment

Wetpaint  is something that I came across a while ago when researching Wiki’s and the effect they’re having on knowledge in the enterprise, and as a subset of social software as a whole.

To be honest I was both really interested but also quite concerned about their business model. They seemed to be long on innovation, but short on long term sustainability. That said, they are working with VC so perhaps someone holding the purse strings knows more than I do!

Shoot forward to yesterday, when I received the “Heads up, we’re ready to roll” email, and it seems that they’ve finally come out of a Beta into live production, where they seem to have really ramped up the content they’re offering using their platform (everything from Bob Dylan to Maria Sharapova to quilting to the best Pizza in New York), or at least the number of vertical niches they’re starting to create content for.

My initial concerns are still the same though. Call me cynical, but if your entire business model is reliant on generating Google advertising revenue through page views (as disclosed in the Webpaint FAQ) then you’re either banking on a) loads of traffic and have a long term strategy in place to leverage the Long Tail, or b) you’re not counting your beans right.

In doing this however, they have eliminated some very serious adoption curve problems which is definitely credit to them. The Wetpaint user interface is really good (full of AJAXy goodness) and their sign up procedure is really easy too. So right away, they’re addressing the key Web 2.0 execution problems of usability and scalability. 

That takes Wetpaint about a third of the way. So what of the other two-thirds? Well, they don’t have an API. And there doesn’t seem to be any RSS icons around telling me that I can monitor updates without actually visiting the site. And you can’t yet configure a Wiki for your own domain. 

This latter point may prove to be the ultimate business model (ASP Wiki’s for anyone), with this initial phase aimed at creating mindshare, software stability and passionate users. We've previously suggested that a white label strategy might help innovative Web 2.0 startups to create new / some revenue streams.

However, is all that going to be enough?

Scoble talked about it today when talking about user generated content and the effect of the long tail, and I think he has a very valid point. 

Why would I want to add content to your site / wiki when I don’t share in the revenues / profits that are generated from it? Wait, there’s another possible business model folks. I’m sure most people won’t care, but many early adopters will (and surely that will have an effect on the adoption rate / rate of content increase).

This is an interesting development, which really does take Wikis to the next level.  Techies will be wetting their lips over the AJAX, and people wanting to create their own content sites will love the ease of use.

There are other players around however, notably Socialtext, which seem to be doing well in the enterprise arena, albeit with a different business model, so we’ll be watching the blogosphere to see what the reaction is.