Wetpaint Goes Social

Posted by Kevin on March 10th, 2008 2 Comments

Today we officially launched a suite of new features making Wetpaint a whole lot more social than ever before. Tipping our hat to the social networking phenomena, we’ve incorporated many of the features that keep social networkers engaged and coming back for more. We think that with the user frequency typical of many social networks, combined with the ability to do so much more together on a Wetpaint site, creates the ideal environment for online communities.

Social networking is amazing for creating connections between like-minded individuals. The typical behavior on social networking sites that keep people coming back time and again is high volume temporal messaging - “What are you doing?” “What did you think of what they just said?” While tremendously valuable in the moment, the content has little value to people outside the inner-most circle and even less value over time. When you add up all those posts, you’re left with the online equivalent of a collection of Post-it notes.

Wikis, on the other hand, are amazing at creating content that has long term value to the immediate creators and viewing audiencs alike, but the social experience on most wikis - let’s see, how best to put this - not so great. While content is celebrated, little is done to recognize the creators, their contributions, or the collective espirit de corps of the group working together to build something of lasting value. Beyond that, the instantaneous communication, connection, and coordination so prevalent on social networks are completely missing from wikis. Without that, creating content that has value is, at best, difficult to do. To make ends meet, wiki users are forced to make do and improvise.

Well, we say no more. We’ve integrated the best aspects of social networks with the best-in-class collaborative authoring tools of Wetpaint. It just makes sense - the people coming together on Wetpaint sites want to connect, communicate, and collaborate. and when that happens (and here’s the cool part), they end up attracting more and more users to the site who are interested in the content. It’s the lookiloos who end up being the new members and contributors to the community. Through a greater audience comes the new lifeblood of the community.

You can read more about the new Wetpaint features on Wetpaint Central. So go make some friends and craft some content together!

Keyword Tags: Collaboration, Social Networking, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Wetpaint, Wikis

Comments

Hello!

I just wanted to stop by and officially say “Thanks!” for all of the cool features that you have released in the past months. They have been great and I’m always willing to provide my feedback. But with the latest release, it has made me keep coming back to WPC and several other wikis. Well, I guess it really didn’t make a difference because I like Wetpaint anyways. But, I just said it because Wetpaint is great! Talk later.

Till Next Time!
Josh Budde

By Josh Budde on March 10th, 2008 at 2:28 pm

[...] Wetpaint goes social (though aren’t they social by nature?) [...]

By Seattle Startup Life » Blog Archive » Updates, Kong Style: 3/10/2008 on March 10th, 2008 at 7:26 pm

freshcoats, the wetpaint blog

Wetpaint Goes Social

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