DISQUS

Nice bit of research, and an important call-to-action for brands. But I hope that in the long run stranger-advice doesn't crowd out friend-advice. Stranger-advice is easy, but there's a relationship element to getting advice from friends that stranger-advice misses. We need systems that make it as easy to find advice on the friend side as it has become stranger on the stranger side. I just put a post about this on my blog. http://blog.turnto.com/?p=11.

There's a question here as to cause and effect. You are postulating that developers add too many features which leads to failure. But often, the problem is that the one core feature that the product was launched with flubbed, then the developers tried to make up for that by adding on more features. Ex post, it looks like the simple systems succeed and the complicated ones fail. But often the simple ones manage to avoid getting complicated because they succeed early and the developers are smart enough to know not to mess with success. So the lesson may be a bit different: launch with something simple and if it doesn't work, don't lard it up; trash it and start over.

There is a dark side to passive sharing: one reason it leads to more sharing is because the burden of filtering is shifted from the sender to the receiver. In passive sharing, the sharer may feel more comfortable doing it because he does not feel "self-important" and so shares more, as Joe says. But this lack of restraint also means the receiver needs to do the work of separating what is likely to be valuable to him from what is not -- work that in the active model is done by the sharer. I think passive sharing will come to be thought of more as "permissioning" and will become more useful once it is coupled with either search or contextual delivery. i.e. I say who I am willing to share what with, but it doesn't get delivered to them until there is some reason for them to want it.

It mght be helpful to distinguish between a community (a bunch of people that probably don't know each other but share a common interest)and a social network (a network of links between people who actually know each other). These all sound like community sites.