Social Networking Sites: The Bad (Part III)

One of the biggest shortfalls of social communities is the ability to find relevant content. One of the smartest things Google did with their page rank relevancy algorithm was to examine how many (and which) sites link to yours as a gauge for relevancy. Links represent a vote of confidence in your site's content. Google also looks at who links to those who link to your site to prevent link farm gaming and the like.

MySpace has no such algorithm within its own community. Sure, they allow you to search the web and then use Google's organic search results, but I'm talking about finding relevant content written by members of MySpace.

Let's say, for example, I was planning to travel to Madagascar and wanted to find travel, accomodation, safari, and other activity recommendations from MySpace users. I search through the groups and find "places and travel" group and then an "Africa" subgroup within that. I see 30 different posts order from oldest to most recent. Very few of the posts even address the question. Some users describe their own Safari last year, another describes her study abroad in Ghana. The bottom line: this content does not answer the question and is not terribly useful. Perhaps the original poster found a new friend among those posting. However, I would love to see all content rated and scored by other users in addition to offering basic sorting options. The best communities provide tools for self-monitoring to those who care about the accuracy, validity, and relevancy of the shared content.

Allowing all community members to rate on another's comments serves several purposes. For starters, it gives members of the community a sense of belonging and ownership because they have the ability to rank one another's content. For those posting, it raises the overall thoughtfulness and quality of their post as they know others will read (and scrutinize) their every word. A person's reputation and pride is at stake when others can praise or ridicule your posting. This power of this incentive cannot be overstated.

Besides not having user generated review ratings and scoring, MySpace doesn't even allow me to sort the posts from most recent to less recent (the opposite is the hard-coded default).

User generated reviews and scores coupled with greater sort functionality would greatly improve MySpace's overall content relevancy. I don't hold out much hope, though.