Friday, June 1, 2012

The Innovation of StackOverflow

So as I write this, there is an egg timer ticking away next to me, set with 10 minutes of time. What am I waiting for? 10 minutes is how much time I predicted it would take to get my programming question answered on StackOverflow (SO):


http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10860020/output-a-vector-in-r-in-the-same-format-used-for-inputting-it-into-r

The back story was that I was writing some R code and I got to a point where I was stuck: there was something I wanted to do and I remembered that there was a built-in function that could accomplish my goal. Unfortunately, I couldn't remember that function's name. After some fruitless googling, I posted the question on SO.

So, how long did it actually take to get the right answer? About 6 1/2 minutes. As I write this sentence, I'm waiting for some more time to elapse so I can actually approve the answer:  

 
This has been my general experience with SO---amazingly high-quality answers delivered almost immediately. I feel sheepish that I haven't been able to answer as many questions as I've asked, but one of the animating ideas of the community is that asking high-quality, answerable questions is a way of contributing. 

What's interesting to me is that SO is an example of a primarily social---as opposed to technological---innovation. There's nothing really technically innovative about SO: the site is fast, search works well, tagging works well etc., but lots of sites have those things. What's special about SO is that through a carefully designed system of incentives and policies, they have created a community that is literally---and I think profoundly---changing how people program computers.  
 
The reason I point about the social nature of the innovation is that it's become popular to lament the shallowness or perceived frivolity of many start-ups that are built around social rather than technological innovations (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.). The idea seems to be that if you aren't making solar panels or cancer-curing drugs, you're not doing something socially useful. I personally don't share that bias, but if we are going to judge companies on the basis of some more "serious" metric like productivity or social surplus, then SO is a great example how a purely social innovation can succeed spectacularly on those metrics.  

6 comments:

  1. There's nothing particularly innovative about Stack, though. It's not like they are the first social Q&A site with gamification components to become successful.

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  2. I think you'd be hard pressed to find any thing or any idea that doesn't have some antecedents, but I think SO is the first example of its type that's actually have a large impact & creating lots of value---and while I'm sure luck was part, they also made some very smart choices that seem to have made a big difference:
    http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/anthropology_the_art_of_building_a_successful_soci.php

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    Replies
    1. From the readwriteweb.com post: "The whole article was basically taken from Joel's mouth. You might was well call it an interview, to avoid the impression that there's any independent thought or analysis going on here."

      SO made three smart choices:
      1. They traded on their popularity as bloggers
      2. They found a site to demonize (that was, admittedly, giving Spolsky and Atwood a lot of ammunition)
      3. They didn't bother with a sustainable business plan

      Your aunt Susie could do that.

      Delete
  3. From the readwriteweb.com post: "The whole article was basically taken from Joel's mouth. You might was well call it an interview, to avoid the impression that there's any independent thought or analysis going on here."

    SO made three smart choices:
    1. They traded on their popularity as bloggers
    2. They found a site to demonize (that was, admittedly, giving Spolsky and Atwood a lot of ammunition)
    3. They didn't bother with a sustainable business plan

    Your aunt Susie could do that.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I've actually used SO and associated sites as an alternative to vworker or odesk.com, "spending" some of my reputation to get answers to problems I was either too ignorant or lazy to solve.

    ReplyDelete