Right, you need some kind of happy medium (not too easy, not too difficult).

Indeed, and it may incentivize and motivate them to do things they might not otherwise have done within the community.

Good post. Have been thinking a lot about influence and reputation lately, and the relative nature of both of them.

Products that only cater to the Quora early adopter crowd won't ever make it big, but ones that are able to siphon them off such that they feel like they're special might.

I'm not convinced that online sharing has caused offline sharing, although there are examples of online communities such as couchsurfing that have brought online communities offline.

This seems like a case of correlation not equalling causation. These are probably the people that are more likely to be trusting and sharing both online and off.

That said, people have been sharing for millennia, so are we just now learning to trust each other, and is it because of the internet?

Things like Airbnb don't exist without the Internet -- fundamentally they connect people who wouldn't have met any other way.

It's about building communities that didn't exist before. That's significant. The modality is the difference. People didn't have a reliable and simple and cheap and instant way to connect. Now they do.

Agreed. My point is that there are certain people that would likely be predisposed to share anyway. And although the internet has provided new opportunities for sharing, other types have occurred in different communities (village, folk, scientific, etc.) for ages.

Basically, new opportunities don't mean that people wouldn't have shared or weren't sharing in other ways.

I'm kinda over the whole .ly domain thing. Find a new cool-sounding TLD where there isn't the risk of having your domain seized because of possible violations of Sharia law.

Williamsburg. Super convenient with the L train, great warehouse spaces, lots going on, tons of tech folks, much cheaper than Manhattan.

Complain all you want about the hipsters but there's a reason why they're all there.

Also check out the North Brooklyn Breakfast Club: http://www.meetup.com/North-Brooklyn-Breakfast-Club/

Has anyone else gotten unsolicited emails from RMS when you inadvertently use one of his "words to avoid" on a mailing list or the like? http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html

It's kinda fun.

Indeed, if other companies developed the technology and did not patent it, it should be in the public domain.

Patents in the US are on a "first to invent" basis -- so if someone else has done it before, then you theoretically can't actually patent it. This is different than in Europe where it's a "first to file" system.

Now the problem is that lots of people patent things anyway that they shouldn't be able to because (1) patent examiners are underpaid (2) they're overworked (3) they spend less than 24 hours on each application and (4) they only check very limited databases for prior art, which do not include the internet. Crazy, I know.