A recurring pattern I encounter frequently when developing community oriented sites is whether to make certain user-contributed content public or private. Often the end-user has the option of making their content public or private and the system defaults to one or other.

The client almost always votes for private as the default, but Ari Paparo tells a cautionary tale in his post about why his bookmarking company Blink.com failed and del.icio.us succeeded.

Ari lists multiple reasons, but the one I identify with as a web developer is the issue of public versus private content. This comes up time and again, and as Ari states, it’s not just the ability to make something private or public, but which should be the default. In his case, making ‘private’ the default was a deciding factor in the failure of his site, whereas del.icio.us defaulted to ‘public’ for the very same content (bookmarks).
So the next time I’m wrestling discussing with a client whether or not user-generated content should be public or private I will refer them to Ari’s post.

[tags]Marketing, Patterns, Content, Content Management[/tags]