The beta collective

While scanning a recent study on crowd behaviour I started to ponder the hows and whens of launching a web service; how can we best drive an idea into the crowd?

The study begins by reminding us of a fairly obvious fact about opinion and crowd feedback, assuming wisdom is what you're going for (the crowd could equally decide your idea is doomed to failure, which is probably a good time to get out) this is pretty useful information:

[…]certain conditions must be met for crowd wisdom to emerge. Members of the crowd ought to have a variety of opinions, and to arrive at those opinions independently.

Makes sense, this is why we expend so much energy testing on diverse user groups before releasing a service into the wild. However, it then goes on to conclude that the wisdom of crowds can be polluted by the cross-pollination of opinions:

Opinion polls and the mass media largely promote information feedback and therefore trigger convergence of how we judge the facts

Convergence of opinion is never good. Sure, sometimes the crowd will – due to peer influence or hype – converge on the opinion that your service is super-amazing, but there's no longevity to an opinion that isn't borne through real, first-hand experience.

This poses an interesting question: how do we, in order to maintain a level of honest feedback, avoid this convergence when launching a new service into the very medium that encourages convergence?

I'm now going to wildly speculate – so apologies to readers who understand the crowd behaviour better than I – that the best way to ensure our services have a fair shot on the Internet, is to spend less time on pre-launch hype, closed user testing, and polishing interfaces; and go back to the age of the early public Beta, or, if you're really brave, Alpha releases.

The early release opens up first-hand experience to as many people as possible, while the 'viral' teaser campaign generally gives us no real facts about a service. It focusses its efforts on being polished, exciting… viral.

So, put simply, an early release gives us:

More people + More facts = More opinions ∴ Less convergence

As terrifying as it may be to open up a service to the crowd while it's in its infancy, it does allow you to both build and test with a real, live user base. So long as you're prepared to develop quickly and respond to criticism (constructive or otherwise), you may be surprised to find the crowd far more forgiving than you'd imagined.