Serendipity35

Dell recently launched a customer relations site called IdeaStorm where registered users can submit product and feature requests, gripes about Dell etc. You can also vote on those posts if you think they are noteworthy. I know what you're saying, "You mean they ripped off Digg.com?"

Hold on.

The day before IdeaStorm arrived, I read a piece on Techcrunch about a similar Yahoo! site which you can access at http://suggestions.yahoo.com.

Now, Dell did give a hat tip to Digg saying that their IdeaStorm is “a combination of message board and Digg.com.”

Do a blog search and you find a lot of people upset about these new sites (a lot of dedicated Digg users especially). I'm more aligned with Michael Arrington on Techcrunch and some others who feel it may be a good thing.

How many sites out there are doing their own versions of a YouTube post-your-video site? Meneame & Hugg are two other Digg clones. So why pick on Dell & Yahoo?

I think what bothered folks about these two latest sites is that they are Big Companies and they want to protect the daughter & son startups (somehow "mom & pop stores" seems wrong for any of these web 2.0 sites) from the big sharks up there in the food chain.

Seems to me that Dell, Yahoo and others are seeing what works on other social sites and using it on their own sites - and maybe to their own purposes. I like the idea of being able to go to a corporate site and post my thoughts (positive & negative) about products. I like being able to get responses from other users. Oftentimes, their responses are faster and more useful than waiting for the official tech support.

Of course, the company is no doubt hoping to get unsolicited feedback for R&D on products and, conspiracy theorists that most of us have become, we suspect that The Man is somehow censoring, altering, and manipulating these social sites. Personally, I wouldn't want to be the employee assigned to monitor one of these sites if that is the corporate intent, but...

I know that in our months of getting ready to launch NJIT on iTunes U (and still today), the most useful place to turn for information was the Apple Support Discussion Forums. There was someone from Apple monitoring and responding at times (Hurray for Duncan!) but most of the discussion is from other folks in the trenches.

All this is not new. I've been sifting through places like the Adobe Product Forums for years, posting questions about Dreamweaver, looking for information on Flash. If the company is getting some good from it too, all the better. Let's hope it leads to positive changes in the products.