Guy Kawasaki has an interesting post on money as a social barrier.

According to Guy, participants in a study that were cued to think of money spent 70% more time before asking for help and 50% lesss time assisting others.

Guy concludes:

This may be my own twisted logic… , but this study has important—and perhaps counter-intuitive and even puzzling—implications vis-a-vis the evangelism of products and services. That is, if a company brings money into an evangelistic relationship with its customers, it could create barriers and instead of incentives—for example, if Apple, Harley-Davidson, and Tivo paid their customers to spread the word. After all, evangelism is the process of selling dreams, and selling dreams doesn’t necessarily require monetization.

I do think that introducing money would have a dampening effect on evangelism. But the study struck me as particularly apt in relation to Google Answers being taken to the woodshed to be put out of its misery this week.

According to Google’s Blog, only 800 or so people answered questions over the life of the product. Alternatively, Yahoo Answers is thriving with with over 60 million unique worldwide monthly visitors, who have written 160 million answers to questions.

So whats the difference between the two services?

Google used a pay for answers model. Yahoo opted for a free model.

Of course, there are good reasons for why Google went with that model (Michael Arrington does a good job of laying them out), but the fact of the matter is, money likely depresses not only the number of people that will ask questions, but the number of people who will answer them.

I don’t know if there is anything too it, but the study that Kawasaki references just might hold a key to why Google’s model ultimately failed.

I just logged into Del.icio.us and noticed that all of my bookmarks are gone. I was about to send an email to the team but figured I should do my due diligence before blaming the mass deletion on their end. I sincerely doubted that I had managed to delete all of my bookmarks (300-400), I don’t even think Del.icio.us allows users to delete all of their bookmarks in one fell swoop (outside of deleting one’s whole account).

But I managed to do it.

You see, I recently downloaded Flock and one of its highly touted features is its integration with Del.icio.us. While I understood the idea of sites I favorited in my browser being added to my Del.icio.us account, I didn’t get that if I deleted a site from my favorites folder in Flock, it would be removed from Del.icio.us account. While it makes perfect sense in retrospect (yes, I feel like an idiot), Flock might want to make that “total integration” concept a bit more clear.

If you don’t want to integrate your flock bookmarks and your del.icio.us account go to Tools -> Accounts and Services and uncheck “share favorites.”

I have primarily been using Yahoo’s MyWeb, so I didn’t lose all that much data. However, if I didn’t make the connection between deleting seemingly local data and its effects on my remote data, the more technologically inept users that follow me will certainly have some accidents that they may not so easily shrug off.

I am interested to hear mroe about this deal. Yahoo’s MyWeb2.0 seemed to have most of the functionality that del.icio.us had and it had the added benefit of saving a cached copy of the web page - a feature that del.icio.us was sorely lacking.

I wonder if they bought it for the brand or if del.icio.us has something on the inside that the average user is not aware of (besides a ton of data). I do hope that they consolidate the two services.

I am becoming a bigger and bigger fan of Yahoo as they acquire some of the web’s most useful services - del.icio.us, flickr, upcoming.

Update:

I just realized that almost no one is using Yahoo’s MyWeb2.0 (what an awful name). As of today, the entire service only has 459,842 pages and 110,620 tags. I just misplaced the stats for del.icio.us but they tower over that. So, Yahoo wasn’t only buying data, they were buying users.

I just received an email in my inbox from Yahoo Promotions with the following subject:

Watch R. Kelly video show, Ashanti photos + hip-hop radio station

My very first thought was, “why is Yahoo sending me porn?”