Sects and sites: people and service operatives

Services that are created with account of people’s real requirements differ from those that are created on the basis of a Web 2.0 trend through cloning. Take a practical task, such as giving birth to and bringing up a healthy child. The solution of the “service operatives” would be to take a trendy mechanism and screw on a sign saying “For Mums”. “Blogs for Mums”, for example. However, maintaining a blog does not give answers to the day-today questions you get from young parents. Now take the resources that are made by the mothers themselves and collected in our contest site. They are completely different: (1) specialised sites with information you won’t find on general portals, such as information on twins; 2) subject-based forums, unlike single blogs, are specially “honed” to exchange experience; (3) online consultancy with doctors in the form of individual services; (4) services to arrange collective actions, such as joint purchasing. Naturally, anything that brings in fast money will be cloned. However, the surplus of clones actually kills them off: the boom in dating services will pass just as the boom in SMS-text services. And yet these same technologies could be used in more “human” services, where there is no danger of collapse.