In my article The User-Generated Content Game I talked about how facinated I am by SFGate.com's ability to inspire users of the site to comment on their new article, generating massive amounts of valuable user generated content (UGC.) I regularly read the site and check out the number of comments. Today, I was floored once again.
The Olympic Torch made it's only North America stop today in San Francisco, and with a clever switcheroo the city announced one official route, but took the Torch on another route to avoid protesters. When I found the SFGate article about this, "Torch leaves S.F. after surprise route shift", the article had 1668 comments at 8:33pm.
Here is the progression of comments between 8:33pm and 10:05pm.
9:00PM: 1759 Comments.
9:22PM: 1801 Comments.
9:33PM: 1818 Comments.
10:05PM: 1885 Comments.
187 Pages of Comments. Whoa.
My point is, the comments just keep flowing in. People are reading and replying and taking a deep interest in the conversation. I wish every application that I've worked on had as involved a user base as this. While this is an oversimplification, SFGate just put newspaper articles on the site and let people talk about them. The killer app.
04/11/2007 - Update
2 days later: 2172 comments.
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