Twitter is too ephemeral and length restriction make it impossible to have a meaningful discussion.

Facebook is best for friends & family sharing – its not a platform for meaningful discussion about a specific topic.

Quora may have some elements of what I’m looking for, but I have a hard time seeing how it will evolve beyond Silicon Valley.

So that leaves an easier way to find and participate in category-domain knowledge based discussions where it doesn’t matter so much who you are, or who you know, but what you know.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/openforquestions/

Here is a list of all the Celebrities that have used Yahoo! Answers as a public invitation to ask them questions or answer a question they posed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_answers#Special_guests

From my experience at both Yahoo! Answers and at FixYa, I came up with a theory that Crowd-sourced communities can best be described as a marketplace between providers of content (sellers) and consumers of content (buyers).  The currency that makes most of the free content generation possible is “thank you’s”.  The key ingredient to making this work is that most providers of content need nothing more than an authentic “Thank You” for them to feel that their contribution (whether its an answer to a question, a video, or photograph) is appreciated, and worth the trouble of posting.

From this perspective, I think that Community Managers are filling in a hole where sometimes the “market” doesn’t work and the content providers are not compensated with proper appreciation.  This is especially true when there is not enough consumers of content – or when content production far outstrip the audience.  So Chief Thank You Officer is also a “market maker” often found on stock exchanges.

A community manager’s job is also to curb abuse – which often is when there is improper feedback (mean-spirited, personal attacks, meaningless responses) from a consumer of content to the provider of content.  Yes, there is also provider – provider conflict that community managers get into, but I do think the chief purpose of online community management for a crowd-sourced site is making sure that Thank You’s are doled out to the right people in the community.

One factor in their differences that I think is critical to their product direction is that Facebook avoided getting swallowed up by Yahoo! whereas MySpace became part of the Fox-NewsCorp empire.  And I think in small but strategic ways, you see that in the product updates and directions of these two companies. 

Whereas Facebook still operates like a startup and makes major strategic bets like opening membership up to the public and this whole apps platform direction, MySpace has certainly stagnated in the product strategy and features department.  Having been at Yahoo! I can just imagine the “product leaders” at MySpace having to go thru endless committee meetings, research, and bureacracy to change anything in their product, and certainly any major risky bets getting quashed since the main business is such a cash-cow. 

You can also see in MySpace’s international sites (I read Japanese & Chinese) that their “globalization” efforts are purely functional – as they just machine translated the UI and launched it without any real consideration for cultural/social dynamics in those countries.  I am willing to bet lots of yen that some ”not in the target demographic” exec at NewsCorp gave some strategic decision to enter those large Asian markets, without any consideration for the product aspects of entering those markets.

Anyhoo – hats off to Facebook & the Zuck machine for “just doing it” and a very wise decision not to get bought by Yahoo!

But ultimately, just as Google figured it out with PageRank, GoTo figured out with auction-based keyword advertising, quality has the potential to beat quantity, and in a sustainable way.  And with social software, the key will be providing a mechanism to separate the quality content from the crap content, and to do it in a scalable manner.  As a sign that there is a major innovation waiting to happen, there are numerous simpleton attempts at this, with many variants of using # of thumbs up and thumbs down for a particular post to bubble up & down post quality.

But as early as 1999, epinions.com used the “popularity” of a product review to bubble up & down content, and was quickly overtaken by organized spammers who formed log-rolling circles who voted each other highly with little regard for the true quality of reviews.

But whoever is first to figure this quality question out in a scalable manner, will be the one to make the next leap in Web 2.0 history.