Stackoverflow quietly moved into public beta last week, and I'm stunned by how active it is already. I'm looking at pages of really funky technical questions here that I haven't a clue how to answer ... and they all have at least one answer in response already.
There are even 106 questions in the "oracle" category.
If you haven't checked it out yet, Stack Overflow is simply a "programming Q & A site". As they say in the FAQ:
What's so special about this? Well, nothing, really. It’s a programming Q&A website. The only unusual thing we do is synthesize aspects of Wikis, Blogs, Forums, and Digg/Reddit in a way that is somewhat original. Or at least we think so.
I have big hopes for this site. The best developer communities I ever participated in were on the old network news/nntp, until it started getting overtaken by the web in the late nineties. Ever since then I've never really found an "optimal" community. It's either everyone (aka google), very specialist mailing lists, or web forums that tend to be too fragmented or low volume to be really useful.
I think this site has great promise to be a well-known meeting place for the world-wide developer community to collect and share knowledge. And I hope we see a huge "Oracle Community" presence (Open Metalink+Forums+Wiki 2.0).
There are two things that have really interested me about this site:
Firstly, it was started by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror). Nuff said.
Second has been the community engagement during the development process. They've had a podcast which I've been listening to for the past 21 weeks. It's a great fly-on-the-wall kind of experience, having the chance to listen to the developers discuss the site while they are still building it. I hope we hear more development done this way.
Do you have a question or maybe some answers? I really recommend everyone should take the plunge and test it out.
Any site that spawned a parody site even before it was launched can't be all bad!