Participation has been a prominent theme in Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005). It is the back and forth interaction in online communities. It is the act of contributing content and interacting with service features and other users in a community. Indeed, a majority of Web 2.0 services are participatory in nature, such as YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. These services thrive on content contribution and user interactions. While participation is encouraged, it is still voluntary and participation in some aspects of a service can be limited. As such, the lack of user participation could see some projects fail. This paper argues that the rise of Dr. Horrible can be attributed to the participation of its fans in their promotional efforts, and the fall of Facebook’s Beacon to the result of a lack of community participation in the decision making process. In other words, user participation can determine the success or failure of a project.
