Brando

O2 have been busy of late working on their new Help and Support site.

With the help of their users, they’ve taken their old help site, overhauled it, added lots of new features and made it better.

And like the old site, user involvement is key. There’s an online community of thousands willing to chip in by answering other users’ technical questions or by generally giving tips and advice.

Pretty impressive on their behalf, especially when you consider that the chances are that none of these members actually know each other in ‘real life’. So what’s in it for them? Well, they get kudos from other users and…that’s pretty much it.

A strange act of selflessness you might think, but altruism is not entirely unusual in the online world. There’s literally hundreds of thousands of online communities, ranging from music and fishing to yoga and stamp-collecting forums, where people log on each day offering help and advice to fellow users.

In fact these selfless Samaritan acts are probably more commonplace online than offline, suggesting that people often find more affinity with their online friends than the people they meet day-to-day offline. But maybe we’re all a little like that. What do you think?

The new O2 Help and Support site – developed with the help of the users – is live now here.

Here’s a video we made explaining how it all works: