In the Facebook discussion Scoble said he's just a user. I guess he meant that as a user, how could he contribute to an open development project. I hope he didn't mean that users just suck energy from product development and never put it back.

Fact: We need users to help drive the process of development.

Here's a great example.

I was so focused on writing code that I missed that MyWord Editor still needed a way to do a home page. A user (who happens also to be a programmer) called me on Skype and said we needed to look at this. D'oh! Of course.

So I did some work and threw it back over the fence to the users in the form of some working code and ideas. If the feature is going to happen it needs to be driven by users. An ambitious developer can only go so far.

When I talk with startups I try to emphasize this. You need good users at the beginning to help you see how the product works for them. Communicating with them, listening and feeding back is the way you get from version 1 to a polished powerful product.