small sample size.... but resonates.
Nasty as they wanna be? Policing Flickr.com
Except rules are tricky things with an operation like Flickr's. The ban on commerce seems simple enough, but as someone at the meeting points out, Brazil's secondhand economy is an integral part of life there, particularly among women. When does the enforcement of a righteous-seeming regulation become a quashing of someone's culture?
Doin't forget to check out Randy Farmer's talk in a couple weeks...
Community is hard, and so is pretty much all social stuff. But why is so darn hard? Why do strange, unexpected things keep happening, like the wikitorial and the Digg revolt and so on?
I hope you are familiar with Lewin's equation by now?
Behavior is a function of a person and his environment?
B=f(P,E)?
Well, on websites, we have always had partial control over our user's behavior. On a good day, 50%.
In these diagrams, red means we have no control. This person (P) was raised by parents that we have never had the pleasure to advice, and thus who knows what nonsense they were fed. But environment(E)! The beautiful blue under our control! Hey, now we're talking. We choose what content went on the site, what navigation, what got linked, what those links were named... and one day, then whammo! Suddenly someone started letting users have a bit of control.
Let's say it was user-generated content, let's say it was tagging... but suddenly more and more elements of the environment we not really under out control. The environment was directly created by the users. and then...
Social networks. Social media. Social everything! The users are the environment. We control so very little; a drop down, a form label... and yet, it's all important because that's our only hope for influence. You have to embrace a lack of control to realize this is what environments are supposed to be. A fully controlled environment is like a shopping mall, and Web 2.0 environments are more like national parks. Prone to forest fires, sure, but would you trade them for anything else?
We cannot dictate, because we have ceded control. We can influence, we can cajole, we can suggest. But Behavior is not ours to manage.
early draft of a section from 2nd edition of blueprints
We all would like to think there was an abstract, perfect design that we could find and then never change. But different sizes demand different design approaches, and as our websites grow we have to change the wise choices we made earlier that are now liabilities. This is true of both information spaces and social spaces.
For example, everyone has seen the almost psychic spellchecker most search engines sport, but do you know how it works? It parses the millions and millions of queries and correlates when a query is made, then no click on results is made, then a second query with a large number of similar characters is made, then a click on a result. To do this and end up with a comprehensive dictionary of potential misspellings and corrections, you need millions of searches so you can identify the millions of ways people get things wrong and the millions of ways they get it right. Adding spellcheck to a website may seem easy, but if you don't get high traffic, you can't get the same range of suggestions and you'll have to rely on what is likely to be a less effective approach (a discussion for elsewhere). There are many other types of websites that are changed and shaped depending on how much data they have and how many people are using it. Wikipedia is one.
Wikipedia is only interesting because of the huge numbers of people who use it. Exerts on every topic on earth join in in writing, editing, contributing citations... collectively creating the most complete entries on any topic. Because they have so much traffic, and because most people are nice, if the occasional idiot defaces a page it is repaired in under five minutes. And so goes the marketing speil, and many of the entries do indeed realize this promise. But some on each end of the spectrum of usage show their own set of problems.
The extremely popular entries or extremely controversial entries (often the same) can't be left open to be edited by everyone, no matter what the Wikipedia philosophy is, because the number of people vandalizing it is too high to guarantee a useful entry at any given time. Wikipedia is forced to lock this entries against open editing.
Here we see a typical Wikipedia article, illustrating the power of collaboration. Ciphergoth, mlcome, OliAtlanson, Aastrup and many others are discussing how to make the article more accurate, and complete.
And here we see a page that gets almost no traffic. In fact, it didn't exist until one day I started to wonder where the name (and the food) Jalapeno poppers came from. I searched everywhere, including Wikipedia, but all Icould find was a Chowhound discussion board article that thought they might be related to Chili Reneos. I posted what little she knew on Wikipedia in hopes that the miracles of five-minute-corrections would bring me the answer, and wandered off to ask the question on another discussion board.
People are so used to Wikipedia being extensive, complete and expert no one questioned this entry. Over the next ten months, a couple people did add to the entry, one restoring the tilde to jalapeno, another contributing a photo, and someone adding suspiciously marketing-esque information about John Neutizling's invention of the Chile Relleno (unless he's Mayan, I really really doubt it). That has been removed since this screenshot, but in the stub world updates are slow, and vandalism - especially subtle vandalism--remains up and the truth is arrived at with fewer miracles if it arrives at all.
Moreover, in the ten months since its creation, it is now the 4th result (5th if you could video best bets) in Google. 
The LATimes tried to leverage the power of wikis with their wikitorial. On June 17th 2005 they launched it, and on June 19th they took it down. Users were posting obscene photos and comments at a pace that no one could manage. LATimes had the large numbers needed to create interesting content, but hadn't learned the lessons of Wikipedia's controversial entries. After all, if Wikipedia with its vibrant and committed community couldn't keep George Bush under control, how could a brand new newspaper section? It still hasn't returned, and maybe it represents a problem that can't be solved.
When you look at examples on the web to learn from, make sure you are dealing with similar problems of scale.
see also earlier size matters post
Thingology (LibraryThing's ideas blog):
Both LibraryThing and Amazon allow users to tag books. But with a tiny fraction of Amazon's traffic, LibraryThing appears to have accumulated *ten times* as many book tags as Amazon--13 million tags on LibraryThing to about 1.3 million on Amazon. (See below for the method I used to find this out.)Something is going on here--something with broad implications for tagging, classification and "Web 2.0" commerce. There are a couple of lessons, but the most important is this: Tagging works well when people tag "their" stuff, but it fails when they're asked to do it to "someone else's" stuff. You can't get your customers to organize your products, unless you give them a very good incentive. We all make our beds, but nobody volunteers to fluff pillows at the local Sheraton.
via Peter Morville
More rereading of Alexander: 129 Common Areas at the Heart
Conflict
No social group- whether a family, a work group, or a school group- can survive without constant informal contact among its members.
Resolution
Create a single common area for every social group. Locate it at the center of gravity of all the spaces the group occupies, and in such a way that the paths which go in and out of the building lie tangent to it.
This is why groups is so important to social networks. I question Facebook's radical de-emphasis on groups in their redesign. Gossip tells me they are trying to move away from groups, since it is on the old architecture. I doubt they will ever get people to give up their groups. LinkedIn is investing heavily in group functionality, with regular updates and additions supporting necessary social activity such as discussion. Yahoo groups, great grandfather of them all, continues unchallenged growing steadily. You need common areas at the heart of your system, because common areas are at the heart of your users.
I picked up A Pattern Language again and I had a bookmark on this pattern 36. Degrees of Publicness
Conflict
People are different, and the way they want to place their houses in a neighbourhood is one of the most basic kinds of difference.
Resolution
Make a clear distinction between three kinds of homes- those on quiet backwaters those on busy streets, and those that are more or less Inbetween. Make sure that those on quiet backwaters are on twisting paths, and that these houses are themselves physically secluded; make sure that the more public houses are on busy streets with many people passing by all day long and that the houses themselves are exposed to the passers-by. The inbetween houses may then be located on the paths halfway between the other two. Give every neighbourhood about an equal number of these three kinds of homes.
I have no idea why past-me found it interesting, but I know why present-me does. Working at LinkedIn (and anyone working on almost any consumer website these days) I have to consider degrees of publicness. Facebook was initially lambasted over what has become their most popular feature and now the model for their redesign: the newsfeed. The newsfeed is the equivalent of the town square where you can hear everything that's going on with everybody and chat about it. Some people want to live on the town square, so they don't miss a thing. Others would like to live at the edges of town, away from both prying eyes and overwhelming updates. Design of feeds tends to be one size fits all. A challenge will be figuring out intelligent and subtle ways to allow people degrees of publicness (including shelter from other people's publicness.)
One of the things I've been thinking about and watching for is how Social Spaces change depending on the size of the community. For example, LinkedIn's news has the comment field at the top (it adds a second one at the bottom once there are three comments). This is fine when you have a small community leaving very few comments. However, if you had a slashdot sized community, this would encourage idiots to post before they read what other's said.
Too often we treat all practices as if the fit all communities, but the fact is size matters. For instance, Joshua's favorite example of the top diggers page, recently removed. What motivated folks at the beginning became a gamed liability once they got big. Much as we are reluctant to change UI's and remove features, there is a reasonable strategy for it....
As of late, I've been extremely focused on how we motivate behavior via our design choices; that theme is reflected in most of the talks I've been giving. Social spaces are particularly critical because of their complexity, subtle clues in interface make a big difference.
Often panels can be a bunch of folks sitting in the spotlight congratulating themselves for begin smart-- I prefer it when it's a chance for a series of lighting talks on a theme, then hopefully some discussion. Joshua's short talk from SXSW is a good guide to behavior in a compact form. I hope my panel form IASummit complements it.
Bernardo A. Huberman has been, so far, the most impressive speaking in a very impressive series. and, lucky you, they just just posted the video of his talk.
The web mediates interactions among distant people on a scale that was never possible in the physical world. From vast social networks, to grass-root amateur creativity and the creation of encyclopedic knowledge, a collective intelligence is at work in ways that differ from traditional communities in style, intensity and effectiveness of interaction. I will present the results of several studies of social dynamics in the web, as well as mechanisms we have designed to access this collective intelligence while improving users experiences with digital content.
enterprise 2.0
old business processes/tools allow management impose their will on company
enterprise 2.0 is the use of emerging social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.
Importance of enterprise 2.0
Technology and approaches are novel
Offer more than incremental improvements
Who's pursuing 2.0?
google, avenue a/razorfish, mckinsey, lockheed, US intelligence, BT, fidelity, IBM
Underlying Trends
1. social software
2. network effects
3. free and easy platforms for communication
4. Lack of upfront structure
5. mechanisms to let structure emerge
Channels and platforms
enterprise IT loves structure
how does IT bring structure to work?
Why is choosing no structure (or emerging) valuable
Newpedia: tried to do the same thing as wikipedia first, but had a 7 step workflow, as an author you had to be credentialed... Jimmy Wales was afraid to submit. Newpedia got closed down with about 25 articles.
Delicious and tags
Tags were not from a dropdown, not from a controlled vocabularly. Things like enterprise 2,0 show up as well as enterprise 2.0... delicious doesn't try to keep you from screwing up upfront. And users are tolerant.
Mechanisms to let structures emerge.
They used to say, the internet is the biggest library in the world, the problem is all the books are on the floor. Search used to be hard.
Google changed the rules by realized the web had structure, but it was not apparent, it was in the links.
Delicious tags... when you see a tag cloud, you see that others are tagging similarly, and if you can tolerate a little slop (blog and blogs) you get the value of the collective wisdom and the emergent structure.
Flickr clusters allows types of images be collected i.e. boston creates an architecture cluster, a red sox cluster, then boston terrier cluster, and then lousy winter weather cluster
The potential benefits of Enterprise 2.0
A Knowledge worker's benefits
(read strength of weak ties)
Teams with weakties get more done, weak ties get you jobs. etc.
Prototypical tools: strong ties
Protypical tools: weak ties
Prototypical tool: potential ties
Avenue A | razorfish
Used mediawiki
Wiki, blog, but also flickr, dig, and delicious ... tags of AARF get called in to the intranet
(see his blog)
Ppl thought it was intel, but AARF didn't.. they said, it would be a shame if our competitors discovered we like starbucks.
Prototypical tool: no ties
Iowa's prediction market is better than any of the professional polls consistently.
Collective and convergence: Hollywood stock exchange
A professional said no one can tell you how well a movie will do, but the crowd does.
Challenges
(prospect theory) we overweight the incumbent by a factor of 3, and underweight the replacement by a factor of 3, so it has to be 10 times better or it'll be a niche technology.
Conclusion
take a look... my god. mashupawards.com/dont-censor-me/ obscenity, stupidity, triviality and spam. Only one or two things that could ... maybe... be considered group intolerance of the lone rebel voice.
howard rheingold's the virtual community
"When you think of a title for a book, you are forced to think of something short and evocative, like, well, 'The Virtual Community,' even though a more accurate title might be: 'People who use computers to communicate, form friendships that sometimes form the basis of communities, but you have to be careful to not mistake the tool for the task and think that just writing words on a screen is the same thing as real community.'" - HLR
We talk a lot about Social Networks, Social Software, etc as Web 2.0... as if using technology to manage human relationships was a novel phase in the progression of technology. We like to think that we invented computers to help us do "important" work like math, and eventually co-opted it to our human needs of community and communication. But electronic community predates the web. BBSs, Usenet, MUDS and MOOS, and of course The infamous Well popped up as soon as there were modems. In other words, as soon as one human could send a message to others, they did.
Web 1.0 had innumerable examples of community, and social behaviors intentional and un. We are all humans, and as such we work though Maslow's Hierarchy of needs even in new mediums, seeking first animal comforts then working upward to abstract intellectual pleasures.
"My direct observations of online behavior around the world over the past ten years have led me to conclude that whenever CMC [computer-mediated communications] technology becomes available to people anywhere, they inevitably build virtual communities with it, just as microorganisms inevitably create colonies."
~~ Howard Rheingold, in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
So if humans acting like humans online is not new, why the hubbub? We are seeing now is the arrival of Social Software on the Web, and this is a bit different —in scale of distribution, if not in originality— and it's worth noting that the social is now part of almost every online activity, including those originally considered data-only tools, such as bookmarking or spreadsheet creation.
Social Software can be loosely defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from, human social behavior —message-boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking.
~~ Tom Coates, of PlasticBag.org
I don't want to be too quick to dismiss the "Web 2.0" part of this conversation, since so many smart folks have said firstly that we are in a sufficiently different time in the evolution of the internet to be versionworthy, and secondly that that versionworthy change is marked by collective human behavior.
In other words, Web 2.0 is made of people.
Tim O'Reilly, carrier of the 2.0 flag, worked hard to find the dividing line between the versions of the web:
| Web 1.0 | Web 2.0 | |
|---|---|---|
| DoubleClick | --> | Google AdSense |
| Ofoto | --> | Flickr |
| Akamai | --> | BitTorrent |
| mp3.com | --> | Napster |
| Britannica Online | --> | Wikipedia |
| personal websites | --> | blogging |
| evite | --> | upcoming.org and EVDB |
| domain name speculation | --> | search engine optimization |
| page views | --> | cost per click |
| screen scraping | --> | web services |
| publishing | --> | participation |
| content management systems | --> | wikis |
| directories (taxonomy) | --> | tagging ("folksonomy") |
| stickiness | --> | syndication |
Almost all of these differences can be reduced to injecting the element of human behavior into what was previously a data-only system. Some of these differences are labored... (akamai vs. bitorrent?) but overall the pattern is persuasive and clear.
I can't help but think of Peter Morville's terrific little essay from 2002 on Social Network analysis. It was the first time I'd seen data and social networks used in an integrated manner, if it was mapping real-world and not virtual world systems. 
Looking at the key diagram for it, you begin to see how social networks can be as effective in solving retrieval problems as data networks (i.e. taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, etc.) This was but a hint of what was to come...
I also want to call attention to the fact that at Graphing Social, O'Reilly also presented this slide :
And this one
Placing these items together presents a ironic look at how analysis can lead to Kumbayah moments.
I notice how terrified we in the technology business are of the human aspects of our work. This theme will come up later, as we look at the question "does technology matter to virtual community building", but for now let's note it's hard to use "peace" and "love" these days without irony and a certain amount of distancing. Are we so scared of aspirational emotions? If we are going to talk about social systems, we are going to have to face the fact that terms like Love and Caring and Friendship are probably going to come up, so stop giggling.
What I find funny (perhaps intentional on O'reilly's part?) is that one can hardly trace the roots of the computer industry without hitting enclaves of hippies. Peace love and understanding ... if they make you uncomfortable, go look for a blog on CSS. This one is about to get gooeyer and gooeyer.
At least embracing our softer side also opens up consideration of a dirty word banished with Web 1.0's crash: Community.
Why does this distinction matter? Because I'm going to spend the next several... well, essays now, but originally it was hours in a workshop... explaining how each design elements affects the nature of the social space. And that social space can be social without being a community. I think that's an idea worth thinking about. Do you care about the other del.icio.us users (those you didn't know before using the website)? How about Digg users? When does it change? How does it happen? Does it matter? What's love got to do with it?
next: The who what where when and why of the Social Web.
I gave a half-day workshop a month or so back, and I meant, I really meant, to write it all out. Well, At urging of friends, I'm going to promise I'm going to go through this, slide-by-slide (with some exceptions such as "break: be back here at 3:15) and get out into the world what I've figured out about this connected age we are in. That promise will hopefully lock me down to blogging about that rather than say, Amelie the marvelous and beautiful. Or pork chops.
The original deck:
The first four slides do the usual job of introducing the talk. One point worth bringing up is I decided to represent myself via my various profiles. I was amazed at what the act of juxtaposing my profiles on one page showed. They acted as puzzle pieces, showing a more complete picture of who I am that most people could ever get... in fact, if comprehensive, more complete than I might want to share. It will be a good question for the aggregation companies: how do you continue to give people the ability to manage their appearance online once all the pieces are in place?
Next: What is community, really?
They posted Ross's terrific opening talk from Parc's new series on Social Media and Web 2.0.: Made of People, including audio and video.
All things 2.0 are made of people. The social software that powers the current wave of innovation takes a different approach of getting out of the way of people to unleash their abundant desire to share and collaborate. While these tools exhibit fantastic social dynamics on the public web, adapting them for the context of an organization is a challenge not only for tools, but practices. Sharing control to create value isn't exactly the instinct of the enterprise. This talk will explore the social software design and business patterns that might make us more human.
I came in a tetch late, but trying to catch up.... when it's archived, it'll be here, probably in about a week.
Okay, now for my notes on Charlene Li, of Forester.
She speaks about the "i love dogs" community, set up by del monte for snausages research. I'm torn between horror and pleasure that companies are listening. Sigh.
* talking -- move form broadcasting to two way conversations -- cluetrain 2.0?
New example: Southwest
Their blog is from tons of people, including structural engineers.. how he brings his passion for customers to his work as structural engineering. The CEO asks customers what he should dress as, and dressed as the one the most people asked for (jack sparrow).
Blendtec created youtube videos of them blending up things like two by fours, and asked viewers what else tey should blend. The ipod was the #1 choice, and it has been viewed 4.6 million times... and people then talk about how it makes good smoothees as well as reposting the video to their blog. It cost the company $50.
* Energizing -- helping your best customers recruit others
example: Brides.com puts highlights and widgets on myspace, and offers widgets like countdown ticker to the wedding. Friends see it, and want the same widgets.
Users associate themselves with brands. Brand as identity.
Myspace found that for brands like Addis advertising on the site did okay, but widgets people chose to put up was 40X more effective.
* Suporting- enable yrou customers to support each other
example: oracle mix creates a community for supporting and embracing via forums.
* Embracing: Involve customers in product development
example: salesforce has "ideas exchange" (like Dell's ideastorm) for demand management. Allowed PM's to remove an annoying widget marketing liked via customer compalints.
WHO owns this process? Who should lead the social strategy in a company?
* start with your most customer centric employee
** they use the word customer in every sentence
** it's too easy to get back into the broadcast marketing point of view.
* Put someone important in charge
** don't give it to the guy with bandwidth-- why does he have bandwidth?
** if you want it to be important, it's got to go to someone with clout
* add an executive sponsor who has the ability to get resources from around the organization
* make the social strategy the responsibility of everyone in the company
** sun encourages everyone to have a blog, because the employees can speak honestly aobut the product.
** their policy is "be smart" (i.e. you know what not to post, and what to post...)
Example Case Study
Dell's community forums provide support... they've had them pre-web on compuserve
** a user, predator, has 21,794 posts, 473,113 minutes
** why? "I actually enjoy helping people. That's what got me hooked, when you help people and they say thank you"
** imagine support costs realized
Dell hell-- jeff jarvis's blog on Dell Hell: "Dell lies. Dell sucks."
made Dell realize they had to watch the blogosphere to understand their problems
* feb 2006 dell creates an elite group in customer service to search and find bloggers writing about problems with Dell
* customer service then contacts the blogger to address the problem
June 2006, dell laptops are on fire... literally. July they launch a blog. They tried ot talk about games, servers... and people screamed "what about the flaming laptops!" Then they posted on "flaming Notebook" and told folks what was going on. They admitted they were tracking down the problem, and users thanked them for coming out on the issue.
Dell executives review and implement IdeaStorm
* the first request was linux dells
* he customers chose what version
* the customer suggested no support (it's linus!)
Dell transformed themself
* Michael Dell was pivotal
** pushed for blog resolution team
**led the charge for ideastorm
**gave encouragement in darkest hours
They weren't afraid to move fast and make mistakes
* launched ideastorm in three weeks
Takeaways
* it took a crises to get them started
* they mastered one thing at a time
** listening >> talking >> embracing
** she recommends do one thing at a time, don't be too ambitious.
* it took them two years. it's not fast, and in internet speed it's forever.
** your transforming an entire organization and your customer base.
* executive push and cover made the difference
* authenticity was crucial
** couldn't be stealthy, had to be honest aobut all the mistakes they were making
Summary
* focus on the relationships, not ht etechnology
* start wiht one objective
* think through the consequences when you form a closer relationship with customers
Q&A: inaudible question on privacy --
Great quote from Charlene "People are very concerned about privacy, but they're willing to give it up for free shipping"
She does talk about choice of how your data is used, middle road, idea that if you do anything on the internet, it's not private.
question (lots of self-back patting then) how do I get an electrronic medium to be more like face to face?
CL: use the tools to supplement traditional, use the tools the customers want to use. You have to listen to customers, then communicate. some companies are afraid to participate in forums because they think it's improper to participate in a forum. But it's wildly successful.
Q: are you measure returns? what techniques?
CI: When CEO's ask what is the ROi of blogging, I say how do you measure ROI of PR? They don't usually know how you do it. Measure it the same way you measure any brand building exercises.
Q; anonymous postings? is there a difference between known identities
CI: known identity communities tend to behave much better. They are nicer to each other. It's important to have it be appropriate.. on blog comments she gets fred flintstones all the time. But on a executive group you have to know, so you don't spill the beans to a competitor. When someone complains to her, Li says Call them up! Often it's quickly resolved... bloggers feel proud and satisfied to be noticed.
She gets into the difference between identity and reputation-- Amazon's real names, and Predator's false name but huge reputation from his activities.
Q: you say focus on relationships, not technologies... but it seems like technology is part of it. Is some better than others, is anyone focusing on the technology of relationships?
CI: in Dell, they measure influence, but they don't measure level of pain-- interesting idea to follow through... on a scale of 1-10 how painful is it? Text not good for sarcasm "oh, that was a really good move"
Cut off-- I think they would have gone for another hour.
Next week: Guy Kawaski By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09
via Rough Type
To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy.
The essay is a terrific one, and brings up many important questions, but I think it's a mistake to typify these two markets as not having parity, or that it's somehow unfair that some people get money and some "only" get attention. The reality is, there is a healthy exchange system across the two markets as effective as those that change money between two countries' currency. Value is fungible.
The people who can monetize their output do... they host their own blogs, monetize as they see fit (typically adnsense) and they can use the SN's as traffic generators, if they wish. Pretty good trade.
But most folks could never get traffic to their blogs, for a variety of reasons: they don't post often enough, they don't post well enough, they don't post on general enough topics or simply no one knows they are there. For these folks, posting regularly (if not exclusively) on a SN is critical to building an audience that can eventually support advertising or serving an audience they will never monetize: friends and family.
Despite geek love of RSS, it's not really made for ordinary humans. Even the much lauded Google Reader is hard to use. Period. Again: hard to use. Facebook: easy to use. Easy to post, easy to consume. So if you want to get your message about your cat's tenth birthday out to the small group of readers who want to know, they it's a viable way to go.
In return for all that effort, Facebook/MySpace/etc gives them room to post every inane thing that pops into their heads, play scrabble, rate friends likes and dislikes and a million other things that takes up bandwidth and doesn't increase profits. This is barter. The Social Networks are betting that the things they can monetize will outweigh the things that cost them. Users are betting that the fun and potential fame is worth giving up some privacy. We make the same bet when we review something on amazon, rate something on Netflix or blog on Blogger. Everyone is betting that they are getting more than they are giving, or at least it's a wash. When it gets uneven, the users leave or the company goes under.
If you have been following the latest hubbub about Facebook, you know that the scales have been tipped toward corporate yet again as Facebook tries to turn cat fanaticism into financial strategy. Moveon.org, a political organization is trying to mobilize the typically indifferent-to-exhibitionist audience to action, and many of the geekarati are telling them to get back ending the war and leave us alone.
Personally I'm always in the odd place of being in favor of two typically opposing systems: I'm for more government regulation to check corporate greed, and yet I trust our free market to sort most things out without intervention. Typically the market moves faster than government, and so government mostly can ignore matters or pass legislation after the fact (for those who cannot learn form history). But not always. My biggest fear with the free market system is irretrievable damage will be done in the name of profits before it can self-correct, such in the case of global warming. There really are things you can't undo.
The SN privacy question falls on the edge of that question. Once your information is out there, it can't be gotten back. We all know this first hand because of spam. You can't un-enter your email into the wrong form, and once you've made a bad decision that address will forever be full of printer ink and penis enhancement offers.
So what will come first, bottom-line effects from the recent backlash or legislation protecting privacy?
Or maybe I should ask, will they come at all?
Parc Forum is candy for those of us who own our own schedule, and this latest series is no exception: it's all social media all the time. Ross Mayfeild was the inagural awesome speaker. Garrett Camp is not par, but he's doing a solid job of telling a case study of learnings from StumbleUpon.
He notes that interface design and interaction design is important. I wish people would stop saying this as if it was a surprise. Ah well. And apparently he recently read "Don't make me Think" so thanks, Steve.
popular urls get a lot of corrections, less popular not. suggestion to cross with deli.ciou.us, they aren't doing that now
And he ends 20 minutes early. and I was 15 minutes late... dang, it was just starting to get good!
Recently Bokardo.com noted and annotated the new Google best practices. I followed his link and found a strange engineer-ese document full of treasures. I started reading it, then started commenting on it, then life intervened and here we are, a month later but hey... it's not like this stuff has changed that much.
Here are my thoughts on the best practices.
Josh: "my interpretation: provide value within 30 seconds"
Tanya Rabourn wisely said, in an answer to my LinkedIn Question about Social Design Challenges
"Designing for when there is "no there there." The users supply the content. However, the site needs to make sense and be compelling to those initial users who arrive when things are a bit sparse (otherwise you have no chance of it growing of course). In addition, a new user who joins the site (at any stage of that site's growth) should be able to understand how it works and see the site's value. They have to be motivated to do that initial work to become a part of the site before they've made a number of connections (or contributed content). Frequently those two types of experiences are overlooked in favor of imagining every user experience being that of a long-time user on a mature site. But if those initial experiences aren't pleasant, the site won't ever reach that stage."
Google is wise in noting this is true of *all* applications, not just social ones. But it is particularly problematic, as Tanya points out, for applications are shaped by the users. It's a chicken-egg problem, and there are multiple approaches to solving it. Joshua stands by his general principal of provide value *without* the network as well as with; i.e. Deli.cio.us is a bookmark tool without the network, a discovery tool with it. Another approach is "seeding" or inviting a small group of highly productive individuals to use for pay or love (or a mix of both.)
Google recommends
With Social Applications, you should first ask yourself first "what are the use cases" and "what is my context"? This tells you where to put the effort in your design.
I think: This is pretty reasonable (please read the entire paragraph on the Open Social page). The last item caught my eye, though. If you use facebook, you are well aware how collections are very much representations of who you are. For better or worse, in these modern times we are our stuff. Have you reconsidered showing your Netflix queue publicly, because you don't want to be defined by your need to see Alien vs. Predator or The Pillow Book? Then you know what I mean.*
Allowing people to display their loyalty via Band Badges, Bumper Stickers and color/font changes is obvious, but people represent themselves in who they select as a top friend (I don't know Don Norman that well, but I may want him front and center as part of my professional persona) and what book they'll admit to having read (please don't out me for finally reading The Long Halloween!.) Not only should you allow self-expression via lists, you have to realize lists are primarily self-expression and make them editable. No one wants too much truth in their profile.
Annotation: Reading Facebook's Privacy Default I came across this
When Blockbuster gives you the popup asking if you want to let your Facebook friends know about your rental, if you do not respond in fifteen seconds, the popup goes away ... and a "yes" is sent to Facebook. Wow, is that not what should happen! Not responding far more likely indicates confusion or dismissal-through-inaction than someone thinking "I'll save myself the click."
This is particularly mortifying because that movie will be on your profile, representing you. You might not even want to admit you rent at Blockbuster, pretending publicly you only go to the little indie rental shop across town. The price of confusion should not be shame.
Josh: Let people personalize their widgets
Yeah, that too. Who wants an ugly widget on their profile?
There are two kinds of updates you want to see: them and me. It's obvious that you want to know what's going on with your contacts. What's less obvious you want want to know what's happening to you. Not only who wrote on my wall but also who's looking at my profile? We all have egos, and stroking those egos keeps you coming back.
In a funny way, it's a bit like parenthood. Sure you have the diapers and the expense and they daily horror that you are going to ruin someone's life, but you also have the love, buckets and buckets of love too big for your body to hold, from the moment they smile at you in the morning to the moment they collapse on you at night. Lots of things in life are scary and hard. But do you want to stop living?
I think: After the previous diatribe, you know I believe in allowing communication in order to build community. And while it's quite right to recognize that your social network could use some slicing and dicing in order to be managable, let's be courageous enough to recognize the communities provide social bonds and emotional treats that encourage return visits. Again, it's about love folks. Nothing is as sticky as love. Enable love.
And as Josh has so frequently and wisely pointed out, the reverse can be said: make sure your mapping includes truly useful things to do with those maps, or why would anyone bother? I played with Dopplr briefly, and while it is nice to know who's visiting my town I get the same effect with way less overhead from twitter. Adding people to a social network is not only work for me, but I also have the guilt of imposing myself on my freinds. You had better make it worth it. (I'm looking at you, Spock.) Otherwise make it an optional aspect of the tool, the way Slideshare has, and focus on the functionality.
As a final word, it's hard to see what's truly meaningful to people when you are sitting around with a whiteboard. You can't understand people with best practices. Getting out and doing some old fashioned ethnography, going to visit people in their homes and offices, taking the time to get under people's skin, is one way to really understand what people want from social applications.
Or you could just wing it, use this list, and hope to get lucky.
* I haven't even been able to figure out if The Pillow Book is porn or art. All I know is Ewan McGregor is a very lucky man.
David Shen has a terrific post on the motivators at work in social media design
Over the last few years, social media has really become a popular buzzword. . Rather than talk about social media as a strategy, I wanted to point out some actual detail level things ... I have found the following techniques to be effective at creating and maintaining a vibrant social environment that produces resultsThe then goes on to list them out
Facebook Fanboy panel: Pro vs Con - Michael Arrington TechCrunch (moderator), Robert Scoble Podtech.net, Jason Calacanis Mahalo, Rodney Rumford FaceReviews.com, Dave McClure 500 Hats
Mike: are we supposed to be talking about issues, or just topics and there are two of you that are pro facebook, and two con.. seriously, what are we talking about?
Dave: yeah
Mike: I think it's more subtle than that
Dave: how about starting with monetization?
Mike: let's just go with my notes
who doesn't go to facebook at least once a day? why?
tantek: too many friend requests
audience member: email works better (Mike asks, and how old are you? he says he's 87, but joking, does look over 50)
mike: anyone under 30 not log in every day? just like paper newspapers... there are two interesting stories this year, iphone and facebook. anyone not agree?
jason: yes, all the facebook developers agree
dave: four months ago i didn't know I would run a facebook conference
robert: four months ago I didn't have a friend on facebook and now I have 4k
Mike: advertising & monetization
dave: currently they (Facebook and facebook aps) monetize like crap.
Jason: google is a perfect way to make money, but not fun. facebook is fun but not a good way to make money.
dave: not if I see my friends have a pair of cool new nikes, and I want a pair
jason: they've been talking about this for a long time with amazon, and it hasn't happened
robert: but what if you click on skiing, you see everyone, they can concentrate on capturing intent, and do advertising based on intent, but we haven't seen it yet.
I can't keep up. I can't keep up! BTW, my injections are all in italics
dave: suggests identifying the influencers then advertising to them, instead of advertising across the platform.
Mike: let me throw in some facts. google is clearly moving into SNs, we broke the story. they have most profitable advertising business in the world. clearly they are moving into SNs. we have to pay attention to that. we did once before, it was called orkut and it turned out to be irrelevant
younger folks are the trend leaders, and hot or not brought in keywords and a brand to represent you. your profile is made of brands. that shows some data on where trends are going, a way to monetize.
Robert: what if there was a facebook hotel in Las Vegas? there are 10 single folks in the hotel, it plays your music?
Jason: myspace has done a good job of it (monetizing), like with barat. it will make money, but not proctor and gamble level money. you won't make shampoo your friend. it's nowhere like the level of search.
Dave: points out influencers - sneezers-- are key. Rockyou maps the network of cool via topfriends.
Audience: you have descried how facebook users could monetize themselves
Jason: the top flickr users make nothing, and now the meme is maybe the top people shoudl make money. get paid. systems will have to figure out how to compensate them or they will leave and make their own.
Mike: change topic. black hat stuff. facebook changed, rule around who you can spam, how you can show your profile to users and friends. The people who misbehaved were rewarded by not losing their users. they had a built in advantage no one could catch up.
Rodney: it's business, doesn't matter if it's fair, some aps didn't take advantage and didn't leverage all the tools.
robert: the aps who played right didn't do as well, we don't hear about them?
rodney, no they didn't do as well.
dave: points out later installs go to the bottom. a clean up ap that removes/lowers less used ap would help.
Mike: but was it right that rockyou and slide didn't get penalized? If they don't, won't everyone want to game the system?
jason: if you build your business in facebook, you are not in charge of yoru business. they are acting nice, but they haven't said we're an open platform and you can control your users. I recall AOl and the information providers got screwed when the rules changed. When facebook goes public, they'll have a financial obligation to shareholders to play hard. Myspace stayed closed because they were winning, facebook opened because they were losing. that doesn't make facebook a bad company, it makes them smart. If you build your company on facebook, you are an idiot.
Dave: ebay example. I hope yahoo, google, et al does well because they'll keep facebook honest. I hope incumbents don't throw their weight around.
robert: the platform allowed it. those are the playing rules.
Mike: I consider that Questions (the ap) setting you up as having asked a question when you didn't is bad behavior, and should be punished.
dave: in the search world if you are a black hat, I don't mind that, if google resets the algorithm and re-levels the field.
Q: what if the open web platform shows up with openid, FOAF and rss, and like aol lost to the web...
Jason: AOL "lost" but they still make more money than facebook.
Dave: open is not better, better is better.
jason: why do developers put up with facebook setting the rules? Why don't you go on strike and say give me my users?
Mike: game theory says that bonding together is not psychologically possible
robert: how many people are still using the pirate ap? the next gen of aps will unseat the top aps.
Jason: you are all working for free to make facebook millions of dollars? talk about the ultimate pyramid scheme?
dave: i think it's interesting that rockyou and slide were kicking ass on myspace
mike: kicking ass how? revenue
dave, well not so much, installs
mike: zero?
jason: half-mil valuation on widgets is crazy
mike and dave argue about who mixed up revenue and valuation
jason: but facebooks valuation went up 15M
mike asks lee is facebook really worth 100B, less says yes, mike demands mike be removed. "that's what fucked up the party for us in 2000"
lee points out valuation is based on buyer and seller, and zuckerberg refused 1B, 15B, and so....
Jason: I want to say mahalo is worth (drowned out by laughter)
dave: i dont' agree with lee, my number is more like 10-15B
mik: where does that number come from?
robert: thinks 5B
Mike: Where do you get these numbers? At least Lee pretends there is some math involved
rodney: but it has engagement, it has emotional engagement and there has to be a way to monetize it.
dave: if they acquired a search engine, or if they acquired a checkout, or a contextual advertising platform, both of which I think likely... should they be valued on what they have or where they are going?
Audience points out it's a cheap way to get users. why not?
Audience: no one has as much insight into this community than you
whole panel says thank you
you don't think eric smchmitt or ballmer would pay 15B for it?
mike: probably yes. but the reason would be to keep it out of the hands of the competitor.
robert: ballmer didn't buy flickr when I told him to...
later... mike dares dave to say something bad about facebook
dave: too slow, not transparent enough,
robert: they don't let me add more than 5K people
mike you're just silly
mike: keep going
now telling the story about the fbFund, where they solicited applications and the lawyers said delete everything and resend saying they have no rights or else people could sue.
robert: they are going to turn evil like microsoft, they are going to see an ap they like and they are goign to buy, copy, whatever. but if you build like a starfish, and have only one tendon into facebook and hte rest elsewhere, beebo, etc.
Mike: what's the second best platform after facebook?
Dave: SEo is the second best platform after facebook
Funding Facebook Apps panel: Valuation & Metrics - Matt Marshall VentureBeat (moderator), Lee Lorenzen Altura Ventures, George Zachary CRV, Luke Nosek The Founders Fund, Jeff Clavier SoftTechVC
introduced as "money burning a hole in their pockets"
when asked do you want nuts and bolds or higher level discussion of strategy and platform, audience was wildly in favor of the second.
Now for the fashion show.
I feel an obligation to reveal that I was tired and bored and over-sugared, and this is at least 50% fake
lee: we do only facebook aps
george, ho hum, funding again
Luke, we love facebook, they are already making us rich
Jeff: I am french and we don't do facebook aps, why am I here, you silly people?
i am tired. I need about 40 downward dogs to unbend for typing in these chairs. Jeff actually said they invest on folks who have facebook aps as part of the strategy, not entire. and I have never seen him without sunglasses on his head.
Lee sounds like he's going to pass out from fear every time he speaks. He was all kinds of smart sunday, but i think it took him an hour to recover from stage fright, and there were only about 20 of then. Now he's pimping adonomics, which is certainly worth pimping.
George reminds me vaguely of Jeff Weiner for reasons I can't put my finer on. I had a looooong coffee one day in which we geeked out wildly and widely. I really like him, even if CRV didn't fund us. :)
matt marshall, meanwhile, is moderating with a grace and style that could easily have made him a diplomat. he makes you at ease, and then you spill your guts... journalist gold!.
George: I tend to think facebook will be the winner, and the portals are struggling because people don't wake up every morning and say I want to see media, they wake up and want to see friends.
Matt: but myspace is still bigger, and will be opening, and orkut is
George: I'm not a facebook investor and I wish I was. Facebook has the best user experience. There are moments of genius in the UI. I think any SN designed by committee will not work out.
Jeff: theez eez something something eet eez something something. I really have no business making fun of French accents,my husbands family will string me up. apparently he said "One of the first that transitioned into the older demographics"
Lee: Google will have a difficult time in moving users out of facebook.
Luke: tee hee hee I'm rich! I'm rich! or maybe something more like "We are very careful about not becoming something like Microsoft, where trust with developers is lacking"
Lee: if you take the first no, and say you can't get VC funded, you aren't much of an entrepreneur, you wimp. go home and hug your mommy, silly baby!
Matt: you say you just like infrastructure plays, not aps, and you syndicate with other investors.
Jeff: when you have a fund my size, you do 30+ deals a year at 250K. but look at the next size, it's a 1M 1.5M, so as a solo I can move very very fast, i can't bring all the value, but I can syndicate wiht a few funds I like working with very efficiently. On the no application rule, but it doesn't mean I'll never do it. never say never.
Matt: what little guys did you invest in, any why bother with such small fry?
George: social media we seed funded with Jeff, they started with aps and moved up to developer network. we cna't quantify. it's hard to quantify breakout markets, it's all gut feel.
Matt: you are close with slide. why slide owns so much of the space?
Luke: the slide CEo saw the graph as separate, and was ready to think about it as a platform, and they ran with it very quickly. when they first went viral on myspace it was a big fight to keep it going but with facebook it was almost too fast. massive growth from the myspace work (it echoes the advice to experimentation early and understand the space)
Lee, all warmed up now: points out rockyou and slide own half the social graph, tremendous power in a couple spaces. microsoft is trying to keep facebook a googlefree zone. (popfly?) these lessons in platform changes is that when there is a platform change it's a chance to get back in the game. rockyou must be a 1/2B company because of the way they own the social graph, if MS was willing to do 15M for % of facebook. Apple caught up with a platform change and would they now open up itunes, so folks don't have to buy an ipod?
Matt: google?
Luke: they've been a great search company/ad network, but it's a one trick pony. gmail is still at the back of the pack. They could use gmail to build a social graph, if they went that way. but we're blown away by facebook, when they make a mistake they correct it, I'd be very comfortable betting on an ap company that made facebook their primary focus. it's hard to make a better product at this point. It's clear social is more important than search, search just isn't that sticky. There is no lock in. those was will be very interesting when they play out.
Lee: the one play google might do to hurt facebook would be college oriented edu only, to get disgruntled facebook users, and they could pay college students to switch.
Luke: but you'd have to pay people. that's how locked in people are.
Lee: the new groups tool should placate disgruntled facebook users who have found their mom on it.
Matt: rockyou has a combo ap/advertising play. how's that? are ppl afraid of UGC?
George: yeah, CPMs are low because it's a new category. ppl are afraid of using their jobs, putting an ad against something people woudn't find tasteful.
just to jump on the google thing, I don't think they'll be a serious threat. Google is tech centric, not consumer centric. They'll spend a lot of money/time to monetize social networks.
Matt: who could challenge?
George. no one. Myspace is bigger, but they are owned by a media company, and they don't get it. I don't think they'll beat facebook.
Luke; I think myspace will slowly go away. newscorp is just not innovative.
Lee: think about the genius of this move, google when they wanted the best programmers they put out the math problem and offered nice food (to keep talent out of microsoft's hands?) Facebook has 300 ppl and they are committed to what they are doing, no salary overhead...
jason calcanis: Saying myspace is going away is ridiculous. How could you say it?
Luke: I could say it very very slowly.
jasonC: facebook hasn't made any money yet! you say it's going to be as big as google? are you drunk?
_I am quoting accurately now!!!!_
Lee suggests facebook could challenge google on search, jason replies that he just said if google can't learn facebook's business, how could facebook learn google's
wow, i went form making stuff up out of boredom to transcribing the real thing. I can't wait for the next panel..... at least it won't be boring.
Tantek Celik (moderator), David Recordon SixApart, Chamath Palihapitiya Facebook, Joseph Smarr Plaxo, Ted Grubb Satisfaction Unlimited
Joseph: plaxo all about connecting all the places where you data is. a webwide solution. demos pulse. pretty nifty. working on a open source tool
david: fairly famous for the opening social graph paper for example, vox, how do you bootstrap a social network? you already have one, they might not want to bring everyone over, but you don't want to start from scratch either. How can you share value but not have ot give up username/password everywhere they go.
ted: we allow uses to import their profile into satisfaction, if the company supports microformats... such as flickr.Justin Smith, InsideFacebook (moderator), Blake Commagere Mogads / Zombies, Jason Beckerman TeachThePeople.com / Lotto, Jia Shen RockYou, Tim O’Shaughnessy Hungry Machine
a two minute history
since may 25 366M aps in the first 20 weeks
14M unique ap users in august
Invitations: originally no rules on invitations
no volume limited
starting to target
no built in stats
now need social incentives for invites
News and minifeeds introduced sept 2006
broadcasts your activity
worries about privacy
feeds: you can optimize
but selection algorythm is not published, depends on individuals, no built in stats
>only friends with the ap see your feed items
notifications
friends of logged in user or anyone with the ap
rules have not been well articulated, some people are abusing and getting blocked as too spamming
can get shut down.
Blake: facebook is getting better about letting you know what changes are coming. my focus was optimizing invites, and I've been using the standard invite interface provided. people have tried different stuff, but instead I've focused on how would this new invite control work vs. the old one. it's worth doing A/B testing.
For notifications, as a mechanism for viral spread, I didn't really use it, and i tried once and i went and played frisbee and my ap was blocked. my users were too eager to bite people.
Tim: good or bad, we lost the massive growth provided by invite process. it's not that invites are not important, but if you look at what we've called up there is a decision point and they can choose skip. Notifcations, it can show up without being marked as spam.
Jia: form looking at all the different channels, invites, minifeeds, minifeeds is the only way to grow it outside fo the users. form an invite perspective we've spent time to make sure the selection process is fairly easy. Most people call it an invite process, but it's really a way to spread the application. if it's an event it's invite, but if its zombies, its a bite, or a gift a gift...
minifeeds, we've tried changing the graphics that accompany and has a big corollary on how often people click through. tuning the images will improve your throughput by far.
People who have 3-20 wallposts are more likely to accept invites, people with real relatoinships accept, just data to support the theory everyone has put in your head.
Jason: bonus functionality works, when you invite more people you get tickets for the daily jackpot. they designed for daily engagement, the jackpot goes up every day, it's good facebook measures engagement for them.
they'd like rollup messages, rarer than having every single activity in the feed.
insert lunch drowsies. notes getting thinner....
again I'm blown away by how these folks study and tweak. they put major corporations to shame. a/b testing, user research and more.
Jason: if you could message your users, that'd help, even if it was only one or two times a week.
Justin: do you know what the future of analytics is on facebooks? what are you doing?
Blake: I'm grateful everytime they add anything, such as recently on pageviews. Some of these issues are a bit opaque because you are going through facebook to the user. I need metrics where I can measure activity so I can learn what features will engage. I don't do as much a/b testing as I should. I know you should do it like on invites where it's the biggest bang for the buck.
Jason: we just built out stats, because we want to understand where our invites are going, is it core users who really want bonus tickets, ro invites that never got used. it's been really cool to have that data.
Jia: dont' go and overdesign a anayltics sytem. we still do real time mysql system, eventually we'll do somethign more but raw numbers speak for themselves. make sure you collect that information properly.
Tim: there are raw numbers we dont' want to relay on facebook for, but then there are things facebook will build and we dont' want to waste money building it.
Blake: dont' spend a ton of time making something beautiful and complex since they (facebook) know what our pain is and will get it to us, what if you spent a month on analytics and you didn't need to.
Jason: we focus on the data facebook will never be able to tell us.
Justin: spam...
Blake: We'd all like to know what the algorithm is for whats spam, but I understand they don't want us toeing the line between spamminess. I odn't think that algorithm will ever be shared, but we all have insight into ti, # of installed users or engaged, then number of notificaitons, then how many get marked as spam. you shoudl think carefully about notifications and think about if yoru toeing the line. I limit it even if the uses are crazy active, thinking I know that would annoy me...
Jia: we've gone through a lot of tuning and focused on only notifying when there is something useful, and blake and play frisbee together and we've gotten blocked and you have ot sit on your computer to see if your ap has gotten blocked, you don't want to sit on your computer and watch it.
Blake: sometimes you are sending out only a few notifications and you see your spamometer going up, a few users can really shift the tide, facebook users have a low tolerance
Jia: when we launch a new ap we don't use notifications.
Justin: what if you could show to non-installed users in the newsfeed
Blake: don't underestimate the power of the newsfeed. if you had a clear argument for the ap on teh newsfeed it's change things
Jason: we wouldn't have to do invites, if people saw their friends winning money
Jia: I really couldn't see us change our call to action in the minifeeds, I don't think it'd change our strategy.
Tim: I think we'd see it as another kind fo invitation, we wouldn't' change strategy much.
Q: how far can these go with non-viral applicaitons? werewolves are naturally viral, BUT...
blake: aps that are not inherently viral can't be made viral by optimizing the heck out of it. is there a reason for someone to want their friends to use it? is it so cool you get street cred for finding it? sharing photos, sharing music, because uses have a direct benefit fom it. You can't make an indea viral, but it can make the difference between seeing a a good idea flounder.
Jason: I don't know if it has to start as being viral if there is a value proposition, it can become viral.
Jia: that addresses the question of when will aps become utilities? they just won't grow as fast, but they could still growth. opening up the minifeed could help utilities.
Tim: you can't dress up a pig. but at least you can fail fast and cheaply. you can try the methods, but if the idea isn't solid, no amount fo virality will help you.
Q; do you know what the drop off is with inviting ten or installing aps
Jason: we require it so we dont' have a good number on that. but the growth is showing that people are using it.
jia: unfortuantely in the previous world, people just clicked hte next button. but people are getting more savvy. limiting to ten has been a good ting, because people are less pissed off and ignore everything.
Tim: look at the growth rates after the limit, it dropped dramatically.
Jia: if you have other incentives, then it's good to have the invite at the top. but for things like events, where people want to use it over time, it just annoys people.
q: how many gets uninstall?
Blake: vampires gets the highest uninstall of all my aps, and its 13%, which is a good number.
jia: exposing the install rate is interesting to brand advertisers, but better would be how long to users keep the ap. it'll end up being like total uniques, etc. those are the stats that really matter.
And dont' forget to check out Jim
Design
Getting tired again, moving to commentary mode.
people want to be creative, but can't write code. many non-pro coders also. 107M nonpros. reaching out to garage coders. xbox released a tool for noncoders that let them make their own games, and built community around it.
Users are the stars... like Digg, treat them like rockstars, take good care and feeding of them.
Your software should embrace self expression-- if someone wants a duck thats magenta, let them.
You've got to let people entertain themselves, other: example the faceook ap that lets folks throw virtual poop at each other.
sometimes i despair for the human race
Popfly lets you build mash-ups, like pipes, but easier user interface.
for the "I dont' write code"-
built on silverlight i assume someone knows what that means
the only "whoa" from the audience came when he resized the browser and it resized perfectly. heee, we are such geeks!!!
great funny quote: "I'll just show it in the gratuitous 3d view"
he just mashed up facebook and asteroids. you can shoot at your friends. it could even fit on your profile, because of the good resizing. pointless and awesome.
each node has modifiers, for example technorati you can get bits of data like search summary and you can give it parameters.
jim says this interface is what visual effects developers have been using for ever and are considering moving away from.
now he's showing how users add to profile. I'm tuning out....
and I never came back.
Finally, facebook in the house!
facebook update
- deep integration
- mass distribution
- new oppurtunity
watch the alpha geeks
- new tech moves through hackers, then entrepreneurs then platform players
examples include screen scraping and the peddle powered internet presaging data platforms and interest in alternative fuels
On Facebook (they have a new report coming out)
facebook is growing 1.14% a day
aps are growing 2% a day
87% of usage goes to 2% of aps
top 50 developers by usage looks like a more traditional long tail, but all 5K and the tail is way long
compares it to chris anderson's research, including book sales.but facebooks long tail is essentially useless right now.
the power law is skewed, that may change, but thats the bad news.
many applications competing for the same users. dating aps have the best uptake, then messaging and chat, just for fun as a category isn't strong.
the most successful category with active users is sports then gaming, chat, fashion, just for fun)
most active categories (what are people building) just for fun, then messaging, then gaming, then video (multiple categories, so may not be fully accurate)
aps with over 100,00 users messaging, dating, gaming, video, just for fun, (sports weaker here)
top 40- top friends, funwall, superwall, superpoke, video, x me, ilike, movies, graffiti -- top aps seem to be topping out, growth slowing.
a web 2.0 refresher
the more users, the more value
building a collective database
* building on top of open source, yahoo pays people to extend
* learning from open source, wikipedia uses volunteers
* p2p sharing users build song swapping tools as a byproduct of their own self interest
* google works this way, and to some extent facebook too
key concept: harnessing collective intelligence. ajax doesn't matter, what matters is value grows wiht userbase.
a network-effect-driven data lock-in, with accelerating returns. red-shift companies
Yahoo started with user generated content, and picked and chose best. google figured out how to automatically extract meaning from activity. They coudl automate what yahoo was doing.
page rank as true start of web 2.0
wesabe uses it too, with fan scores, recommendations, and data information being gathered and used for advice.
facebook is picking up data but you don't have much control over it, there is not much intelligence in the data.
for example, a list of facebook invites
* geni.com knows sean is my brother
* my company directory knows I work at oreilly
* google knows I worked with Danese
* amazon knows who's written books for me
- why should I confirm? can't facebook learn to use databases?
How ridiculous is this? my phone company knows everyone I ever called, but my phone only knows the last ten. Phone companies suffer from churn-- data could create lock in.
"are you my friend" anyone with email, phone, IM already knows who my friends are (Yahoo, are you listening???)
xobni is extracting data such as phone numbers and email, click to call, statistics on how often you communicate, let you know when you haven't talked to someone in a while.
The Internet Operating system
the subsystems will not be devices, they will be data subsystems. facebook describes itself as a platform, it's really a subsystem platform, not a platform yet. if you study history, a platform beats an application every time. lotus 123 to excel... wordperfect gets beat by MS word.
two types of platform
* one ring to rule them all
* small pieces loosely joined
facebook can't do it all. hopes they will help open it up to a small pieces model
=> thoughts on the social graph read it!
questions you should be asking
* am I doing everything i can to build applications that learn form my users?
* Does my applications get better with more users, or just more busy and crowded
** consider filtering, smart filtering
* if ""data is the intel inside":http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/data_is_the_int.html" of web 2.0, what adata do I own?
* what user facing services can I build against it?
* does my platform give me and my users control, or take it away form us?
** you have to create more value than you capture
Random thoughts about what I want form the social grpah
* I want social networks to reflect my real social network
* I want it to help me manage those contacts (how to reach them, updated status)
* I want it to manage my groups of people
** I need to put java people together, or facebook people, if I know them or not.
** people I know, people I don't know, people I regret knowing
* I want it to recognize asymmetry in relationships
** how can I reach out to superstars in a field I don't yet know
** I don't want to just manage my friends. In fact, the closer they are, the less I need to manage.
* I want fine grained control over what I see and what I ignore
** some people I just want flickr feeds, other ones I want everything. I want to see this persons blogs, but not their tweets.
* I want to discover interesting people
is Tim normal? Probably not, but good ideas here.
geni.com .. mothers maiden name no longer a good security question ;)
I can't recall if he had a point, except smart understanding of relationships
facebook doesn't fit my relationships -- steve case: i sold him a company, what am I going to say, we hooked up? might be accurate.. yes, that was a quote.
FOWA, should look at different tie describers
what do people want to say about themselves? What do I want to say about them? What if I could adjust my view of the people. How do I want to see them? could I rearrange modules to shape how I want to be updated?
jaiku has done great things, and just got acquired by google. takes idea of smart presence to mobile. your phone knows where you are. your phone should tell you if a friend is in berlin and you are going to wake them up. Or if a friend ins town, you cna ping them. I do this with twitter, but obviously not as effective. But do I want my movements tracked?
I'm and inventor. I because interested in long term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which is finished, not the world in which ist is started." ray kurzwell
think far along the curve, think about new platforms, think about future of applications, think about taking the platform forward so we can say, wasn't that platform quaint?
QUESTIONS
Q: criteria in companies distribution channel?
A: one of my fundamental beliefs about web 2.0 - it's distribution, creating interfaces with your customers. The best use all channels, web facebook, etc. They want as much contact as possible. The need to understand each of those channels, and there may not be much overlap-- ilike says only 4% overlap between web and facebook uses, they tend to choose. thinking of twitter, everyone has a favored interface the uses is the asset, and the services you can offer to them, and you can figure out how to offer that.
Q: If Facebook will dominate, won't they fight to keep their uses to themselves? Even if everyone wants it?
A: I'm ont sure, there are a couple answers. If you become truly domainate, no need ot share- facebook isnt there. Google is a good example. they own a lot of data they don't share BUT they also share a lot as well. They spider the same sites as yahoo and ms. you can share and still dominate. if large graphs cooperate, say geni and facebook cooperate both sites become more valuable. There is value in openness, if you focus on building services for users, then you choose ... it ultimately depends on the services and applications you build. Right now there is way more for facebook to gain by being open, as they try to crack open these deep mines of data. For now and for many years to come, all the trends say openness is good for you.
Dave McClure is useing fun movies ot intro folks. this was at the end of Tim's talks
haiku introductions
(I'm too slow to get it. they were funny.)
I'm pooped after that last round of live blogging. I'm going just note interesting points here...
adbrite: a facebook ad network is just like a regular one, it's just a bit more limiting. channel specific ad networks like glam for womens, it's just a matter of focus
another elephant in the room. hype! they've gotten a lot of people working on this problem of monetization. crowdsourced problem solving!
didn't know that the 30 boxes guy (Narenda) started a facebook ad and promtional network and is making silly money now. he smiles shyly and shrugs, what's a boy to do?
Ro Choy, of rock you, is all kinda of articulate. I'd pluck him for a conference.
adbrite: it's still early to tell, but the budgets can be sizable for facebook advertising, for like a movie release. other folks are smaller for say a guy seeking his soulmate.
videoegg: most of the business CPM is for brand exposure, say movies, tv shows, music. a video ad has greater value.
we sell a lot to big advertisers because they recut their tv ads to videos for facebook. it's measureable now, we can tell them not only numbers viewed, but how much of the video has been viewed. We provide richer data.
good question on proportion of big advertisers vs little guys. Ro says it's direct response, so it's developers themselves. they've done big guys, but 90/10 little to big. Adbrite says its 75/25. narenda says similar, but videoegg goes more big guys.
moderator: facebook is losing it's beauty and whitespace with ap madness.
narenda says lots to cheer about, any tie there is a new market there is a lot fo excitement that can get in teh way of judgement. this community could consider long term business, benefit from long term thinkgin. apple wouldn't build it that way, flickr wouldn't' build it that way.. companies that focus on the user experience... you can con a 18yr old from Ontario, many folks are very trusting, and many aps get handed a lot of private data , i'm not sure we fully understand the repercussions of that. It's in everyone's interest to think a bit more long term, rather than short term exploitation.
Ro notes that many companies are learning to change their focus form thousands of users to thousands of ACTIVE users. the value is still being understood, it's only six months old.
narenda says they are taking a hard line about video, noise, rude ads.. an ap that respects user will succeed. Joe, of video egg, points out video is very engaging, but his is user-initiated.
Adbrite points out the creepy factor in contextual advertising (seen in gmail) but opportunity is high also, can understand genre preferences, etc. reminds me of old wired article on "yuck factor" of new technology.
remember altavista, and when you first started using google, you felt guilty? for abandoning altavista?
1st gen search engines: search engines "crawl" links to pages, they make a copy in something called a index, they find pages you are looking through, originally via term frequency. this was too spammable, because control was in the hands of the webmaster.
2nd gen search engines: use factors off the page that wemaster can't easily influence
SocialMedia.com is an app network
apsaholic allows you to track the success of yoru ap vs. your peers
evolution of online advertising
1997 websites
I missed the second talk, see http://www.geekdaily.org for jim's write up. also, slides:
first a anatomy of a facebook ap
first to give ap developers access ot social graph and demographics
you get a splash, a spot on the profile and an icon in the ap list
difference between facebook ap and myspace widget? FB is viral and itneractive, myspace is all aobut self expression
- CONCEPT FRIDAY 6/15
- DESIGN FRIDAY
- IMPLEMENTATION 3 DAYS
- ADVERTSING 6/18
- VIRAL GROWTH 3 WEEKS
- caplock off
- discover through friends
- certainly discovery of people's social lives
many interesting new entrepreneurs out of college will build on facebookQUESTIONS
interesting ecosystem between websites and facebook applicationseconomics will be a real issue- keep costs low!
- ilike, flixter
- websites establishing their position, i.e. yahoo hiring rockyou for Ymusic
constant newness will be important for entertainment
Ro Choy from Rockyou
lot of questions on value of facebook-- lack of long tail, what's value, how relevant to business
most money spent on google and yahoo for internet spend. why social networks? relevancy via search and relevancy via social network. Sn's showing radical growth. get in now to understand for tomorrow
social web on the rise with open Sns.
move destination sites-- like service master-- creates opportunity to thrive.
rockyou is a widget provider, 700k widgets embedded daily (WTF? what a world we live in) built on putting widgets on myspace to drive traffic to parent sites. tells story of rock you's growth and strategy. Starting to feel like a salescall...
aps that focus on engagement (access to friends) rather than self-expression perform 7x better.
one key component of virality is simplicity. the easier it is, the more viral. every single extra step takes away from virality.
rockyou has 15 facebooks apos with 40M live installs and 10 of top 40 aps: superwall, xme, likenss, zombies/werewolves/vampires, horoscopes, slideshows, emoter
Rodney Rumford up. "The user perspective" I'm doing a much worse job due to food in my stomach. :\
At Graphing Social, a facebook conference. I'm doing the biz track, Jim the tech track. Lee Lorenzen is talking now on facebook 101 and user perspectives.
I'll try to pull out interesting points
From wired
Under the radar, Appfuel -- a five-person startup in San Francisco -- has been developing an application that fulfills what everyone knows to be the real opportunity: If a company can mine your Facebook profile to know who you are and what you like, it can show you targeted ads. Without storing any user data, says co-founder Sundeep Ahuja, Appfuel can scan a user's profile and deliver a targeted ad in under a second. For example, if you fancy The Fray, Appfuel's system will know the group is playing a concert near you tonight and will offer a link to buy tickets.Ahuja does, however, acknowledge the elephant in the room: Facebook is likely preparing to do the same thing, as the Wall Street Journal reported in August (subscription required). Facebook says it already targets ads based on profiles. But so far, advertisements on the site do not appear to be closely matched with either users' profiles or the widgets they've installed.
Yesterday I asked on Linked in (and on Facebook, more on that later)
What do you consider the greatest challenges in designing for social media/software/networks?I have gotten many terrific answers, and I'll share a couple now.
When you are designing social media you are not building and designing a product in the typical sense of that word. You are really designing an infrastructure upon which social interaction, and eventually a community, can build. The affordances needed to "direct" and "control" the development of a community are very different from and much more subtle than typical single-user systems that we (as designers, developers) know. I usually compare it metaphorically to a soap bubble: you can gently try to push it in a certain direction, but if if you push too hard, it'll burst. User-centered design takes on a whole new meaning when you are building social media and communities......
There are many MANY more terrific answers, and since the poll is open for another six days, I recommend you read them and add your 2cents. After it closes, I'll do a write up of what I've learned, and create some follow up questions to answer some of these challenges.The greatest challenge is marketing, because marketing determines who your audience will be more than the quality of your product design.
Design-wise, the answer is similar: understanding who your audience will be, as chosen (hopefully) in close collaboration with marketing. If the marketing people don't exist or aren't powerful, then the features and the site design will alone be relied on to determine the audience -- and this will result in a fractured, aimless audience with no sustainability and no strategy except a hope to get lucky with some sort of coincidental generation of audience cohesiveness and thus community.Clarification: I'm not trying to discount the importance of features or product design. I just happen to think that, especially among Christina's group of friends and contacts, we're more likely to fail to understand the importance of marketing than we are likely to fail to deliver powerful user experiences. Other answer-ers here are thinking along the same lines when they stress the importance of brand, voice, and acquiring users: all of these qualities are the things that marketing experts can really help with in a profound way.
To whatever extent that a UI designer can do this, that UI designer is performing a marketing function.-- Christopher FaheyTwo things:
1. Not doing one. I find the biggest issue these days is that companies continue to shy away from social networks as something someone else does. The loss of top down marketing control and the perceived liability of open-ended conversations still keeps many companies well away
2. Not looking at what networks already are working and carving out a space in them for yourself. I think a big mistake for a lot of companies is the idea they have to start complex processes like this by always building their own first. I think it would be better to start with a thread or user group or sanctioned community employee team to participate on other well-participated meta-forums first. If the desire is strong enough to create a unique social network that is more targeted to the select group, then the idea will have some momentum from the target community itself to move along.-- Tod RathboneReleasing control to your community. On the two social sites I've worked on, both aimed at narrow audiences (one tech-oriented, the other party-oriented -- assuming those are separate audiences), the site owners in both cases wanted to avoid "The MySpace Syndrome" wherein nearly every page becomes a messy conflagration of plug-ins, run-on sentences, endless scrolling and possible lawsuits. Facebook has been somewhat successful in manhandling its audience into a single interface they can't easily manipulate. But growth seems to depend on freedom of expression, and when you have thousands or millions of users, control goes out the window. Finding the balance between "My Vision" as a client and "Your Vision" as a user is painful, but unavoidable.
-- Lance Arthur
I think the biggest challenge is having a really good reason to build one in the first place. back when streaming media was new, everyone and their brother was saying 'we need streaming media on our site!' More recently it's been "Ajax! Web 2.0! We need some of that!" No you flippin' don't. That's like saying 'we need more concrete to make this new building excellent!' Social networking applications are becoming part of the infrastructure of the web and technology. They are a commodity, a tool. And they are being applied indiscriminately, which is making them worthless. Unless there is a really good reason for supporting some kind of 'community,' then social networks and community applications just increase noise and diminish the interestingness and goodness of 'real' social networks. So the biggest challenge? Doing the really good thinking up front, before you decide you need one, to figure out who you are trying to help, why, what they need, the experience you want to support, and the best ways to support this experience. Designing social media or networks should only be undertaken AFTER you've done all that hard work. and I think it's the biggest challenge because i think so few people are doing it.
Somehow I've managed to live mylife so far withotu hearing the term Sock-Puppeting. A shame.
Recently yet another case of someone using a second identity to promote their own work has presented itself on a major tech writing listserv. This act is apparently known as sock-puppeting (I'll admit, I had to look it up). As an example, Joe Smith wrote an article, and John Jones (aka Joe Smith) is promoting it as a supposed third party.
via Joel on Software's Building Communities with Software
The social scientist Ray Oldenburg talks about how humans need a third place, besides work and home, to meet with friends, have a beer, discuss the events of the day, and enjoy some human interaction. Coffee shops, bars, hair salons, beer gardens, pool halls, clubs, and other hangouts are as vital as factories, schools and apartments
it brings up the question "Are Social Networks, Media and Software the new third place?"
Where do you go to assuage loneliness or boredom? Do you open twitter? Swing by Facebook? Is email a third place? Is IM?
The impact of social media (like PR) is overdetermined. There are a lot of moving parts. Which is not to say that it can’t be measured. How do we do it? Well, it depends. Here are some things we can measure, some of which may be right for your project:* Page views
* Feed subscriptions
* Comments
* Quality of comments
* Number and types of user submissions
and it continues... read it all.
a particularly smart slideshow.
I was delighted to see a poster I worked on when I was at MIG referenced in it... made me feel all tingly.
Jeremiah is such an uber SN geeks, he doesn't realize that his little summary is valuable even to the non-SN novice.
Digest of the Social Networking Space: August 15th, 2007
Summary Adoption rates continue to grow, an excessive amount of white label vendors, many which are receiving funding of questionable amounts, savvy corporations are deploying either in existing networks, or building their own. Data and privacy continue to be a primary concern for users. Unless your audience does not share online, I recommend that corporations develop a strategy for this market quickly, and budget for 2008.
From Recovering Journalist: Backfence: Lessons Learned
Trust the audience. We were asked all the time, mostly by nervous journalists, how we avoided having Backfence become a nasty free-for-all. There were many answers: We installed profanity filters, required registered membership to post or comment, asked members to use their real names and put "report misconduct" buttons on every post and comment. But most of all, we trusted the audience to do the right thing—and invariably it did.
I recently learned an old programming mantra -- trust but verify-- originated with Ronald Regan. I'm not sure how well it worked for him, but in social media design, it's the way to go. We baked it in to PublicSquare; you can see when people logged in and who touched what files last, but our permissions look laughably lightweight compared to any CMS (admittedly draconian next to a wiki, but we are aiming to strike a middle road.)
I also wanted to note the required registration on commenting. This is, in my opinion, a good thing. But not widely agreed upon. I'd love to hear if anyone out there has gathered data on this.
What is Ambient Intimacy good for? I think it's incredibly good at providing phatic expression online. Phatic expression being the language we use for the purpose of being social, not so much for sharing information or ideas. It's like the virtual 'what's up' or 'how're you doing'?'
I gave this short talk as a breakout discussion starter. I think what stewart>matt>gene are doing is awesome, and I'd love to be the next link in the chain.
MORE...ABC News: Guide to New ABCNEWS.com
The new site is designed to harness the power of community. And by community we mean "citizen reporters," our viewers and readers who help us report the news by contributing, commenting and telling us what they know. The redesigned ABCNEWS.com makes it much easier for our Internet users to add to the facts, ask questions of newsmakers and make their voices heard.Users will also find it much easier to submit to us video from cell phones and their home video cameras -- video that we may choose to broadcast on our site or on one of our television news programs.
Monday I listened ot a pretty terrific forum, a radio program on my local PBS station. Because their site behaves in a way I can best describe as erratic, here are the relevant links:
The show discusses the lure of "the dark side" with Philip Zimbardo. What makes good people do bad things? Where is the line between good and evil, and where does this line become blurred? Can we curb this seduction to commit immoral deeds?Philip Zimbardo , professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University, creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the author of "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil"
Download (MP3)(Windows: right-click and choose "Save Target As." Mac: hold Ctrl, click link, and choose "Save As.")
I've long been fascinated by the Stanford Prison Studies, and the effect they had on research, but more so on the learnings they gathered so very quickly and so very deeply. In this talk, one thing I couldn't help but fixate upon was the details-- his choice of military-style outfits for the guards, including reflective sunglasses, or the hospital-gown style uniforms for the prisoners.
Because I spend most of my time considering which features affect community behavior, I wondered what is the online equivalent? What are those aspects of the fixtures of our design that create or dissuade evil (and how could it have affected the situation that led to Kathy Sierra's life threats) Is anonymity on the web something we want to discourage? How can we continue on without flagging (which obviously PublicSquare has.) I've been told that people feel more kindly to me and respond more gently when my avatar includes my baby. How can photos change our communications? Does a icon carry the same weight as a photo, does a photo carry the same weight as a photo of a face?
Good and evil are not something we as designers think of all that often. In fact, fairly often we hand wave and point to Leni Riefenstahl as our icon of beauty in the face of evil (beauty as the face of evil?). But we are not just recorders of life who can choose to do so with or without style, we are the architects of life, just as much as architects of buildings or urban planners.
I think every design choice in PublicSquare is built with conscious or unconscious implications on user behavior. You are responsible for your actions. Your bio carries every comment, every story you write. Your photo hangs out next to your words, as does your reputation. The reputation on each comment reflects passer-by's reactions. People don't approve when you make a snarky comment, or even when spelling errors are publicly mocked. The community decides what's acceptable and what's not, if you give them the tools to do so.
I wonder what tools create abuses of power. The theory in Zimbardo's book is most people have the capacity of evil within them, they just need the right situation to bring it out.
We can't hand wave if there is even a slim chance he is right.
If we design community spaces, we must design with community mores, be it a small community or the community of man.
"I too have had the sense that much of the discussion in the IA/Design community was dangerously close to a conference of virgins talking about sex."
Christopher Allen rocked the house tonight with many vital insights on group size. But don't beleive me, do
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