Social Strategist News & Boston Events · 04/24/2008
I’d love for you to be in an exotic location. Some place like Tahiti, Morocco, Zanzibar. Just in case you’re here in Boston (where the weather hasn’t been too shabby lately) with me, I wanted to let you know about a couple of events coming up, and a little about what’s going on with myself.
Boston Tech Events
First, POPSignal is a party “aimed at bringing together the local tech community in a fun and informal environment. There is no format, presentations, or speeches. However, there is always a free open bar, free food, music, fun activities from sponsors, and great conversation.“ It’s happening May 15th, and you should RSVP ASAP or you’ll be SOL.
Then May 17th & 18th is BarCampBoston3, an unconference with just as much networking but some good presentations, demos, and discussions too. What’s an unconference? It means that the basic organization(setting the dates, finding a venue, finding sponsors) have been done by organizers, but the content of the conference is driven by the attendees. There will be a schedule of timeslots and rooms available, to be filled the morning of. Hopefully I’ll see you present! Maybe you’ll see me present?
My Boston Tech Life
I’ve been in Boston for over a year now, and have been writing Social Strategist a bit longer. I’ve completed a re-design of the site to make it cleaner, smoother, and now even have a headshot of myself up top… staring at you while you read. I’d like to update more often, but the best ones come when I’m not forcing myself to write something; and I’d hate to waste your time with anything but the best.
As I’ve mentioned in a couple of entries, I’m also working on a startup, with two co-founders: Chris Mela and Andrew Trese. News Armada is a startup that wants to bring online news out of its infancy, based on the philosophy that there’s too much information with too little meaning. We’re planning to build the single best source of news, commentary, and community online. We hope to have a prototype by early June; if you’d like to hear more before then, hopefully I’ll see you at POPSignal or BostonBarCamp3, or you can get in touch and we’ll grab a coffee.
Until then, I hope you continue to enjoy Social Strategist!
Your Users are Boring. Help Them Stand Out! · 04/17/2008
Your users are boring. They have no substance, no identity. Not on your site, at least. All they have are usernames. Or maybe a favicon-sized avatar, or a little profile picture. But guess what? If you have a lot of users (and you want to, right?), that’s not enough for most people to tell most people apart.
I’ve been thinking about online identity since discovering an excellent new (really new, not just new to me) blog on the subject, Own Your Identity by Josh Porter, of Bokardo, and some others who seem to be equally excellent writers/thinkers. While they’re talking about the whys and hows of getting your identities on other sites under your own control, I’d like to talk about why it’s so important for sites to provide identity to their users, and how to do it.
Who Needs It
Sites that…
- Have user accounts.
- Have users who are visible to the public.
- Have users who are visible to each other.
- Have users who contribute content.
“But my users want to be anonymous!”
Identity ≠ exposure. Identity is about uniqueness, about what sets one user apart from the other; it’s a set of characteristics that represents the person on your site, not necessarily hard facts about the person in front of the screen. A pseudonym is as much of an identity (within the bounds of your site) as a fingerprint. Unfortunately for your users, they’re also about as distinguishable from one another.
Why You Need It
Giving your users the ability to distinguish one from another is the single best thing for the health of your community that will happen this year. Why? Better identity = better recognition, which equals:
- Connections! Connections are great, because users who connect to other users on your site keep coming back!
- Accountability! Every community gets spammers and trolls and troublemakers (read my post on how to stop bad behavior in online communities); identity helps, well.. identifying them. More importantly, it stops bad behavior before it starts.
- Credit! You also have great users in your community. You don’t have time to recognize them all one by one, and what makes them great to you won’t make them great to others. Let your users give credit where it’s due, and your best users will love your site for the reinforcement it provides.
How to Do It
First, how not to do it. 
Minimalism shouldn’t mean indistinguishable, and most sites aren’t much better than Reddit at this. Problems:
- Usernames all look alike.
- A tiny avatar is seen as three things: color, shape, and light or dark. 9 distinguishable colors x 3 shapes (round, square, asymmetrical) x 2 shades = enough variation for about 54 users.
- You can’t count on clicks. Users will not click through to a profile page to make another user stand out in their mind.
Instead,
- Make identity a priority. Content is king, but creators are the king-makers. It’s important for your users to be able to see who’s giving them King Arthur, and who’s giving them George Bush, Jr.
- Differentiate usernames. The easiest time I’ve ever had telling usernames apart was on a late-90’s forum that awarded users the ability to change text colors and add effects like “glow” and “shadow” to their names. Of course, the site’s design sucked, and I understand you don’t want to sacrifice design for display. Instead, provide controlled options and limit repetition:
- A limited number of colors that complement your design, and are the appropriate shade to display against the background.
- A limited selection of fonts. Even more than color, this gives a username personality.
- Think outside alpha-numeric! A trail of numbers at the end of a username allows for much less visual variation than letting users insert characters that go between parts of a username, like dashes, underscores, and spaces.
- Make pictures large enough to stand out. 50×50 is ideal. 30×30 is the minimum. When appropriate, encourage avatars. Logo-like images have more variation than faces, even at 50×50.
- Provide persistent expression with every contribution. Post signatures, user ‘titles’, image overlay banners. Something that lets the user express themselves succinctly, and is attached to all content they contribute.
I’m sure there are plenty of clever UI gurus who can come up with other best practices, making use of CSS or even AJAX effects to enhance the display of identity. But until then, there’s no reason why services couldn’t at least go from this:
Aggregation and Monetization - Profit From Making Markets More Efficient · 03/12/2008
My two startup co-founders and I recently launched a small side-project as a way of testing several tools and processes we plan on using in our actual venture. The project is meant to be a PopURLs of t-shirts, an aggregator of the newest cool shirts from popular t-shirt sites around the web. The theory is simple: there are many great t-shirts out there, from many great sites. But the consumer doesn’t want a great t-shirt site, they want a great shirt. And frequently, they don’t know what a great shirt is. Is it funny? Is it vintage? Is it geeky? Is it artsy? With GetANewShirt.com, they see a variety of shirt designs and styles from a variety of sites. It’s one example of how to solve one of the major emerging problems, caused by the new abundance of individual and small-business published content.
Quickly Increasing Supply, Slowly Increasing Demand
Supply for all kinds of content is increasing, but demand isn’t keeping up. It’s not because people don’t want the new content becoming available to them, but more often because they don’t know they want it. The tech solution to this problem isn’t to do a better job of selling content than the content creators, but to make it easier for the content consumers to find that content. But ‘find’ does not have to mean search. The biggest problem today’s search engines are contending with is that people don’t always know what they want, or how to express what they want. Some businesses have known this for a while. Amazon isn’t just a Google for books, after all. Their editorial department has been important to them from the very beginning, and every product page contains a treasure trove of recommendations, related items, and other social features. Those features not only solve this first problem, but also another…
Larger Supply Usually Means Larger Supply of Crap, Too
More content doesn’t necessarily mean more good content. While many of us have celebrated the rise of self-publishing and one-to-many communication, one of the biggest criticisms of the blogosphere is the amount of useless drivel “most” blogs contain. For blogs, tools like Techmeme and Technorati have made displaying and finding the good stuff a little easier. Wisdom-of-crowds tools like Digg and Reddit have tried to do the same for news and other informative content, but the signal-to-noise ratio seems to be getting worse.
I’ve written before about getting more signal from noise using 3rd-party mashup tools. As the following trends increase…
- the supply of content growing
- more content being put into machine-readable format
- improving tools for human-guided(but not operated) quality refinement
…I’ve become convinced that this is one of the biggest opportunities for businesses to offer services to others, by drawing value that was previously inaccessible from existing content, like making clothes from cotton.
For example, press releases. PRWeb alone has hundreds of categories for press releases, with between dozens and hundreds of individual releases being published for each category, each day. But which releases are really newsworthy, and which are meaningless publicity efforts? A tool that determined that would be valuable to reporters, industry analysts, and many other kinds of knowledge workers.
Where else do you see potential for drawing out value?
Platform Predictions Coming True - Virtual World Access by Mobile Phones · 02/20/2008
Now you can be in two places at once. One of those places will have to be inside a virtual world, it’s true, but as connections between the virtual and the physical become more numerous, how long until that’s not such a big difference?
When I wrote about the Platforms of the Web, some of the potential connections I explored were between one platform, the mobile web, and another, virtual worlds. The first steps toward exploring those connections have now been taken, as efforts begun earlier than last year are being launched as consumer products.
Vollee Announces App for Second Life on Mobile Phones – InformationWeek’s article, with direct access to Vollee’s Second Life sign-up here.
Comverse Demos Second Life for Java-Enabled Phones – From Reuters. And a video of Second Life on the iPhone from Mobile World Congress.
Second Life on Mobile Phones in Japan – Just before the end of the year, Sun Inc. announced a Second Life mobile viewer, paid for by a monthly fee that also pays for extra features, including a stipend of Linden Dollars, the in-game currency. That link also contains a diagram of how this, and most likely how the other mobile viewers work, which has been translated into English by Nock Forager.
So now we have access. Next step: interaction. View my full post on the future platforms of the web: virtual worlds, the semantic web, the mobile web, and social networks for more ideas on what interactions will become possible.
True Social Software - SNSs of 2010 - Part II · 02/19/2008
The Amish are kicking our ass. They’re building large, complex, multi-use platforms using a process that requires a high level of expertise and many different skill sets, and they launch these platforms in a day. That’s something the we (technologists, tech users, and tech businessmen) still can’t do, in most cases. Why not? Because we are isolated, separated, spread out. Our communication tools have become more advanced, but they’re disconnected from the work processes we use them to discuss. We are delayed by the many small waiting periods that total together, because people aren’t working together, they’re combining the work they do apart. What we need, is true social software.
The Path to True Social Software
A few notes on the above image…
- Seamless Software: “Location-independent”? This means that regardless of what device you’re using at which location, you have access to the software, and all data related to that software, that you own. Over at a friend’s house, or in a co-worker’s cubicle? You can still pull up the same Open Office document/Photoshop image you were working on earlier at home. And when you get back home, any changes you made while at other locations are intact.
- Seamless Software: “Smart Syncing”? You work on a document online, then some more while offline, and perhaps even some more online at another location, before the earlier offline work has been incorporated. How does the software sync these three versions correctly?
- Each instance should have timestamped logs, so that the software can create a timeline of which changes were made when, and try to reconcile different versions based upon the order in which changes were made.
- After a certain number of times using the software, it should understand your workflow and preferences based upon stored behavioral data, helping it to understand the likelihood of your intended end result for things like formatting, positioning, paragraph length, etc.
- Easy reversion/reconciliation display. The software notifies you if it’s reconciled multiple versions with significant differences. It displays what changes were made in which areas, thanks to storing data for changes in discrete chunks, and offers you easy options for reverting to a specific version, or only reconciling specific parts of each version.
- XFN/FOAF? These are two different standards for making your relationships machine-readable online. They’re also the two standards being used in Google’s Social Graph API.
What Does True Social Software Do?
True social software rejects the premise that software is for a person, and opens up the possibilities of software made for multiple people. It can accept data you offer it about your social network, or create new connections based on your use of the software. Some examples:
- Software, games for example, that search your network for friends who have indicated they want to let friends know they also own this software.
- Real-time chat and collaboration features for everything from word processing to image editing to software development. Multiple “network profiles” allow you to transition between co-workers, friends, and location-based networks, as well as adding/removing access to individuals at any time.
- On-the-fly file sharing networks for music playlists, document templates, Photoshop brushes, game maps, program plug-ins, and much more.
The benefits of this are huge. It improves the accessibility of information, increases collaboration, improves workflow, and frees up your time to focus on creating.
Social Networking Services and Software
While eventually these kind of integrated social features will be standard, understood, and expected, at first it will be in both software companies and SNSs’ interests to use existing SNSs as the method of display and connection between owners of specific software. SNSs have already made the leap from being a social listing and communication tool to platforms for applications. While those applications are currently merely games, small utilities, or connections to larger services, they will evolve and make more full use of the social platform they are built upon.
Part I of my Social Networking Services of 2010 series was about reviews and recommendation integration… done right.
What true social software application would you most like to see?
