Experience Planner

It’s not like this diagram does anything, so to speak, it just gives you a way of describing social features, and it serves as a reminder of the social network attributes you should consider when designing social software. Wodtke created an expanded version that includes some attributes she considers missing from this honeycomb, which hopefully I’ll be able to share later, along with an expanded description of the attributes.

One of the presenters (Wodtke, I think) made a point about how, when you’re designing a social network, you don’t need to “own” the content your users create — you just need to aggregate it in a way that’s useful. For example, if your users already have blogs, maybe you just want to search that content for certain tags and aggregate the posts in a way that’s useful.

The presenters often hit on a similar idea: when designing social networks, open is good. Users are tired of entering in all their personal information, building their network of friends, and then having all that data locked inside your application. We need to build networks that allow data portability (through RSS, APIs, microformats, etc.) if we want to provide a product that’s easy to use from beginning to end and integrates with users’ whole digital life.

The phrase “trust and monitor” describes a good approach to maintaining editorial control over a social network. “Trust” means you assume your users are not criminals who all want to break the rules or game the system. “Monitor” means you still do your due diligence to make sure offensive content doesn’t crop up.

This stands as a recommendation for our corporate clients who often want to keep an iron fist around anything social on their websites.

Near the end of the session, we talked about the problem of the “cold start”, which is when you build a social network, but nobody’s there. And nobody’s going to come until there are people there. Catch-22.

We talked about 2 ways of overcoming that problem. First is having content or functionality that’s valuable even if nobody is there. But in cases where the site isn’t meant to have its own content, the only real solution is to start the group yourself. You join the social network and get your friends to come, and get them to bring their friends. Or, if not you, then a chosen community manager. The idea is you have to start at home. 

There was an interesting conversation about the right size for a group online. We talked about Dunbar’s number, and how that doesn’t directly apply to web experiences because the social information you would normally need to keep in your head can instead be kept on the computer. But we also talked about how “scale kills conversation”, meaning as groups get larger, the conversation becomes less meaningful.

At work, we’ve been discussing this issue for an upcoming social network, but I’m not sure today’s session really helped me figure out an answer. Does anyone really think there’s a “right” size for online groups? Or does it depend on the situation?