The Future of Social Objects - SNSs of 2010 - Part III · 06/18/2008
Social objects are the vital concept for online communities. They are the focal point of the interaction, discussion, and sometimes even connection between users. I touched on their role in Social Network Strategy for Web Services. Now I want to briefly highlight a few trends involving social objects and the evolution of social network platforms.
Synchronous Socializing
So far, most interaction around social objects has been asynchronous: I post a comment about a video, you see it and respond later. Soon, social network services will offer the ability to simultaneously communicate while viewing pieces of digital content. Creating a conversation is very powerful; it’s the difference between exchanging recipes, and actually cooking together.
Facebook is an SNS that’s already taken the first step, providing a site-wide Facebook chat utility. What’s lacking (for now) in the chat client is an awareness of context. I can already instant message a friend a Facebook photo link through any one of a dozen IM clients; but only Facebook’s client can have an awareness of: a) what content on Facebook I’m viewing, b) my network (as it relates to that content), and c) the network of the content owner.
There are dozens of potential applications for synchronous socializing around social objects. A few:
- TV/Online Video. Hulu + SNS-enabled chat = a winning web TV platform.
- Music. Not listening by itself, but joint music discovery. This would be killer for MySpace, Last.fm, or web radio stations.
- Web browsing. There have been plenty of attempts to do this from scratch, but the social- and interest-based context a SNS can provide makes it much more feasible.
Outside Their Own Backyard
As user adoption rates for SNSs slow, they’ll need to expand their usefulness to attract new users. That doesn’t mean adding new features Swiss army style, but increasing the utility of their platform for their particular social object(s). Recognizing and aggregating objects from outside the site, and connecting to other services related to those objects is a key way of doing so.
Partially, that means the same kind of import options, and B2B partnerships other tech companies/services have done for years, but that SNSs haven’t seen a need for yet. The more innovative part is becoming the kind of semantic creator I talked about in How the Semantic Web Will & Won’t Work, and providing useful tools for working with interacting with external objects.
Costs of Content Create New Clouds
For many SNSs, social objects aren’t a specific type of information or interest, but an actual piece of digital content. In these cases, as SNSs grow, their infrastructure needs will also grow. Digital media is exploding in any case, but the rise of persistent communities around pieces of media create the opportunity for improved storage and distribution networks. I would not be surprised to see SNS platforms also operate as content delivery networks, either as a traditional CDN, or through a peer-to-peer solution that doubles synchronous socializing with distributed content delivery.
The community dynamics around social networks and online interaction are still being studied, even as the technology making them possible evolves. It’s an exciting area to watch, and an even more exciting area to be a pioneer in, with News Armada. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the online communities of the future.
How the Semantic Web Will & Won't Work · 05/28/2008
People, places, events; our browsers (and other machines) should be able to recognize these things as easily as you and I can. That’s the promise of the semantic web. But users are not the ones who will make the semantic web work. Microformats extend existing XHTML tags to put human-readable information into machine-parsable form (<span class="location">Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA</span>). But as simple of a solution as that is, it will never have mainstream appeal.
Unlike text-formatting XHTML tags & classes like <strong> or <blockquote>, data-formatting XHTML tags have no immediate visible effect on their contents. Can you tell the difference between:
and:
Jay Neely
Boston, MA
? Because of this, users have no reason to ever remember to format their information with machine-readable tags. Even a rich-text-editing-like interface isn’t that helpful, because users lack a reason to want to make their data machine-readable. Only techies and smart business people care about that; for everyone else, human-readable is good enough. People write for people, not machines. So services will have to write for services.
Semantic Sources
We already have our information put into semantic form on a regular basis. Every time we type our name into a textfield created for that purpose, the machines of at least one service (Facebook, Yahoo! Mail, Wachovia) store that not just as a bit of text, but text identified specifically as our name. Not just our names, but often our addresses, our interests, our friends, our job titles, and many other kinds of information. Data silos have existed for ages, of course; but giving the semantic web at large access to data silos is a key step forward in making semantic tools useful — just as key, if not more so, than collecting data from the distributed web.
Not only is that data all in a central location for easy access, it’s often the kind of data we don’t explicitly state in our natural usage of the rest of the web. How often do you write on your blog or in an IM, “I live in Boston, MA. My interests are coffee, technology, startups, and communications. My relationship status is single, my height is 5’8”, and my eye color varies between blue and green”? (Which reminds me, I really need to increase the female demographic of my readership.)
Finally, access to data silos is as important as access to distribute data because data silos are where the majority of people are (and will be for the foreseeable future). There are only 165,700,000 sites in existence, whereas Facebook alone has over 70 million active users (and Facebook gets 1/4th the traffic Yahoo! does). The majority of people’s online presences will be through a centralized service, rather than their own site.
Semantic Creators
But, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any value in all of the data available on the distributed web. After all, even just a few sites can put out a lot of content. But for the reasons outlined above, most of these sites won’t be putting their own content into a semantic format. That’s where semantic creators come in.
Data scraping is as simple as understanding the common format a specific type of data usually is put in (myname@mydomain.com or 555-555-5555), and having a web-crawler find that information, extract it, and put it into the desired markup or database entry fields. As natural language processing advances, we’ll start seeing more services that recognize the kind of information I expressed explicitly above (interests, relationship status, etc.), even when it’s only expressed implicitly.
Those kind of services will operate either constantly, or on-demand. They will be the middlemen between semantic tools and the rest of the web, collecting all of the information we put out, and putting it into a machine-readable format services can use (and changing it from the format one service uses to the format another service prefers, until semantic markup becomes more standardized).
Semantic Tools
So we have all that information in machine-readable format; great! Now what can we do with it? We can:
- Find it. Search, bookmarking, related-items, context, area-specific…
- Combine it. Mashups – filter, visualize, correlate, advertise, etc.
- Integrate it. One-click additions of events, contact info, preferences, licensing information, etc. into the applications you use every day.
- Aggregate it. See all of the events for a certain category happening within your city. Discover the most-talked-about TV show amongst your friends. Find all Creative Commons licensed podcasts available for remixing.
The possibilities for users to enhance their web experience with semantic data are endless. But it’s up to developers to create the services that give them that chance.
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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 to the average eye.
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?
