How do you bootstrap your social site if you’re targeting a group that doesn’t yet use software (or doesn’t seem interested in using software)? While software designers can often see how useful their tool can be, normal users aren’t so prescient. How do you get them to see the value in your software?

Eric DeLabar brings up this question in response to my post on the power of niche social network sites last week:

“I’ve always had a problem wrapping my head around this exact topic. Having mainly technical friends getting my circle of friends to try out a new website is simple, especially if it’s of a technical nature. However, my next largest circle of friends are from our local community theatre. As a whole we could really use a niche site for communicating with other community theatre groups, however most of our members really aren’t all that interested in social networking or in most cases the web in general. I don’t know if this is localized or just community theatre in general, but I haven’t been able to find anything similar.

It seems like a perfect niche, but where do I find an audience to bootstrap it?”

Eric’s situation is a great example of what a lot of software designers are dealing with.

Leverage Existing Motivation

The key is to swim with the tide, not against it, by leveraging existing motivation.

Notice how Eric wrote that the theatre folks aren’t interested in “social networking”. This is normal…most people don’t have a social networking problem.

So where is the existing motivation? Well, the folks in your community theatre group *are* motivated to be better at theatre, to put on better shows, to run better productions. That’s where Eric needs to focus…on how the social software can make them better at theatre.

People don’t want to be good at software. They want to be good at fun things like acting, writing, and ultimate frisbee.

In other words, Eric needs to answer the question: “How does my software make them better at what they already love to do?”. Does it allow them to put on better shows? Does it allow them to get more people into the theatre by cross-promoting with other theatres? Does it put their show on more community calendars? Does it allow producers better access to shared resources? (I really have no idea what the real benefits would be, but the point is that Eric needs to know what these details are)

Once you identify the areas where the software can improve the theatre folks life, you’ll have a much easier time convincing them to give it a shot. So in their mind they won’t be using “social network software”, they’ll be using a tool to help them be a better theatre group.

This is an unfortunate side-effect of the social networking craze. We have new words that we’re using to communicate among those of us who design the software, but for the vast majority of folks who will actually use the software, the terms don’t mean very much. So while you may understand what I mean by “niche social network”, the people actually in the niche social network think of themselves as performers, actors, or what-have-you.

Kathy Sierra has a great post on this topic: Keeping users engaged. In this long post (definitely worth reading) she talks about how to make things interesting for people by engaging and challenging them on multiple levels. If what you’re building isn’t interesting in itself (Kathy uses the example of garbage bags), you need to create a challenging environment around that thing. (I don’t think theatre has this problem, but other niche sites might)

Anyway, there isn’t always a great answer to the question: “how does my software make people better at what they’re passionate about?” If you can’t answer this question, your software is facing an uphill battle for acceptance.

But most of the time there is existing motivation. Everybody wants to be better, even if they don’t articulate it as such. Bootstrapping niche social networks is about finding and leveraging that motivation, while speaking in terms people already understand.

Ravelry.com is a social network site for the “knit and crochet community”.

A site for knitters, you ask? What will they think of next…a site for dog owners?

The reason why Revelry.com and other niche sites seem so alien is because they support communities that we often don’t see because we don’t participate in them. My wife is a knitter, and I have often been struck at how often, when I visit a yarn shop with her, somewhere in the back there is a group of women (almost always women) sitting round a circle in rocking chairs chatting and knitting. While knitters and crocheters have likely always gotten together as a community, they usually do so in some quiet environment where non-knitters won’t bother them.

Knitting groups are a classic third place, just like the barbershop or pub.

The simple exposure of creating a web site dedicated to these communities comes across as odd or unecessary because to people outside the community it might be their first exposure to it. Knitters are a community?, we ask. That’s exactly the point of niche communities. They aren’t for everyone, and they are often focused on a very specific activity.

But to the people inside that community, niche social sites are as natural as any software (if software can be natural). So as software infects all parts of our lifestyles, so it will support our various activities, no matter how odd or niche they are.

A few months back Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb wrote a bullish article on niche social networks in The Nearly Never Ending Market for Niche Social Networks and while the points Marshall makes are spot on, I think there is a bigger overarching opportunity for these sites.

Marshall says:

“What is a social network? Typically, it’s just a website that offers users a profile page, the ability to publish to the web, to add other users as friends and to send user-to-user messages, or sitemail.”

This is the generic view of a social network and it fits our perceptions of what they are. But for niche sites, the opportunity isn’t just connecting the people together, the opportunity is making them better at the activity they’re doing.

My favorite example is PatientsLikeMe.com, which was pointed out to me by Adam Darowski in response to an earlier post I wrote: Sermo a sign of a larger trend toward specialized social networks. PatientsLikeMe.com is a site that supports people with diseases such as ALS, AIDS/HIV, multiple schlerosis, and OCD.

Now, PatientsLikeMe is a great connecting tool, helping people communicate and support each other while living with the disease. But while that’s great, and is why forums and message boards are such amazing tools, the site’s value actually goes way beyond it, as it allows people to record their symptoms and match them with the medication they’re taking. Not only does this allow people to track what they’ve done, the site can help compare people’s experiences.

This is where PatientsLikeMe is redefining medicine. Imagine going to a doctor who doesn’t have a cure for your disease. He or she will try some number of medications to help alleviate your symptoms…they might increase your dose or try a new drug…but they’re basically throwing darts…they don’t know the best course of action. What PatientsLikeMe does is to help find what’s working best for everyone in the community…thereby treating the group’s experience as real research data.

So, patients are able to watch each other and see what the best course of action might be, or at least find out what seems to be working for others at the moment. This is incredibly powerful, as it allows the community to come up with better treatments than they had before!

If you haven’t read it, please read the fabulous New York Times piece on PatientsLikeMe: Practicing Patients.

PatientsLikeMe, Ravelry, and Dogster demonstrate the power of niche communities. It’s not just improved communication, it’s improved action. The value targeted, focused software can have is astounding…even as the novelty of the web has long since worn off.

Boston Web Studio: Marc Amos, whom I met through local meetups, has taken the plunge and is now an independent web designer/developer specializing in creating attractive, modern, accessible web sites that appeal to the visitors your business needs to reach. Congrats, Marc! Best of luck with your new venture.

Social Media for Social Change: Michelle Riggen-Ransom (with whom I had a marathon argument at SXSW with about whether altruism exists) has also taken the plunge and started a blog on a topic near and dear to my heart: exploring how technology can promote good in the world. Looking forward to it, Michelle!

By the way, I must say that I think it’s great that Marc and Michelle have stepped out and done that thing they have been thinking about for the longest time. My guess is that there are lots of people who have a company they want to start, a blog they want to write, or some other project they’ve been thinking about but have, for one reason or another, not yet done. I know, I’ve been there myself. But there really is no time like the present, and if something isn’t worth doing right now it’s probably not worth doing at all.

So, just do that thing. No excuses. No regrets. It will lead somewhere interesting. I promise.

The three studies were done by respected marketing research companies: Forrester, Edelman, and Pollara. They all agree on the same thing: that bloggers just don’t elicit much trust when compared to other sources of information.

I can’t help but think that these studies weighted the questions…oh just a little bit. I mean, who would trust someone based solely on the fact that they happen to write a blog? Does merely creating a blogger account and whipping out a few blog posts make one a trusted authority on…anything? Of course not.

It’s kind of like asking: “Who do you trust more: a family member or someone who can use wordpress?”. The question just doesn’t teach us anything new. So the reason why people don’t trust “bloggers” in the context of these studies is because they don’t know who those bloggers are.

Now, Jeremiah’s point was to push back on the unfortunate conventional wisdom that merely writing a blog means you’re having an authentic conversation with an audience. This focus on technology over interaction is the problem with social media marketing, and Jeremiah was right to push back on that. But I don’t believe that bloggers don’t have trust. Of course bloggers have some level of trust. The people who trust them are their audience. (I’m sure Jeremiah sure hopes that his audience trusts him)

So, if instead of asking a meaningless question these studies asked “Do you trust bloggers who you read regularly/subscribe to?” most people would answer that they do. But that’s not what the studies asked…they asked about a faceless, nameless, random blogger. Not only is this a poor question, but it puts the entire studies under a shadow of doubt. It’s almost as if the question were asked just so that the researchers could come to that conclusion.

What bloggers don’t have, and what the studies might show, is automatic trust. Joe Blogger doesn’t automatically have permission to talk to you simply because he knows how to use Wordpress. Blogging is about relationships, like most of life, and you need to earn any respect and permission you get.

There are few shortcuts here. But let’s not swing the pendulum completely the other way and suggest that bloggers aren’t trusted at all. The reality is that you have to prove yourself with each action, over time, building up trust and experience slowly, steadily. If it were any other way, then the word trust wouldn’t mean anything.

Last August, when I decided to go out on my own and start Bokardo Design, I also began writing a book on a new aspect of design that I called “social design”. Social design was the term I used when thinking about and designing for the social interactions between people using software. It was clear to me that web sites and applications were “going social”, meaning that they were realizing that improving the interactions between their audience was key to their ongoing success, not just having conversations with the audience themselves. I decided to write a book about this area, with a focus on tying social psychology research with actual design practice.

The result is Designing for the Social Web, now available from New Riders and other merchants such as Amazon. The book is 200 pages long, chock-full of screenshots of interfaces, and peppered with social psychology tidbits.

Here’s the chapter outline:

1. The Rise of the Social Web
2. A Framework for Social Web Design
3. Authentic Conversations
4. Design for Sign-up
5. Design for Ongoing Participation
6. Design for Collective Intelligence
7. Design for Sharing
8. The Funnel Analysis

In the coming days I’ll be exploring the book in-depth, going through the most important factors in social design, giving away free chapters, and publishing bits that I wrote after the book which could have easily been included in it.

I see this book as just the beginning of the conversation. The fields of design and psychology are so vast, we can’t possibly imagine the infinite ways they’ll inform each other going forward.

In the meantime, enjoy the book!

Here are the details:

Date: Thursday, April 17, 2008
Place: The Grog (see map)
Start: ~6-7pm
Ends: ~9-10pm

See the Facebook group or Upcoming page.

By the way, at this meeting we’ll be setting the date for the next one, so that we can get the word out as early as possible.

Travel tips:

• By Car: Downtown Newburyport is ~3 miles off of Interstate 95, so it’s very easy to find and fast to get into/out of by car. (this ain’t the city)
• Commuter Rail: Newburyport is at the end of the commuter rail…if we have any folks coming on the 5:36 or the 6:15 we’ll do a pick up (the train station is about a mile away from the pub) (commuter rail schedule)

If you have any questions/comments/concerns, feel free to contact me.

View Larger Map

Two weeks ago Google dropped this site from their search results because of the number of spam links I had on my pages. I did not put them there, of course, and I tried multiple times to get rid of them, but hackers kept coming back to the site and thoughtfully adding them back again.

It turns out that they were the result of someone exploiting a well-known Wordpress hack. Hackers were literally overwriting php scripts on my web server so that when people requested pages, tons of spam links were inserted into the result. Several people told me that this was happening, so I diligently overwrote the files in question (header.php, footer.php). Then, the next day someone else would tell me that it was happening (again), and I would fix it (again). I want to thank everyone who helped out…I truly appreciate you letting me know when this was occurring.

So then when Google crawled the site, they assumed I was a spam site and de-listed me. Literally overnight, I’m losing 300-400 visits per day. If you search on “Joshua Porter” or “bokardo”, you will not find this site. I’ve been the top link for those two terms for years.

From a technical standpoint, this is quite boring. But from a social design standpoint, the situation is quite interesting.

Obviously, if I met these hackers in real life, I would have choice words for them. Among other things, I would ask them to stop. And, if their identities were known, their behavior would also likely stop. Not just because of any warning or threat I could come up with, but because they would feel pressure from society to stop. Social norms would moderate their behavior better than anything I could do.

This is how behavior normally works. Most people don’t act out badly because of fear of getting caught and punished…although that certainly has an effect. Most people behave well because of how they’ll be treated afterward by society when they do something bad. The effect of our social groups is as strong as any threat of punishment.

In order to design software where people behave, the best practice is to tie identity to behavior. Once these two things are known, and related to each other, then social norms can kick in.

My question: if everything we do on the web is recorded somewhere…why can’t this sort of thing be stopped? I’m sure it’s a very small population of people who are doing this…why can’t someone reverse engineer the request to my web server and find out where it came from? Is that possible?

My guess is that it is possible, but involved. It probably gets done when a serious crime is committed, but not when the pain is seeing some spam links or getting de-indexed from Google. I would probably have to pay someone to do it.

Also, I would presume that other people using Wordpress are also having this problem. Couldn’t we set up a tracking system (much like a bug-tracking system) that catalogues these breaches? Then we would see how widespread they are, and we might gain some momentum in combatting them. Maybe the perpetrators are a small group or a small number of individuals?

At this point, however, I’m not sure what I can do. I’ve upgraded to the latest Wordpress, and that seems to have stemmed the flow of hacks temporarily. But this is going to happen again and again. Do I simply get into an arms race with the hackers and hope that I can outpace them?

How can I be sure that Google is even going to return to the site? Perhaps they’ve seen spam so long on my site that it’s now blacklisted?

Anyway, I think the root of this problem is social as much as technological. The available solutions, however, seem mostly technological. Any advice/thoughts you have on the matter would be greatly appreciated.

Own Your Identity

I’m writing this blog along with web-maven Brian Oberkirch and polar explorer turned web revolutionary Tony Haile. We’re just getting started, but our goal is to lead a discussion on the ins and outs of online identity, tackling such questions as:

• What does it mean to own one’s identity online?
• What building blocks do we need in place to help achieve identity ownership?
• What practices are social networks doing that help (or hurt) personal identity online?
• How can we work with social networks to build a better web?
• What are the real-world problems that normal folks are dealing with concerning identity?

Our eventual hope is that by participating in this discussion and really driving it forward, we’ll all learn how to build software that helps us own our identity.

The Society, if you’re not familiar, is run by Dan Cederholm and Ethan Marcotte, two Boston-area web designers I’ve admired for a long time. So I was extremely honored when they asked me to speak. Here are some write-ups of the event: (Ethan, Dan, Filament Group)

For my talk, I picked something I’ve never talked about before: web craftsmanship. I chose this topic because I’ve been thinking a lot more about it since going out on my own last August. I also consider both Dan and Ethan craftsmen, obsessed with doing quality work vs. gaining notoriety or getting rich. So I thought it would be a good fit for the audience as well.

Ethan started the show with an excellent talk about liquid layouts. Dan followed with an equally great talk on em-based grids. Scott Jehl then talked about progressive enhancement. Funny thing, several people I spoke with said that they learned more from these three talks about building state-of-the-art web sites than they did at SXSW…

Here is my slide deck:

| View | Upload your own

The event was hosted by the fine folks at the Filament Group, who among other things created the baby-name choosing-site Nymbler. (My wife and I used this site when we picked out our kid’s name). Anyway, the Filament Group has started a blog called The Lab), where they archive some of the interesting work they’re doing. I wish more design shops would expose their thinking in this way…it really helps to get an idea of how their designers think and shows indirectly what values they have.

The event was also sponsored in part by Adobe, who gave away two copies of CS3! This suggests to me that these meetups are not simply gatherings in which to drink beer and maybe talk a bit about design…but they are part of the fabric of the design community…since designers often work on their own there isn’t a common space to gather regularly. The Society, and our newly-formed North Shore Meetup group, in my mind, are fulfilling the needs of the Third Place in this way.

Several folks have posted pictures of the event. Here is an action shot of me by Jennifer Bergman. Thanks, Jen!

If you have any questions about the slides or any of the quotes in them, drop me a line.

Here are the details:

Date: Thursday, March 20, 2008
Place: The Grog (see map)
Start: ~6-7pm
Ends: ~9-10pm

See the Facebook group

Travel tips:

• By Car: Downtown Newburyport is ~3 miles off of Interstate 95, so it’s very easy to find and fast to get into/out of by car. (this ain’t the city)
• Commuter Rail: Newburyport is at the end of the commuter rail…if we have any folks coming on the 5:36 or the 6:15 we’ll do a pick up (the train station is about a mile away from the pub) (commuter rail schedule)

If you have any questions/comments/concerns, feel free to contact me.

View Larger Map

But this year the content of SXSW was all about “social” as well. Social media, social marketing, social design. While I’m excited by this development, as it’s right up my alley, I’m also troubled by a remarkable trend: we’re still having relatively early discussions about what it means to listen to your customers/audience/passionate people.

In the wave of social panels and talks at SXSW, the term social media kept coming up again and again. Social media, it seems, is about talking to your customers. While this doesn’t seem to be a revelation, it almost assuredly is for a large number of companies and organizations out there, as that’s what almost all of the conversation is about. The takeaway from many panels was, over and over, “Listen to your customers”!!!

This became clear to me as I walked into a party with Freshbooks CEO Mike McDerment. Mike and I have communicated online for a while, and we both have very similar thoughts about engaging with the people who use your software and having conversations with them. Mike has done this amazingly well through the Freshbooks blog, as well as the feedback mechanisms of the Freshbooks application.

Mike and I were asked to interview for a podcast put on by MZinga. One of the questions I received was about what companies can do if they want to start a conversation with their customers. I replied that they’re already having a conversation with their customers, even if it’s a broken one and even if it’s offline.

Jim Storer, whom I was glad to meet after reading his work for a while, paraphrased my answer by saying something like: “So, social media is just another channel”.

Now, while I understand that Jim knows what he’s talking about and is deeply immersed in social media, the term “channel” brought a flood of thoughts back into my head about the central argument of the Cluetrain Manifesto. I immediately recognized my overall frustration I was experiencing with the panels at SXSW. The problem, I think, is that while everyone recognizes the need to talk to their customers (the people who make them successful), they (we) continue to use terminology that, in my mind, degrades the relationship.

Part of the central argument of The Cluetrain Manifesto, whose theme is that markets are conversations, is that we need to use the right terminology while framing any discussion that involves talking with people. This means that we don’t use terms like “consumers”, “prospects”, “leads”, or “channel”. Instead, we use the term “people” as much as possible.

But what we see over and over, especially from the “social media” crowd, is a continuation of archaic corporate verbiage that sets up a distance between the two parties that need to have a conversation. While Jim and I would certainly agree on lots of things, probably most things, and while I understand that he’s talking in the language of the people he does business with, I can’t help but think that the long term effect of using “channel”, etc. is distancing, not attracting.

So there were lots of panels that were directed at, as my friend Christina says, “those who have yet to board the Cluetrain”. Unfortunately, I think she’s right.

And, by the way, the Cluetrain is now approximately a decade old…

I’m proud to say that the panel which I was a part of, the Social Design Strategies panel, assumed people were on the Cluetrain and we avoided getting into the same discussion that many panels ended up with. Our focus was on designing interfaces and social systems that support that important communication, not about arguing the beginning point.

That said, if there is a continued need to revisit the Cluetrain, I’m certainly all for it. We need to break down any and all barriers between people in the marketplace, and if those barriers still exist, the least we can do is start to weed out the language that serves to perpetuate them.

A couple of years ago I would not have written this blog post, this is somewhat of a subtle argument…I’m really only arguing about words, right? How can the terminology affect the practice?

Well, if there is anything that can subvert the activity of people without them knowing, it’s the exactness of the words we use to have conversations. So I urge everyone who has not read it (or not read it recently) to go out and read the Cluetrain. Each time I read it there is a new revelation…it’s certainly one of the defining books of the current generation.

Needless to say, I’m thinking long and hard about panels and discussions for next year’s SXSW. I would love to hear your input and thoughts on that matter, as I fear we have a long way to go before we can claim that everyone is aboard the Cluetrain.

My co-panelists are awesome designers: Emily Chang and Max Keisler of Ideacodes, and Daniel Burka, creative director at Digg. Thank you Emily for organizing the panel!

This is the official description of the panel:

“Now that social networks are pervasive and quickly becoming a regular feature set, designers need to understand the dynamics of creating experiences that encourage social behavior and public expression, while giving individuals a sense of privacy, personal gain, and ownership. This session will take an in-depth look at the principles and practices of social design. How do you create a symbiotic relationship between people and data that maximizes discovery, game-play, connections, and communication? We’ll examine a breadth of examples and explore their pros and cons. Then, we’ll take a look into the future of what’s possible. You’ll hear firsthand from a group of designers who do this every day.”

Since we had to write out that description a while ago, it’s not totally accurate. So here’s what we’re actually doing:

Each of us is going to tackle a really hard problem in social design. We’ll talk about the problem and some strategies for solving it, pointing to real-world screen flows and interfaces. These are not challenges you’ve never heard of. They are challenges that affect everyone building social sites. Examples of challenges might be: How to add an element of fun to your social web app, How to prevent gaming [Daniel can take that one :)], How to roll out features that straddle the privacy line, and How to measure your success.

We’re really trying to focus on providing a solid set of practical techniques to overcoming widespread, hard problems. My experience with SXSW in the past has been that talks are all over the place in terms of being useful…if there is one thing we’re trying to do it’s describe useful, practical techniques to overcome these problems.

The social design strategy panel is Sunday morning at 10am.

Hope to see you there!

“leverage social tools to create buzz and demand for your product”.

I don’t know exactly what was meant by this, but it sounds like causation: that if you use social tools to talk to your customers then you’ll increase buzz and demand.

I’ve seen other recommendations like this by people calling themselves “social media marketers”. These folks are hired to use social tools to improve relationships with customers. I know some really great social media marketers, but still this claim seems to be creeping into the conventional wisdom of the field.

But people who are considering hiring social media marketers need to know that there is more to it than this.

Giving people a platform for expression doesn’t necessarily create buzz and demand. It only amplifies what the opinion was in the first place.

In other words, if you give people a platform for expression and:

• If your product sucks, the resulting conversation will be about how much it sucks.
• If your product is great, the resulting conversation will be about how great it is.

In other words, it’s better to think of social media tools as amplifying customer opinion rather than improving it.

You can’t simply set up social media tools and expect your business to get better. You have to change your business for your business to get better.

However, even if your product sucks social media tools can help you, because they give you the choice to make your business better.

You can:

1. Listen to the feedback (positive or negative), engage with those people, and improve your product/service.
2. Ignore the feedback, keeping your product/service the same, and continue not improving.

Actually, there is a third choice. If you really don’t want to be in business, you can disagree with the feedback.

Finally, if you take the first choice and choose to engage and improve, you will start to realize a sort of causation because at that point people will start to recognize that you give a damn. And since companies that give a damn are so rare, your customers will go tell their friends about it.

That’s the promise of social media marketing…but it happens as a result of having a commitment to improvement, not simply because you implement social media tools.

Why is this so? Why is it that Google monetizes so well on Search while having a hard time on social properties? Given an equal amount of views on Google vs. MySpace, shouldn’t they be able to get about the same number of click-throughs and thus ad revenue?

The difference, of course, is that when people go to Google, they’re actively looking for something. That something isn’t on Google. They are performing a search activity. Thus their task will be to click on a link that seems to promise what it is they’re looking for. It may be the organic results, or it may be an ad that seems close to what they want.

When people are on MySpace, the activity they’re doing isn’t search. It’s something akin to “hanging out” or “networking”. Their task is almost the opposite of search. They are already on the site they want to be on. They don’t need to click on links to take them where they want to go.

In other words, the context is entirely different. When you’re in search mode, you are playing by different rules.

Social ads don’t work as well because people are being social, not searching for something.

Advertisements live along a spectrum that goes from “irrelevant and distracting” to “relevant and interesting”. When ads are well-placed, they actually serve to help the user find what they’re looking for, or they’re interesting enough to grab the person’s attention away from whatever else they were doing. It would seem that this is what social ads have to do…they have to be interesting enough to get you away from socializing. Or, perhaps they are simply for brand-building purposes…you see the brand and it has a subconscious effect…you don’t change what you were doing but the brand is somehow strengthened in your mind from the ad impression.

Here’s a question: What if the activity you’re doing actually does determine your willingness to click on ads? This is what is being suggested by the early returns on ads in social networks. If this is so, then we can start by making a list of activities in which it would make sense that people are most accepting of ads.

• Searching
• Shopping
• Traveling

These activities all share something in common. People are on the move, and are actively looking for products and services to help them along their way.

There is a reason why Google wants super short time-per-visit and Facebook wants super long time-per-visit. It’s because the services support two completely different activities. Google wants a tremendous number of incredibly short visits. They want you to find good results immediately and leave the site. Facebook wants you to stay forever.

A fundamental problem with monetizing social sites is that the very reason why they have long time-on-site that makes them less effective places for advertising. They have provided a comfortable third place…people are already where they want to be!

Social network audiences are less like searchers and more like homebodies. The ads that will work best aren’t those where people have to leave the site, but those which allow you to stay and keep hanging out. But trivial things like games and contests can only be novel for so long…

In addition, since we are dealing with social capital as much as economic capital, the advertisements don’t make as much sense. Imagine if every time you talked with your friends they were trying to sell you something. They wouldn’t last long as your friend.

Facebook, in particular, is pushing the envelope here, as well they should, and hopefully learning a lot along the way. I hope, also, that we can learn from what they’re doing. My big takeaway so far is a renewed focus on the activity at hand. What activities people are engaging in says as much about their behavior as their innate constitution.

This might also suggest why Yahoo and Microsoft have a harder time monetizing their ads on their various properties. They’re trying to monetize ads on Mail, Groups, and other places where people are doing non-search activities. That’s why Google continues to rule the roost, because they have the most searchers. People, when they want to search for something, go to Google. Google = Search.

No matter how well Microsoft thinks it can monetize Yahoo’s non-search properties, it won’t be able to do as well as if it had more searchers coming to its site. However, Yahoo does have some interesting travel properties, so those should provide better results. I’m sure that these companies know down to the nano-percentages which types of properties work and which don’t. I would bet that it all depends on the context of use within those properties.

In terms of design, which is our focus, what does this mean? Well, it means that we need to investigate what contexts people are in as they use our web applications. Are they looking for something, or would they use our service as part of the activity of looking for something? Are they primed for ads? If not, then we’re better off providing value in some other way, like increasing productivity, etc.

This simple list also suggests why Google is investing a ton of energy into mobile, because when people are mobile we’re in unfamiliar places with the same old needs. We’re searching not only for our destination, but services that will help us along the way. So that’s why every time you turn around there’s some new quiet feature in Google Maps, because maps and mobile are the future of advertising.