How an over-focus on technology and visual design can hide the real value of social software.

In a fascinating piece on the amazing growth of the photo-sharing site Fotolog, Jason Kottke clearly articulates a growing problem in design:

“Fotolog…relative to Flickr…has changed little in the past couple of years. Fotolog has groups and message boards, but they’re not done as well as Flickr’s and there’s no tags, no APIs, no JavaScript widgets, no “embed this photo on your blog/MySpace”, and no helpful Ajax design elements, all supposedly required elements for a successful site in the Web 2.0 era. Even now, Fotolog’s feature set and design remains planted firmly in Web 1.0 territory.”

How do sites with sub-optimal visual design and technology grow so big and become so successful?

Continue Reading: How to Prevent Valueless Design in Social Web Sites

Tim O’Reilly is returning to the definition he started with: Web 2.0 is the Web as Platform.
This is the definition that got me interested in Web 2.0 in the first place. It makes sense, easily contrasts with “desktop as platform”, and is accurate: we are seeing a tremendous platform move to the Web.
Unfortunately, sometime [...]

Continue Reading: Web as Platform

This past week’s Digg controversy is one in a growing number of incidents that suggest that a small group of users are having an undue influence on the promotion of stories. In response, Digg is changing the way that it handles votes by adding complexity to its ranking algorithm. I think that’s the wrong approach, so here’s another idea: change the actual design of the site…that’s the real problem.

The most recent controversy happened on September 5th, when someone named jesusphreak posted Digg the Rigged?, an in-depth article exposing some of the curious details of recently-popular stories on digg. Many of the stories, jp pointed out, were dugg by members of the Digg Top 30, or the 30 most popular digg members (popular being measured by number of stories submitted that were promoted to the frontpage). The Top 30 includes Digg founder Kevin Rose.

This was not the first time that someone has pointed out this phenomenon. On April 18 of this year Macgyver at ForeverGeek posted Digg Army, which included screenshots of who dugg two recent articles on the site. Each article had the exact same 16 people digging it in the exact same order. Of the first 19, 18 were the same. Included in that list of people was, again, Kevin Rose. ( for an in-depth history see Tony Hung’s excellent: A Brief History of the Digg Controversy)

These incidents, taken together, are more than coincidence…

Continue Reading: Digg’s Design Dilemma

Update: 7 More Reasons Why Web Apps Fail

I’m not one to believe that we’re in a Bubble 2.0 or anything like that (aren’t we always bubbular?), but here are a few ideas about why some of the web apps out there fail.

1. Focus on social instead of personal.
   Following up on my Del.icio.us Lesson post, this is a critical reason why web apps fail. Many apps focus on being the new social killer-app when, in general, people don’t have time to worry about what other people are doing, and will only use software that benefits them personally at every step. You could call this selfishness or laziness, but I would call it optimization. For example, we simply don’t have time to tag things for tagging sake. Instead, we might tag things if we think that it will help us in the future, but adding tags to an app does not a solution make.
2. They solve too many problems, or try to.
   This is when the buzzwords rear their ugly head. If you’ve got a list of problems you’re solving with an application, it stands to reason that you can’t solve any one of them fully. Instead of trying to solve more than one, focus like gangbusters on one problem and really nail it. If you think about the successful web apps out there right now that have garnered impressive mindshare, it should be easy to line up the one problem (or activity) they really get right. Flickr: photos. Del.icio.us: bookmarks. Facebook: college. Myspace: identity. Gmail: email. Plaxo: contacts. Tailrank: news. Etc…
3. They’re about making someone other than the user happy.
   So much focus is on aggregation right now that it is easy to overlook the happiness of users. Many services, such as Technorati Tags or Google Sitemaps, exist solely to make the aggregators happy, and not the user themselves. They sell themselves on incentives that sound like what a movie agent might say to an aspiring actor: “We’ll make you famous, kid. You’ll get found!”. First of all, this is all talk directed at the developer, who is not the user. That’s a huge tip-off right there. Second of all, if the aggregators had their way everyone would be using these formats, which simply dilutes the value for everyone else and only serves to lock the site into some weird relationship with the aggregator. This is not how it should be. That’s why I stopped using those two services ages ago. Instead, focus on adding features that make the user happy, and when that happens everyone else can be happy, too.

Continue Reading: 7 Reasons Why Web Apps Fail

Jonathan Bouttelle has an insightful post about the question that will only be asked more and more:

Flash or Ajax?

It’s easy to assume that Web 2.0 is a technological revolution, with acronyms like RSS, APIs, Ajax, and XML floating around. However, I think though technology has a central role to play, the real revolution isn’t technological, it’s people-based. Web 2.0 is a social revolution.
A common view is that technology drastically changes the way [...]

Continue Reading: A Social Revolution by Modeling Human Behavior

I’m sitting in Hagan River’s session on web applications and something is explicitly clear: developers all over are using Ajax. Last week when I was at Web2Con everyone was using Ajax there, but that was expected because it was all about brand-new, first-time apps.

At UI10, the attendees aren’t working on start-ups. Most are working in entrenched applications for universities, Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and other places that don’t need to be cutting edge. They just need stuff to solidly work. Usable applications are a must.

That’s why I’m surprised that so many people are talking about and using Ajax. In most cases when a new technology comes along, it takes years to get into the mainstream applications. Ajax, it seems, doesn’t fit that model.

A major topic at the Web 2.0 Conference is the web-based office suite. The competition is getting heated, to say the least.
Many companies are throwing their bets into the ring, and several have released word processor type applications recently. One recently one was the minimalist Writeboard, released by the 37signals crew, riding an always [...]

Continue Reading: Web-based Office Competition Heats Up

The following bit emerged out of the What’s in a Tag session at the Web 2.0 Conference.
Closely related to the popularity decay idea is the idea of emergent tags. Emergent tags are those tags that become more popular over time.
The interesting thing about emergent tags is that they’re rare, but hugely valuable.
Why are [...]

Continue Reading: Web2Con: Emergent Tags

In this Era of Interfaces, we have many criss-crossing themes. Among them:

Recommendation Systems are an end goal of Web 2.0 applications. This is done by collaborative filtering over user-supplied data. Examples of interfaces include Del.icio.us Popular, Movielens Movie Recommendations, and iTunes Music Store Top Songs.
More semantic Data Formats. Joe Reger’s new tool highlights what [...]

Continue Reading: Web 2.0 as the Era of Interfaces, Redux