Jason Kottke points to a study in which researchers found evidence that the brain reacts differently to people who seem like us.

This isn’t surprising, of course. We do tend to react differently when we feel like we’re around a like-minded person.

But how can this help inform design?

We already see many features which take advantage of this, such as grouping features, demographic filters, “viewers like you”, and many others. Folks mentioned around the idea of Circles of Relationships.

In addition, many recommendation engines are built on what’s called “person-based collaborative filtering” (see Wikipedia: collaborative filtering). When Netflix figures out what movies to recommend to you, what they’re really doing is assuming that people who have rated like you in the past are the best predictors of future ratings. You can get a sense of this from the “similarity” number that shows up in your friends pages on the site.

However, Amazon’s “people who shopped for this also shopped for” isn’t actually person-based collaborative filtering. They use “item-based” instead, meaning that they collaboratively filter based on what items are purchased at the same time, regardless of who purchased them. (see David’s comment below, he also talked about the negative reaction “people like me” sometimes gets)

In my own research I’ve found that many people read comments, reviews, and other online material and make some judgement of how similar they are to a person. If they are similar, they’ll weigh that person’s opinion much more than others. If they aren’t similar, if the person doesn’t seem to have the same values or appreciations, then we give them less weight.

Do you know of any great examples of a “people like me” feature?

“While I agree that (social media) CAN…(make us more social) How often *DOES* social media lead to actual social interaction, for YOU? …I became less social instead of more social because of the fact that my friends are always at my fingertips. For the sake of this post, I’m defining “social” as actually going somewhere to hang out with friends of mine, IRL. (In Real Life)”

Bill says that because people are always a click away, he actually has become less social (face-to-face).

I’m interested to know if others feel this same way: has social interaction through software had the same effect on you?

And, if so, has the increased social interaction through software been for the better, or for the worse?

The usage of the word is spreading, however, and is now finding its way into web application vernacular. It is called a “lifestream”, “socialstream”, “friendstream”, “contentstream”, among others.

It has come to mean a list of the always-updated items in a system. Here are a few examples:

• Twitter
  The stream in Twitter is the list of latest sms messages from your friends
• Facebook News Feed
  This stream has lots of different types of items, made up of activities like adding friends, joining groups, and adding applications
• RSS readers
  Your RSS reader displays a stream of the latest posts from the blogs you subscribe to
• Del.icio.us Links
  Your list of links submitted to Del.icio.us is a linkstream
• Digg Spy
  The latest items added or dugg in digg

It should be apparent that almost any items updated in real-time can constitute a stream. And therefore a stream can be used in almost any application that people use. The question is: is it useful to see a list of what you’ve done or what you’re friends are doing? In many cases, it is at least interesting, if not useful.

Satisfaction’s Lane Becker suggests (and I think he’s right), that streams are as core to today’s social applications as the checkout sequence was to apps 5 years ago. He says:

‘The “stream” — let’s call it that, because “river” just doesn’t cut it — is, like tagging, one of those canonical, web-native inventions that is already so totally fundamental to inhabiting an online social system that its adoption is inevitable in every app that plans to aggregate people in a collaborative networked setting. The stream is to this round of the web what shopping carts were to the last one. It’ll show up everywhere, but put to very different ends in different places.’

In addition, many apps are starting to tout the stream as an important feature they offer. In a recent post on Mashable, streams are mentioned several times in relation to the newest social startups: 20 Ways To Aggregate Your Social Networking Profiles.

The stream trend is only increasing. Anything you can grab via an API or RSS can be a stream.

And because of this, because it feels like we’re really starting to see the emergence of a new interaction paradigm around streams, I keep hearing Pink Floyd singing “Welcome my son, welcome to the stream”.

Update: read Part II and Part III

In the last several years we’ve seen the rise and fall of many social web applications. While most of our attention gets paid to the hugely successful ones like YouTube and Facebook, we can also learn a lot from those that have failed. Here are some of the common pitfalls that lead to failure when building social web applications.

1) Underestimating The Cold Start Problem

If you build and release your social web site and nobody uses it, you have the cold start problem. This problem affects most social sites, and directly results from designing for the network. The effect of the network is that nodes on the network (web sites) have attention momentum. We pay attention to certain nodes (sites) already, and so if you’re trying to add one to the network then you have to build your own attention momentum over time. This is not easy.

Too often, though, this hurdle is underestimated. The first step is to admit there’s a problem. Say “This is not working. Our early users are not using the site how we want them to”. You would be surprised at how often this doesn’t happen. Instead, what often happens is that more money is pushed into features or marketing, which is precisely the wrong move.

Strong social sites build value one user at a time. If one user finds value, then they’re much more likely to tell others or invite their friends. Strong sites don’t succeed by attracting “markets”, satisfying entire groups of people with a certain feature set. Instead, they succeed on a smaller level, really focusing on individuals and their immediate social network. Then they can branch outward. One strategy in particular is to design for your friends, get the system working well for them, and then release it to a broader audience.

2) Focusing on Too Many Things

I got this email in my inbox the other day from a well-meaning entrepreneur who was building a new social web site:

“(our site) aims to combine the best elements of Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon, as a mechanism of social discovery and personal expression – but with the unique element of real-time.”

I get so many of these it’s not funny. This is a clear case of focusing on too many things. If you can’t describe what your site does with a single, clear idea then you’re trying to do too much. In addition, a comparison to other sites in this way is a bad idea, because they’ve already beat you. They already have a strong brand while you have a weak one.

The ease of adding social features makes overload likely. Development frameworks make adding friends, tags, profiles, blogs, or a host of other social features much easier than it was even a couple years ago. This is the opposite to a barrier to entry, where the hard part is building something at all. Instead, the ease of adding social features is a barrier to focus. If you have every feature under the sun you’re probably not focused as well as you could be.

So focus on one thing that isn’t being addressed. It can’t be something like “the unique element of real-time”. It has to be something inherently valuable, like a common frustrating activity. Nail that one thing to the ground, and show people how you do that one thing better than anybody else.

Think of the most successful social sites out there. They usually focus on a single thing. YouTube (video), Netflix (movies), eBay (auctions), MySpace (friends), Flickr (photos), Del.icio.us (bookmarks) and most of the social features on those sites are aimed at making that one activity better. These are just the giants. There are many more niches that are successfully designed for that are even more focused. Threadless focuses on t-shirts. Last.fm on music. etc…

3) Lack of Sustained Execution

What makes Google so terrifying to their competitors is that they never stop getting better. They’re executing each and every day to make their software the best it can be. For example, in September of last year they did the unthinkable: they completely killed off the interface paradigm of a solid, growing product: their Google Reader software. But they replaced it with an even better interface that was universally acclaimed.

It’s too easy to fall into the desktop software mindset of build, release, and wait for the next cycle. But with social software, you don’t have the opportunity to stop improving. Your community is always growing and changing and so your management has to as well. There will always be things to do, screens to improve, questions to answer, and wording to tweak, support docs to update.

This can seem daunting, but I think it’s mostly about mindset. If you see it as a sustained problem, then it will be one. If you see it as an opportunity for continual improvement, your outlook will be more positive.

4) Pointing the Finger when Missteps Happen

When you mess up on a social web app, as you undoubtedly will, you have to come completely clean or your users will smell your fear and hate you for it. Social sites are not typical software…they ebb and flow depending on the community and how it evolves over time. You, as the manager of a community, must act accordingly.

Consider the recent Digg dustup in which the Digg community pushed back on the site after they tried to remove a certain DVD-cracking code from user-submitted entries. At first, Digg tried to explain the situation away by saying they were legally obligated to as the result of a cease-and-desist letter. The basic message was “our hands are tied”.

But then the Digg community overwhelmed the site and got the DVD crack code up anyway. The failure of Digg management to stand up for their users initially resulted in the user’s aggregate behavior. Digg didn’t lose out, however, as this community passion provided an opportunity for them to ride the wave, so to speak, reversing their course and standing up to the cease-and-desist. Their apology letter and reversal suggests they quickly realized that pointing the finger wasn’t the right course. Only by accepting responsibility for their user base could Digg keep their respect.

Here’s a template for how to say you’re sorry.

Continue to Part II

“FOR many, many decades, successful branding — one of the corporate world’s holy grails — involved a clear set of rules. Produce quality goods at the right price. Frame the value in memorable messages seen by millions on television and in print. Then fine-tune the pitch by measuring sales and evaluating consumer responses through letters, phone calls, focus groups and surveys.

Nowhere have those rules been applied more effectively than here, the home of Procter & Gamble, which made a fortune turning Crest, Pampers, and Tide into must-have items on household shopping lists. But the branding game has changed radically, largely because of the myriad choices the Internet provides consumers and because of the economic influence of widespread Web pontificating, known as the blogosphere, which barely existed as a popular force until about four years ago.

As consumers eagerly post word-of-mouth commentary in online communities, message boards and Web logs, a straightforward question confronts brandmeisters: Who wins and who loses as time-tested practices of mass production and mass marketing are undermined by the informed and often cranky voices of the knowledge age? “

My question is: if the blogosphere didn’t exist 4 years ago, what did? Weren’t those same people experiencing the same brands and sharing their thoughts via word-of-mouth? Of course they were!

Blogs do enable more conversation. But, the reason isn’t that the conversations weren’t happening before, the reason is that they were just never recorded and easily accessible.

“People choose not on the basis of what’s most important, but on what’s easiest to evaluate”.

In other words, many times we don’t choose what’s best for us, we take the easy way out. This behavior is often called laziness, but I think it’s more than that. As Schwartz pointed out, we simply don’t have time for diligent research on all the choices we make. Most of the time, however, we imagine people making informed decisions. We imagine that if the information is there, then they’ll take advantage of it, consider it, and choose wisely.

We too easily forget that they’ve got 400 choices to make that day, this probably isn’t the most important one, and making it as fast as possible is a top priority. Instead of focusing in and really nailing that decision, the goal, instead, is an easy choice for a change.

It doesn’t take much to discover the ramifications of Schwartz’ observation. We choose politicians based on if we’ve heard of them before, not if they have the best record. We choose computers if we use the same kind at work, not if they are the best at helping us get stuff done. We choose movies that get high ratings, not if they’re the most important movie for us to see. Many times it’s OK if it’s not the best choice, but it’s the one we’re most comfortable with.

In interaction design, what’s easiest to evaluate gets attention. To-the-point copy. Efficient graphics. Strong page hierarchy. Easy-to-grasp interface elements. Etc…

This also helps to explain why we readily rely on our friends and family for help making decisions. It’s simply easier to do so, and in all probability will be a better decision than the one we would make casually, without much thought. It’s interesting to see how people make decisions in the face of intense choice: we’re really good at adapting and coming up with strategies that save time and energy.

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. They strongly suggest that Digg is being gamed by a small number of users, artificially inflating the value of stories that might not deserve such attention. This flies in the face of the democratic ideal of the site. And so far, nobody has claimed that the two articles I mentioned are false: Digg exposes most of the voting activity for all to see. A small group of users is definitely having a large effect on popular stories.

But before we get outraged at the corruption of it all, we should give everyone involved the benefit of the doubt and consider how this might have happened without evil influences.

Don’t blame the users

The users of Digg aren’t to blame. They’re simply playing by the rules as outlined by what they can and cannot do on the site. They’ve figured out how to play in the environment they find themselves in, and that’s OK. Jason Calacanis, creator of digg-clone Netscape.com, said in his post One User, One Vote: “The top users earned their spot and they should be reward for their contributions–not penalized.”. I agree with that…it’s not like there were any rules to follow.

Blame the design

Instead of blaming the users, blame the design of the site. From the ranking system, to the friends feature, to the display of content, to the ease with which users vote, the design of Digg.com conspires to make it haven for gaming. Not only is the pile-on digging activity possible on the site, it is actually enhanced and made easier by the very design of it!

Here are the features in question:

• Rankings list
  If you want people to compete, rank them. This is a big part of the reason why there is gaming on Digg. Getting a higher ranking becomes an incentive to game because if you do then others will notice and you’ll get recognition. (that’s important to people, even in social software) In addition, with the recent offer by afformentioned Calacanis to pay people for this type of work, high rankings may also be a source of income.
• Friends feature
  The Digg friends feature is the means by which the top users promote stories so quickly and with such synchronicity. In particular, the friend’s history page shows the stories that friends have dugg in reverse-chronological order, so that the newest diggs are at the top of the page. By refreshing this page often, top Digg users (who are all friends in the system) can stay up-to-the-moment with each other. During waking hours, a quick 30 diggs will draw further attention to any story, making a pile-on more likely.
• Exposing who diggs what
  At the bottom of each dugg entry is a list of people who have dugg it, and serves as the evidence that the two articles above used to expose the issue going on at Digg. This is a perfect example of what in psychology is called “social proof”. Social proof is something that is “proved by society”. In other words, the mere fact that others are doing makes it seem like it is what should be done. We learn that way, by mimicking the actions of others. So, when we see someone else digging something, we would be much more likely to digg it ourselves. Or, to put it another way, we let others influence our decisions and help make them for us.
• Stories at a distance
  It is very possible to interact on Digg, digging stories and burying others, without actually reading a story. That’s because Digg only shows summaries of posts. If you want to read a post, you actually have to click on them and go to the external site to do so. Many people will make this extra effort. But many people won’t.

  In It’s all a Farce Anyway Tara Hunt recounts an interesting (and scary) conversation with people who game digg. They submit stories and ask their friends to digg them. After a post reaches a certain digg count they say: “people just hit digg if they are remotely interested in the topic.”. This, again, is the effect of social proof, exacerbated because the stories are at a distance and it is extra effort to read them.

• Ease of voting
  While it takes extra effort to read posts, it takes almost no effort to digg them. This might be backward…digg is essentially making it possible to vote without knowing what you’re voting on. Although the digg feature is amazing, an excellent example of technology that makes our lives easier, it is also in danger of trivializing them.

  This reminds me of a story by Derek Powazek in his book Design for Community, where he makes the point that the harder it is for someone to comment on something, the better the comments are. In other words, people who jump through hoops (or pay attention long enough) to comment are the ones who really care about the subject matter, they’re invested in the story and see value in taking the time to respond.

Other factors

The Digg community is protective. Stories that are about digg get a lot of positive attention there. If you want to get noticed, for example, simply write a post entitled “10 Ways to Get Dugg”. That will get them interested. However, it has also been noted that many Digg community members react strongly to anti-Digg content, often burying it when it reaches the front page of the site, effectively censoring it. This has the unintended effect of making it seem like Digg the service is censoring all non-Digg content (which isn’t necessarily false, either).

Also, people use Digg in many different contexts. I’ve dugg stories myself that I just want to read later…stories that I don’t have time to read right now but that seem valuable to me and I want to be able to find them later. It could be that others do this activity as well, causing votes where none should happen. When you give people tools, they don’t always use them as prescribed.

The result: no independence in voting

The result of all these factors is that Digg breaks the cardinal rule of voting: independence. As outlined in James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds, independence arises when a person makes a decision (votes, diggs) without the direct influence of others, on their own, by making up their own mind. Of course, there will always be influences on that decision…what others have said, where their political party is leaning, their current situation, but in the end they need to have the privacy of their vote. On Digg, no votes are private, and when you make them you can’t help but notice the way others are voting.

If we compare this to how people vote in Presidential elections, we see how different it is. In those, we anonymously vote. The anonymity of the vote is key…once we start exposing who voted on what we’re gaming the system because we are inevitably influenced by others votes. And the ranking of voters just solidifies this…imagine if we could see how others voted over time in Presidential elections…

Digg vs. Del.icio.us

The voting on Digg is in contrast to a site like Del.icio.us, where voting (saving a bookmark) is done more independently, often without having any idea whether or not someone else even viewed it, let alone voted on it. Del.icio.us isn’t immune to gaming, however, as there is a popular list, and it’s very easy to simply copy those bookmarks into your own, driving up the numbers just like on Digg.

So far, however, Del.icio.us seems to be more immune to the outcries of gaming. This may result from a smaller user population, as it is nowhere near the size of Digg. But I think it has more to do with the nature of the tool. On Del.icio.us, the main value is personal, as people use it to store bookmarks that are valuable to them. On Digg, the bookmarking utility is secondary to the voting, in both the interface and the wording used on the site.

Digg’s response

Later this past week, Digg responded to the controversy by changing its algorithm:

“This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn’t mean that the story won’t be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story homepage-worthy.”

I think this is the wrong approach. By keeping the above features the same…Digg is asking for gaming. As gaming occurs, they’ll have to change their promotion algorithm. Then more gaming will occur to override the new algorithm, which they’ll then have to change. In any social system gaming will occur, but I think Digg’s problems are much more basic: their features simply beg to be gamed. Better to focus on the independence of voting, not on the algorithm. By making much of the ranking and voting hidden, the diversity of the site would increase. It’s exposing information that leads to sameness.

What would change mean?

Even if Digg were to change, however, to alter some of the features above to make voting more independent, we still couldn’t be sure that they would work. People test the boundaries of all social tools, finding every which way to bend them to do something useful. Sometimes it’s fine, sometimes it really does hurt the quality of the site.

Digg couldn’t just say “let’s move the digg voting widget somewhere else” and be done with it. That would introduce a new set of problems, based on the new context. However, they did add a new feature lately whereby the Digg widget shows up right on the posts themselves. That could potentially solve a lot of these problems, getting the voting mechanism much closer to the content people should be reading before voting on. Though it isn’t clear whether or not this is part of the solution, it seems like a step in the right direction. (I’m trying it out below – you may not see it if you’re in an aggregator that strips scripts)

In the comments Cori Schlegel made the seemingly innocuous suggestion that we need a messaging proxy. Send a message to the proxy, and you get it on all of your devices or services that talk to your proxy.

This is a great idea! And the more that I thought about it, the more I realized that it is a perfect extension of an idea that I wrote about last year: domain as identity. (a post which, coincidentally enough, Cori commented on).

Here’s how it would work, as far as I understand it…

Instead of web sites having domain names, and those domains having mail accounts, people have domain names and one messaging account. My domain is Bokardo, and I have services at Bokardo.com that I control. Mail would be one of those services.

When mail is sent to mail.bokardo.com, it is forwarded to any devices or services I have added to my domain. So it acts as a proxy in this way…it serves as the place that all mail is sent to, and then I control where it goes after that.

The messaging devices and I have set up on my domain could be of various types:

• Cellphone
• Chat programs
• Social networks
• PDAs
• Traditional email accounts
• The display on your car dashboard

The difference is subtle. Instead of having a separate messaging service for each context we’re in, we have a single messaging service provided by our own domain that routes messages for us. If we join a new social network, we still use our messaging proxy to relay the messages. We simply point the social network to our domain and it knows about us. We would have a single archive of all the messages we send, with metadata that tells us what context they were sent in. So, if I want to say “thanks for the add” to a MySpace member, I send it through my messaging proxy to the messaging proxy of the MySpace member, suggesting that it be received within a MySpace context, and then the person receives it in their MySpace interface. If they aren’t in their MySpace context, they might receive it wherever they are on their cellphone.

In this setup you would never lose mail as along as you keep your domain. If you didn’t have any services set up to receive the mail, it would sit at your domain. Right now, one of the big pains with email is that they’re often provided by your ISP, so you have something like mary@comcast.net. That’s a tie-in we don’t want because it gives the wrong domain power over the account!

The identity folks out there are probably saying “duh”. But that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? Most of us haven’t yet realized what having a solid identity would mean. Take a look at MySpace again. People are fiercely protective of their accounts there, because they’ve invested the time and energy to fill them up with information about themselves. It’s their identity. Their messaging capability is centered around the service, and they can’t interact with folks outside the service easily. That’s the pain point where identity comes in. When a new, cooler hang out spot comes along, they’ll be gone, and all of their messages and profile information will be lost. Unless that information is stored in their identity domain…

Privacy advocates will recognize that this also has benefits for privacy. When messages can be tied to an identity, and we can hold someone accountable for them, SPAM plummets. The problem with SPAM is lack of identity, and if we can create a system where every message is tied to an identity then we can start the long uphill climb of getting rid of SPAM. At least some of it.

Attention-minded folks might see this idea as personal attention streams. Route messages through a single service, and you’ve got them all right there for picking. You’ve got a single address book comprised of everyone you’ve ever sent a message to, you know where you’ve spent your attention, and that could potentially be valuable information for oneself (and perhaps for others).

All the messages come from one mouth (i.e. one mind), so why not a service to model that?

So a domain per person. A single message routing mechanism per person. It’s an interesting idea that I would love to talk more about.

If I were Steve Gillmor, I would say that it has already happened.

But it’s not just about advertising. It’s also about what I’m really interested in: recommendation systems. Basically, recommendation systems are systems that record what we pay attention to in order to provide recommendations to us. Think Amazon.com recommending books to us based on our past purchases and Last.fm recommending music to us based on our listening habits. Those are great examples of specialized attention recorders that record only a sliver of what we pay attention to. (an important sliver, but a small one nonetheless)

Contrary to the previous two examples, the basic message of the AttentionTrust gang is that we should own our own attention data. (just try getting your attention data from Amazon) To that end, they’ve built an Attention Recorder that tracks clickstreams while you browse. You don’t have to do anything, it just sends data silently to a growing database of attention data. The problem is the same problem that us web designers have. You can’t tell much from clickstreams: no motivation, no intention. You can’t figure out why someone does something by looking at their clickstreams.

As in all fields, however, ideas are rarely new: they probably exist in some form already. Recently I was reminded of this in regards to Attention from Ray Deck, who has built an Attention engine that already works, that is making his business successful, and that is, in my amateur opinion, a prototype of what is to come.

Ray runs Element55 in Cambridge, MA. He builds software for lawyers and when he was explaining his business to me I kept hearing the same word over and over again (though he never said it). That word was attention. Ray builds software that allows lawyers to monitor what they pay attention to so that they can bill clients accurately. Did they spend 10 minutes researching that topic? Yes, that goes on that account. The Element55 software records this information by sitting in the middle of the lawyer’s task-based software (MS Office, web browser, email) and the OS, simply recording what is running, where it is going, and for how long.

But it’s not all automated. An interesting piece of the software is a panel for lawyers to make decisions before the data is sent to the time-tracking software.
I think this is an important point. We can give people software to help them track their attention, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have to make decisions about it. Instead of software that silently observes, we need software to help us make decisions about our attention…and we’ll need to if monitoring attention is really important to us. I have a feeling that this is important in most of our software…it should help us make decisions…not take the decision making out of the process.

Another interesting thing about what Ray is doing is that this is not web-based software. It’s an actual desktop application. This is because Ray is not your average web-head. In fact, he’s too contrary to be a web-head when everyone else is. He actually moved from web-based software to desktop-based software! How is that for finding the edge?

Lawyers, in hindsight, are the perfect candidates for someone who needs to know what they pay attention to. They bill by the hour, but rarely work on things an hour at a time. So they need to take this five minute research event and combine it with that 15 minute phone call, and come up with some number that they can then apply to their time-tracking software and bill their client accurately.

So far the whole Attention movement has felt like a solution in search of a problem, albeit a very interesting and thoughtful discussion. But Attention is a real problem, right now, to people like lawyers. And there are folks who are solving that problem, right now, like Ray Deck.

Now, the question I wonder about is: what other professions needs this type of attention-tracking? Where are people already recording their attention, and what tools are they using? What can we learn from companies like Amazon and Element55?

The edge, I imagine, is further out than we think.

While Del.icio.us rose to prominence, much was made of the ability to aggregate the tags that the service’s user population created. The resulting framework, called a folksonomy, promised to redefine web navigation. If users could tag their own bookmarks and navigate to them through a direct tag-based interface, then there was really no need for an overarching, expert-developed taxonomy. In addition, if Del.icio.us could aggregate the bookmarks over all users, they could come up with a folksonomy for everybody, based on how the total population actually valued and referred to the content.

One of the hardest problems in web design is to speak the user’s language. With folksonomies and tagging, the web site could be designed with, and evolved by, the user’s own words. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line the vast majority of excited technologists (including me) forgot the original reason why people use and enjoy Del.icio.us. I call this reason the Del.icio.us Lesson, and I first posted about it last December in Learning more about Structured Blogging. Since then, that post has become the most referenced post on Bokardo. This post is an attempt to further illustrate the Del.icio.us Lesson.

Personal Value Precedes Network Value

The one major idea behind the Del.icio.us Lesson is that personal value precedes network value. What this means is that if we are to build networks of value, then each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network. In the case of Del.icio.us, people find value saving their personal bookmarks first and foremost. All other usage is secondary.

As people use Del.icio.us more, and in order to gain more personal value, they use tags to be able to find their bookmarks later. Tagging isn’t even the primary function of Del.icio.us. Most of the tagging done on Del.icio.us is done secondarily, and for personal use.

The social value of tags on Del.icio.us is only a happy side-effect. Even though most of the ink spilled about Del.icio.us is about the social value, it’s really not the reason why people use it.

Similar to Google aggregating links that were originally created for taking readers from one document to another, Del.icio.us can aggregate tags in order to find out how people value content. If 1,000 people save and tag the same bookmark, for example, that’s a good sign that they find value in it. But to think that people tag so that this information can be aggregated is to give people a trait of altruism they just don’t possess.

Blinded by the Aggregation Light

Unfortunately, the ability to aggregate has blinded many software developers to think that tags are a cure-all to the success of their software. Tags have almost become a requisite feature in new software. I’ve received many emails in which developers try to sell me on the merits of their brand-new software based mostly on the ability of potential users to tag things, as if users inherently enjoy tagging things as a matter of course. Real people, in contrast, tag for their own benefit. And they surely won’t tag if the incentive to do so isn’t clear.

Aggregation, in general, is probably more effective as a second-order feature of software. If we create features just to aggregate them, without providing users with tangible value first, then people simply won’t use the features. My guess is that aggregation technologies which prove most useful will be ones that are added to some activity that users have already started doing without the promise of any aggregation benefits.

Why Del.icio.us Tags aren’t like Meta Keywords

Shortly after Yahoo bought Flickr, Danny Sullivan, of Search Engine Watch, was dubiously skeptical of tags. He compared them with the meta keyword tag, observing that meta keyword tags have failed miserably on the Web and aren’t recognized by major search engines. He was certainly right: meta keyword tags aren’t useful anymore.

However, Del.icio.us tags aren’t like meta keyword tags because of the Del.icio.us Lesson. Meta keyword tags provide no personal value whatsoever. All of their value is social. They’re for aggregation engines to find and tell other people about. In other words, they’re for getting attention only. Del.icio.us tags, on the other hand, provide personal value each time someone uses them to recall a bookmark.

Danny was right to be skeptical, though. Some tagging initiatives don’t seem to provide much personal value at all. On sites like Amazon and Technorati, who have their own versions of tags, it is not clear what personal value users are getting. On Amazon, we already have multiple wish lists for items we want to remember. On Technorati, the tags seem like a pure-play for aggregation benefit without any real benefits for users. Dave Sifry’s suggestion that “Many bloggers use this (Technorati’s) tagging capability to help get their content found by people who are searching for a particular topic” sounds an awful lot like the value promised by meta keywords. Going further, the Del.icio.us Lesson might help us parse Dave’s statistics, especially this one: 47% of blog posts have tags or categories associated with them. If the Del.icio.us Lesson is predictive, it would suggest that nearly all of that 47% would be categories that users are applying for their personal value on their blog, rather than tags applied for attention only. Any way to separate out those numbers, Dave?

Working toward Valuable Services

The level of innovation and discussion in and around tagging is phenomenal. There is increasing talk about tagging in intranets, there is Rashmi Sinha’s great piece on why tags are easier than categories, and there is even a Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop at WWW2006 this month. Tagging, it seems, has hit the big time. Everybody wants to know how and why tags work, and the best working example is the site that started it all: Del.icio.us.

Philipp Keller (who will be speaking about tags at WWW2006) in a post about how to spread the word on tagging, asks “is the tagging revolution stuck?“. This is a common question these days, as the number of services trying to leverage tagging skyrockets.

I say no, tagging isn’t stuck. Just don’t try and make it the primary thing to do. Instead, make sure personal value preceeds network value. Then you’ll have plenty to aggregate.

Additional Reading:

• Rashmi Sinha A social analysis of tagging (or how tagging transforms the solitary browsing experience into a social one)
• Dan Bricklin Systems without guilt where every contribution is appreciated
• Joshua Schachter Tagging Session at Carson Summit
• Dave Winer The utter futility of geekness
• Shelley Powers Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web Cafe
• Delicious Stats

In his piece Martin discusses issues like making money via mashups, building to flip, and commodity office applications and points to several reasons for the new boom:

1. High-speed internet connections
2. Ajax
3. APIs
4. Cheap startup costs

So Lamonica’s point is that it is simply easier to create now. These seem like very reasonable factors for the new companies and products we’re seeing. However, simply having the means doesn’t really lead to innovation…but solving someone’s problem in a better way does. So in addition to technology-related reasons, I would add a couple more factors to Lamonica’s list, including two that can directly lead to solving people’s problems:

1. Increased attention pain
   Techies, who are often ahead of the curve in most areas, are feeling the pain of increased pressure on their attention more than anyone else. Especially those who read RSS feeds. This is an obvious problem, and so is a great place to look to innovate and build.
2. Increased frustration with desktop software
   You don’t have to replace something that works great. Desktop software, though it works well for a single person talking to themselves, is horrible at leveraging the network. (it wasn’t built for it) The frustration we have with the inability to communicate with every tool we use leads to new innovation as much as simply the possibility of it.
3. High profile success stories
   It’s easy to imagine growing a business and getting bought out by a big company. However, the ability to imagine it is nothing compared with seeing it actually happen with 1 and 2 year-old companies like Flickr, Upcoming.org, Writely, etc… These are the canaries in the mineshaft for the onlookers just waiting for the water to warm up before they jump in.

Giving away the prized milk cow

Certainly, in an effort to get a network effect many companies are giving away their prized milk cow by failing to charge for their service. But the thing is, people don’t mind spending money on things they find valuable. Why else would teenagers spend 2-3 dollars each for dozens of ringtones? (This is something I will never fully appreciate)

Instead of worrying how everyone else makes money with Web 2.0, I wonder if developers should ignore articles like Lamonica’s and instead worry about how they can solve the problems of their users. If they can do that, then they won’t have any problem making money. Focusing on mashups in general and getting bought out are not focusing on real problems. So I hope that developers don’t get too discouraged by Lamonica’s piece…and instead keep forging ahead despite the concerns.

I don’t remember where I heard this next quote but I think it still rings true, especially in light of the increasing questions we’re facing like those in Lamonica’s article:

All businesses succeed for different reasons, but fail for the same ones.

“In The Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer’s purchase. Simple as that.”

The whole piece is excellent.

In referencing Joshua Micah Marshall’s two reasons for not using a Mac (despite admitting that he’s heard great things about them), Gruber suggests that we underestimate the power of familiarity. He says:

“But the reasons behind his (Marshall’s) reluctance to switch are eminently reasonable, or, if not quite reasonable, understandable. He’s a political nerd, not a computer nerd, but he’s cobbled together enough knowledge about Windows and PC hardware that he’s comfortable knowing he can get his work done with them, and that when things go wrong, that he can probably fix them.”

This insight could also be called the “good enough” principle. If what we are familiar with is good enough, then there really isn’t an incentive for us to change what we’re doing. After all, we know what we’re doing now, and any change would set us back at least temporarily.

How to get familiar?

However, I’m a little more optimistic than Gruber is about what, if anything, Apple can do about getting folks using Macs. I’ve seen their products garner loyal fans. In fact I live with two of them.

My wife loved my Powerbook so much that we went and bought her an iBook. Then, her father loved that so much that he went and bought his own. (By the way, I can imagine that Windows boxes get fans like this, but I haven’t actually experienced it myself.)

The problem is that the remedy for Apple is very costly: getting people to actually use a Mac. It’s not easy to get someone to sit down and use a Mac for any extended period of time, and for a computer that is crucial to getting used to it. You can’t get familiar with a Mac by going to the Apple Store a couple times.

Thankfully, with web-based software you have the ability to provide brain-dead easy test drives of it.

Not about advertising

My wife and father-in-law using a Mac and wanting one is, at first glance, not a big deal. I like that, and I want one myself. But one thing that isn’t apparent is that Apple’s marketing had nothing to do with this. In a sense, their marketing was worthless to these two people. It was all about the actual use of the machine.

For anybody who is familiar with Seth Godin‘s books, you’ll instantly recognize this as a manifestation of what he’s been talking about for years. This is the essence of his Purple Cow idea.

A Purple Cow, according to Godin, is what you need to make in today’s attention-strained landscape. Because there are so many people trying to spread so many messages (advertising), you need a product that actually does the spreading for you. That spreading occurs when the people who use your product like it so much that they tell everyone else. So you don’t have to.

Godin would point out that this changes the game dramatically. First, you need much less advertising because your customers do that for you. Second, you have to focus more on your product, making sure that it is remarkable enough to get people talking. Third, you can help this along by enabling your users to spread the word.

The strategy of the recommendosphere

Overall, it’s a really simple strategy: Focus like nuts on your product and let your users advertise it for you.

Oh, and here’s an update: Joshua Micah Marshall now owns a new Mac.

To which I can only say: Welcome to the Recommendosphere.

In his 2005 Les Blogs presentation Doc Searls, in his explanation of what blogs are and what they are not, suggested that:

“We are all authors of each other.”

What exactly does Doc mean by this? Does he mean that we author other people’s lives, and they ours, whether or not we want them to? Or could it mean something more optimistic, that we author each other gladly?

Then there’s the problem of popularity. How does popularity fit into the idea that we all author each other? Don’t popular things help shape us, too? Do the voices that add up to popularity author us in the aggregate?

Popularity is maligned as much as any attribute known to man. If you are popular, you are probably not worth paying attention to. It’s as if we are saying: “You already have too much attention, and I’m not going to give you more.”

But I think there is much more to popularity than unwarranted attention.

Memetrackers!

The current explosion of memetrackers (Memeorandum, Tailrank, Megite, Findory) is a great place to observe these questions play out. Gabe Riviera’s Memeorandum, one of the first of the bunch, started with a list of RSS feeds and grew out organically from there (at least that’s the legend I’ve heard several times). On tech.memeorandum, you can get the latest buzz in the tech blogosphere, and you can track a meme for the 10 or 12 hours that it’s hot. Unfortunately, as many have pointed out, it sometimes feels like an echo-chamber with the same blogs bubbling to the top consistently.

I once heard that the most popular bloggers weren’t necessarily the ones with the best ideas, but they were the ones who could amplify those ideas most effectively. Just like any other writing, I guess.

Today’s hottest blog, of course, is Mike Arrington’s Techcrunch, a clearinghouse for the latest Web 2.0 news and product releases. Mike’s success seems to rely on his ability to quickly get the story and tell the most relevant details before others do. His tireless excellence is really something to watch, making bloggers like me wonder how many hours there are in his days.

Technorati, who likes to throw around big numbers, has the Technorati 100, a list of popular blogs which, according to this study by Tristan Louis, changes rather frequently. Today’s Doc Searls is tomorrow’s … what was that guy’s name again?

Popularity

The energy put forth in figuring out how to get onto Memeorandum, Techcrunch, and Technorati is proof that people look to those services as a light in the fog. People want to be and want to know what’s popular, and the primary utility of these services is to help them do that.

Popularity, it seems, is the goal of many a blogger. We get a kick out of seeing our name on the lists. If I was Boing Boing sitting in the #1 spot in the 100, I would be pretty damn pleased with myself. I might even take a vacation.

This makes sense because outside of acclaim from our readers we really have no idea if what we’re writing is jiving with people. For a quick calculation we instead look to numbers and rankings to suggest how well we’re doing.

So if getting popular is at least part of our goal, why is there always such a negative connotation about it? Seth Finkelstein, in response to a Scott Karp post in which he laments the rise of popularity sites like Digg and Reddit, reiterated a common distinction between popularity and importance:

“Finding what’s *popular* is easier and more profitable than what’s “important”. In order to find the popular, you just poll either the crowd, or the demagogues (people who are experts – at what’s popular). That’s very simple (relatively speaking).

But how do you find what’s important, what you *need*? What do you code for? The first cut is to poll a niche rather than a general audience. But problems there are that there might not be enough of a sample, and the economics are even less supportable.

These questions don’t often get discussed extensively because the hype-machine runs on populism and demogoguery, so that’s what gets amplified and echoed. But also, there’s more to discuss, and moreover, a service which acts to find the popular is, recursively, a popular topic for coverage.

There is that word again: hype. Whenever this word is mentioned, it is in relationship to something that the author wishes would go away. Same with populism. Never mind that millions of people are talking about it. It’s hype. Forget it.

The endless struggle to get at personally-relevant information, to weed out the hype and focus on what is important to us, is the defining problem on the Web at this time.

Importance is relative

The problem, as Seth points out, is that each of us has a different definition of importance. But that’s only part of the problem. The other part is that most of us secretly yearn for popularity. So even as we argue against popularity as an idea, we really don’t mean that popularity isn’t important to us. Things that are popular that we don’t find important don’t make sense, but if we were popular, if our blog was in the top 100…well then that’s OK.

But I don’t think that should stop us from trying to alleviate the problem. I think we’re learning more about this as we go. For example, I think we can distinguish between two types of popularity:

Echo-chamber popularity

This is the popularity that Seth was talking about and that everybody hates. It’s the one that people complain about when they complain about Memeorandum, about Britney Spears, about the wicked pretty cheerleader and her dumbass jock boyfriend.

Interestingly, however, our anger at this type of popularity can only occur after we’ve made the judgement that it isn’t important to us. Most people don’t complain that the Beatles were popular because they’re a pretty good band. Their popularity was justified. And very few people complain about memeorandum if they’re the ones getting consistent traffic from it.

Only after we’ve read the stories on memeorandum can they be part of the echo-chamber. The first reading, the reading at which the information was new to us, was actually valuable in some way, if only to let us know that it wasn’t important to us.

Word-of-mouth popularity

This is the popularity that we all value. When a friend recommends a movie to us, we listen, even if they’re talking about the same damn movie everyone else is. Because it is coming from a personal authority, we don’t consider it a part of the echo-chamber, we consider it valuable information. People have a great way of knowing what will be important to their friends, and so probably won’t give them the same echoes that they hear elsewhere.

We all want people to say nice things about us. If we become popular that way, then all is well.

The problem is that it’s really hard to have one type of popularity without the other. In fact, they’re basically the same thing, except one is popularity that we value and the other isn’t. It all depends on whether or not we find the popular thing valuable. If we don’t, we start saying things like “hype” and “echo-chamber”. These words actually say more about the relationship between the person saying them and the topic than they do about the topic itself.

Most things aren’t valuable to us

Just as the Power Law dictates that in a network some things will be popular and most things won’t, some popular things we’ll find important but most we won’t.

The technologies that we’re using to leverage the network now, most particularly RSS, are giving us more access to more things. With that comes more things that we don’t value. Is this a failing of the network? Or is it a failure of the people on the network? Or is it a failure of the technology? Is it a failure at all?

Probably not. It’s simply that we have more of everything, and are already taking for granted the increase in valuable information because there’s so much useless information as well. Of course, there was a time before cell phones and computers, but who the hell remembers that?

What we need is to model that in our software in a way that allows us to make judgments about which information is valuable to us, and which is merely hype. In other words, we need to be able to pick out those popular things that we still value, despite our fears of popular things. I think this is what Dan Bricklin is getting at in his insightful article: When The Long Tail Wags The Dog.

So I think Doc is right, we are all authors of each other. We value the same things we’ve always valued: the information we receive from family, friends, writers we admire, and other personal authorities. And oh yes, we’ll value a small portion of the popular things too, because we don’t discover everything through the people we know. We’ll probably also continue to deride popularity as a bad idea, because we always have, ever since the cool 6th graders were listening to Guns and Roses and using the F-word.

And all the while we’ll secretly ego-surf to see how popular we would be if we believed in that sort of thing.

“When you get right down to it, Google is a giant recommendation engine.”