This is part II of a series on Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web Applications. Read Part I

5) Not Appointing a Full-time Community Manager

No matter how prescient your designers and how well thought out your design strategy, there is no way to design a perfect social web site that doesn’t need ongoing management. Yet, some social start-ups fail to recognize this and launch their app without a designated caretaker. The result is a slow failure…the worst kind of failure because it’s not immediately apparent that it’s happening.

In any decent social app, use and users are always changing, always adapting and pushing the limits of your software. So as Matt Haughey, founder of Metafilter, says in his excellent Community Tips for 2007, “Moderation is a full-time job”.

Continue Reading: Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web Applications and How to Avoid Them, Part 2

Tagging is growing like wildfire on the Web. Maybe it can work on the desktop, too.

Continue Reading: Folksonomies in Mac OS X?

Kevin Gamble (via Dave Weinberger):

“Is there any living, breathing example of a taxonomic approach working (scaling) to keep-up with the hyper-efficiency we see in peer-production systems? I’m being quite serious here. Can you point me to a working model?.”

Why is this an important question?

Continue Reading: Is there an Example of a Scalable Taxonomy?

When social design works, you get SPAM. When it works well, the community helps get rid of it. Cnet’s Elinor Mills, in a piece describing Digg rigging on a wide scale, writes: “dubious Internet marketers are planting stories, paying people to promote items, and otherwise trying to manipulate rankings on Digg and other so-called social-media […]

Continue Reading: Yes Virginia, there is SPAM on Digg

I recently got the chance to virtually sit down and have a chat with Brian Oberkirch about social web design, including lessons we can draw from Digg, Delicious, MySpace and some of the other leading social apps. Brian asks some really good questions! Edgework – Joshua Porter 59MB MP3

Continue Reading: Podcast on Social Design with Brian Oberkirch

Why and how scale in social tagging systems can leverage the Wisdom of Crowds (much like Google does with links) to make the incorrect tags less influential than certain Aristotelians would have us believe. Ok, so I got into hot water for my Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture post… But I’m completely […]

Continue Reading: Why Scale Matters in Tagging Systems

In which I argue that the field of Information Architecture doesn’t fit anymore.

Continue Reading: Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture

This is part 3 of a conversation with Luke Wroblewski on design lifecycles.

In case you missed them, here are Part 1 and Part 2 on Luke’s site.

Joshua Porter
First off, I think that Craigslist and MySpace exposing their full content is a design decision…maybe one made without much thought but a design decision nonetheless. If *all* sites simply exposed their content to the world like these two sites, we would probably be better off. So many successful things have come from happy accidents that it doesn’t bother me to think that MySpace might be a happy accident…until you read how relentless they are about updating the site with useful things. Kathy Sierra’s talks more to this…

Continue Reading: The Lifecycle of Design: Part 3

Luke’s got part 2 of our conversation on design lifecycles up: The Lifecycle of Design: Part 2

In case you missed it, here’s part 1: The Lifecycle of Design: Part 1

Continue Reading: The Lifecycle of Design: Part 2

Earlier this summer I got the chance to interview Luke Wroblewski of Functioning Form. Luke’s a great writer and longtime web application designer currently working on Yahoo! Social Media. Following the interview we kept up an informal dialog around the idea of a design lifecycle.

Well, we ended up archiving it in Writely, and filling it out a bit. Luke’s got the first part up now. (I’ll be publishing some parts of it during the week).

The Lifecycle of Design: Part 1

Continue Reading: The Lifecycle of Design: Part 1