So two weeks after I called out Derek Powazek to write a 2nd edition of his book Designing for Community, his wife Heather Champ has put together a nice list of ways to build community, Flickr-style. (via Derek himself)

Businessweek: Ten Ways Flickr Builds Communities

Here’s the list…

1. Engage
   Don’t just listen to your community. Engage
2. Enforce
   Let the community help set standards and policies for appropriate behavior-then enforce them
3. Take Responsibility
   Fess up immediately when you make mistakes
4. Step Back
   Don’t be afraid to step back and let your customers take over
5. Give Freely
   Never underestimate the allure of a free T-shirt (or sticker, or button…)
6. Be Patient
   Take knee-jerk reactions with a grain of salt
7. Hire Fans
   Make sure your employees are as passionate about your product as your community’s most die-hard fans
8. Stay Calm
   Develop a thick skin
9. Focus
   Be flexible but don’t lose sight of your priorities
10. Be Visible
    Stay human

What’s missing from the list? Features!!!

No features to be found. Not a one. Now THAT says something about building a community. It’s not about features, it’s about human-to-human interaction and being part of a group. That, to me, is the implicit lesson here…Flickr doesn’t see community building as a feature set, they see it as interpersonal communication.

Now, a response to this might be…but so many features on Flickr and other social networking sites enable community, or make community possible. To some extent that is true, but not much. There were online communities way back before the Web in places like the Well and their features were incredibly crude…yet they still formed a very tight community. So while we need some basic level of communication means, there is no such thing as a “community feature set”.

One of the biggest problems on the Web is joining a new social networking site. To do so means going through the painful effort of creating a profile and adding all of our friends, something we’ve done over and over…at least once for each social networking site we already belong to. This is quickly becoming an issue for everyone who uses social networks.

This problem has led to a flurry of activity, highlighted by LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick’s missive: Thoughts on the Social Graph, in which he clearly outlines the issues involved as well as some worthy goals to shoot for. Brad’s piece was followed shortly after by the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web, which among its rights is the right to allow users to syndicate their own profile and friend data. This, of course, would alleviate the squeaky wheel.

In addition there are countless groups getting together to try and solve this problem. The microformats folks are working on building formats to help with this. The DataSharingSummit is an entire event focused on this and related problems. All of this activity is centered around one idea: that people have a social graph that can be represented in software. In other words, we can recreate our offline relationships online and let everyone know about it by sharing some sort of file or feed.

The major axis of the social graph, as Fitzpatrick points out, is relationships between people, or more simply, a list of friends. My social graph, for example, consists of my friends, colleagues, family, and acquaintances. These people I know to some extent or another, some I talk with daily, some I know only online, and some I would rather not speak to.

At this point we could easily move forward and accept the common notion of social networks: that they are made up only of relationships between people. But for those folks working deeply on these issues another problem soon arises: the realization that there is more to the social graph than just people…there are objects that mediate our relationships as well.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with the word “mediate” because it is not entirely clear what it means. But in this case it means something like this: our relationships with other people are determined in part by the activities and objects we share. This idea has long been known in the world of social psychology, and could have big effects on the utility of the social graph going forward.

For example, our YouTube and MySpace and Flickr friends exist partly in relation to the content that we’ve shared with each other on those sites. Our lifelong friends exist in relation to the things we’ve done together: the places we’ve gone to, the words we’ve spoken, and the movies we’ve seen. It doesn’t make sense to talk about our friends without these mediating objects, and that’s why our social graph must also represent them as well.

This view is explained wonderfully by Jyri Engeström in this post: Why some social network services work and others don’t — Or: the case for object-centered sociality . Engeström argues for an “objects of sociality” view of social networks, where people aren’t the only objects necessary for relationships. Engeström’s post is in turn based on the work of sociology professor Karin Knorr Cetina.

This notion of “objects of sociality” helps explain the success of sites such as YouTube, Flickr, and Netflix. (and, I might add, the slideshow sharing service Slideshare co-created by my friend Rashmi Sinha, whom I first heard the term “objects of sociality” from). What these services have done is to create a system that supports relationships around the objects of videos, photos, and movies, and slideshows. And as I wrote about the other day (What if YouTube was simply lucky?), their success seems based on their ability to make the activities of uploading, viewing, and sharing as painless as possible.

Still, Jyri suggests that most notions of social networks are restricted to people. He says:

“Approaching sociality as object-centered is to suggest that when it becomes easy to create digital instances of the object, the online services for networking on, through, and around that object will emerge too. Social network theory fails to recognise such real-world dynamics because its notion of sociality is limited to just people.”

It’s interesting to note that Facebook, who is at the center of this social graph discussion because of their partially-closed (or partially-open, however you want to look at it) system, asks everyone who adds a friend how you know them. They want to know if you worked with them, if you went to school with them, or if you met them through an acquaintance. These items, the job, the school, and the other friend, are the very objects of sociality that make the relationship work.

Download PDF of The Psychology of Social Design

I’ve also created a set of resources and links for the talk at Del.icio.us:

http://del.icio.us/bokardo/uxweek/

My focus in the talk was to expose several psychological frameworks that can be applied to social design. The first one is Kurt Lewin’s famous equation: B=ƒ(P,E) which articulates the primary tension in social psychology: that both an individual’s personality (P) and their environment (E) affect their behavior (B)…btw: that was the only equation I’ve ever shown in a talk and will probably be the last.

Here’s an high-level outline:

1. Kurt Lewin’s Equation as the central tension in social psychology
2. Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs as a precursor to the Del.icio.us Lesson
3. Peter Kollock’s 4 motivations for contributing
4. Robert Axelrod’s 3 necessary conditions to cooperate
5. Duncan Watts’ study on social influence in interfaces

On the Web, of course, our environment is largely the interface we’re using in addition to the social actions that are occurring elsewhere. In many cases the interface is the only evidence we have that anything is happening at all.

The talk went well, I think. I got some really positive feedback about it from attendees, and some great questions afterward that took the discussion further.

I know that it’s not easy to follow a talk by just looking at the slide-deck, but if you have any feedback or comments, I would love to hear them.

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? How are MySpace, Fotolog, and Craigslist so popular in an age that values stunning visual design and amazing technology above all else? Conversely, how is it that Flickr, full of beauty and Ajax, is being overtaken by a site as boring as Fotolog?

Aye, there’s the rub…a rub that defines the current state of web design.

First off, a little throat-clearing. We’re dealing with Alexa stats here, so there are no guarantees that anything is accurate. Just because Alexa shows that Fotolog gets more traffic than Flickr doesn’t mean that it is…it’s kind of like listening to a reporter who usually covers political news tell us what’s going on in Silicon Valley. Suspect, to say the least. But for the sake of argument let’s assume that the trend is right, and that Fotolog is overtaking Flickr in terms of traffic.

Page views and Ajax…a match made in Hell

Well, one reason why Fotolog might appear so successful is the very technology that Jason mentions: Ajax. Page views are a metric that Alexa uses in its traffic calculation. But when you switch to an Ajax interface, your page views plummet. For example, when people want to add a tag, change a headline, or edit a photo set on Flickr very few page views occur. You’re simply interacting with a single screen that doesn’t refresh, but sends and receives requests in the background. This undoubtedly has a huge effect on the page views on Flickr.

Fotolog, on the other hand, gets a page view anytime a person wants to change anything. Therefore, less efficient bandwidth consumption and server usage actually gets Fotolog much higher traffic numbers…which is pretty damn ironic.

What’s more ironic is that this is an increasing problem on huge advertising sites and few people want to talk about it. What’s at stake? Billions of dollars that are wrapped up in page-view models where money changes hands depending on what “traffic” a site receives. And for years that traffic depends on page requests to a server, which of course happens even when people are doing simple things like changing a photos headline. So while companies realize that using an Ajax interface, when done well, can literally save millions in bandwidth costs and actually provide a faster, easier-to-use interface, they also realize that their advertisers only know one metric: the page view.

I’ve talked to some folks at Yahoo about this, and they say that their discussions on this topic get pretty tense. This is a huge problem for them because so much of their revenue is advertising based but they know that the future of interface design is elegant Ajax. This problem has been known for some time, but we’re still at the start of the huge effort in migrating away from the page view as a valuable metric for anything.

Technology doesn’t a great value make

Jason makes a strong case that technology is over-valued. I think he’s exactly right when he says:

“Maybe tags, APIs, and Ajax aren’t the silver bullets we’ve been led to believe they are. Fotolog, MySpace, Orkut, YouTube, and Digg have all proven that you can build compelling experiences and huge audiences without heavy reliance on so-called Web 2.0 technologies. Whatever Web 2.0 is, I don’t think its success hinges on Ajax, tags, or APIs.”

This is the exact problem I’ve been talking about lately: in some cases visual design and/or technology are trumped by other aspects of design.

In my Social Design talk, which I most recently gave at the Web App Summit, I ask this question: What are the most successful web sites in the world? The answers are the ones you would expect: Google, YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo, Craigslist, Amazon, eBay.

But then I ask the question slightly differently: What are the most well-designed web sites in the world? Outside of a minimalist Google, there is no overlap for most folks. None of the others on the list are “well-designed” in their minds…they’re simply successful, poorly-designed sites. They attribute the success of these sites to other factors: being first in the market, having economies of scale, etc.

From a visual design standpoint they might be right: these sites aren’t going to win any visual design contests. But the value of these sites goes so far beyond the visual that to judge them by the way they look is to completely miss the boat. In our testing at UIE, for example, we’ve never had anyone refuse to shop at Amazon because it doesn’t look great…in fact people are most passionate about Amazon because of the value they get from reviews…and the rest of the socially-focused features there. People love Amazon, and it has nothing to do with its visual design!

And people are passionate about the other very successful sites, too. To Jason’s point, the major value of all of the successful sites doesn’t rest on what specific technology they use or whether they have tagging. Instead, the major value rests on social aspects of the design…take away the interaction of the communities on these sites and there is very little value left in them. Take away the reviews from Amazon and you’ll hear a great big sucking sound of folks rushing out to buy their wares on some other site…

Similarly to Amazon, Fotolog relies heavily on social interaction, in their case sharing photos with friends. This is the primary value of the site, not how they do it from a technological standpoint.

The usual red herring: judging a book by its cover

Ignoring visuals and technology (at least temporarily) is a big change for many designers and technologists. Why? Because technology and visuals often get the credit when things go well, but aren’t really talked about when things go contrary to our assumptions. That’s exactly Jason’s point: why is it that Fotolog uses inferior technology and visual design and still succeeds?

I think the answer is that the differentiator on the Web right now isn’t great visual design or technology, although those help out tremendously (don’t get me wrong!). An analogy might be in order here because so many people think I’m trying to denigrate visual design…I’m not! Here’s an analogy:

Every time George Bush makes his State of the Union Address he speaks very clearly, his words are well-chosen and his speechwriters are obviously top-of-the-class. They communicate very well, and for the most part every single person who listens or watches the address knows exactly what George Bush is trying to say. Speechwriters learning the craft would do well to emulate the skill and technique of Bush’s speechwriters. Even so, the address is a bunch of statements that most people disagree with: most people want the U.S. out of Iraq and observe that the efforts there have largely been a failure. Even Bush’s own party is now alienated. But the State of the Union Address itself is well-executed: it’s clear communication…Bush is just sending the wrong message.

(update: several folks are angry with me that I used a political analogy…I’m certainly open to suggestions for future analogies where the communication is clear and well-executed but fails to deliver the right message to the audience)

This is the same with visual design: you can execute beautifully but if the message you’re sending isn’t the one the audience wants to hear then the overall design will be a failure. I believe this is what Jason is talking about with his repeated references to “Web 2.0″. He doesn’t see the value in the majority of so-called Web 2.0 services…they might look great and have interesting technology but if they don’t actually improve our lives…then what good are they?

Visual design is about communicating a message well…getting the point across. The problem comes when the message being communicated isn’t the right one…and that’s exactly what we’re seeing so much of…so many sites have great visual design and great technology but just aren’t sending a valuable message…

Where are all these sites? They’re everywhere: they’re the ones you’re NOT using.

There are two primary aspects of design: communicating the right message. Why is this two aspects? Because one aspect is communicating a message well and the other is making sure it is the right message in the first place. Perhaps this second part is what is called design strategy these days. I don’t know, but I know that one needs the other in each and every design project.

Preventing valueless design

We need a new way of thinking to prevent valueless design. Valueless design is like a George Bush speech: well-executed but wrong. While it may be communicating beautifully on one level, the impact on society may be minimal or, even worse, negative. We need design that provides real value to humans.

The new model as I call it is social design: a focus on the social lives of users, the context of how people live, and the connections they have with their family, friends, and loved ones. It’s about the daily activities that people care about, that make their lives richer, more fulfilling, and that have very little to do with how a piece of software looks or works behind the scenes.

But that’s just how I see it. I’m sure that other ways to get people in the right design mindset. I believe the best designers not only execute technically well, but have the mindset to discover the right design. They’re open to new ideas, passionate about what they do, and focused on the lives of their users in order to prevent sending the wrong message.

“We wanted to build a web-based game that would take the social web to the next level. When we realized it was the communication that was so important we changed direction”

Web apps are tools with which people communicate. Of course people do some task with them, but communication is key. With Flickr, of course, people communicate through photo sharing. With other tools, people communicate around other artifacts, like links, reviews, ratings, and other types of what Richard MacManus and I called “microcontent” in our Web 2.0 for Designers article (back when Web 2.0 didn’t mean everything under the sun).

Caterina continues:

‘The advance of the social web has thrust Flickr into the limelight, but the notion of sharing, discussing and commenting on pictures was far from original, which begs the question: Why has Flickr succeeded where similar sites have not?. “About 80 per cent of photos on Flickr are public: that level of social freedom wasn’t foreseen,” says Caterina. “When we started the company, there were dozens of other photosharing companies such as Shutterfly, but on those sites there was no such thing as a public photograph – it didn’t even exist as a concept – so the idea of something ‘public’ changed the whole idea of Flickr. By sharing images via tags, users are able to see stuff that’s going on all over the world – pictures of the London bombings and the Lebanese evacuation were up in minutes after the events.”‘

I find it interesting that Caterina uses the term “social freedom”. Certainly, having images public by default gets them to the 80% shared figure, but is it really freedom?

Perhaps it is, given that users can make them private when they want to. It also seems like an issue of control. People don’t mind having images public, as long as they can make them private when they want to. The insight to make them public by default is brilliant…but my guess is that it wouldn’t work as well if you weren’t able to choose.

Christina Wodtke (who wrote the book on Information Architecture) is angry about its impending death:

“I recalled a recent blogpost by Adam Greenfield and I found a clue. I think he, and Peterme, and Lou and Peter Morville… well, we’re all outgrowing our favorite pair of jeans: IA. And the waistband is cutting in badly, but it’s our favorite pair, so of course we’re crabby. We’re all going to stay crabby unless we finally take them out of our “skinny” drawer and give them to goodwill.”

Yes, indeed. IA as it has lived will soon die. Not because it wasn’t valuable, not because IA’s didn’t do great work, but because the Web is moving on.

The problem is that IA models information, not relationships. Many of the artifacts that IAs create: site maps, navigation systems, taxonomies, are information models built on the assumption that a single way to organize things can suit all users…one IA to rule them all, so to speak.

Clay Shirky, in his talk Ontologies are Overrated, equates this type of categorization with organizing the world in advance. He uses the dichotomy of browse vs. search as a wedge:

“Browse versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure, and in the degree of power derived from that link structure. Browse says the people making the ontology, the people doing the categorization, have the responsibility to organize the world in advance. Given this requirement, the views of the catalogers necessarily override the user’s needs and the user’s view of the world. If you want something that hasn’t been categorized in the way you think about it, you’re out of luck.”

Many IA’s won’t stand for this, however. Their response would be something along these lines: “unchanging taxonomies aren’t what IA is about…it’s about organizing information around the user’s needs, and practices such as card sorting help to do that”.

In addition, writers in information architecture have reacted strongly against ideas such as folksonomies, which are navigation structures built out of one’s own tags. Peter Morville, in his book Ambient Findability, states:

“when it comes to findability, their (folksonomies) inability to handle equivalence, hierarchy, and other semantic relationships causes them to fail miserably at any significant scale.”

This is a valid reply, of course, except that it’s completely wrong. Equivalence is handled by similar tags and tag clusters, hierarchy is handled by nested tags, and it’s pretty clear that both Flickr and Del.icio.us (and many other sites using folksonomies) can scale.

Thomas Vander Wal, in a recent reply to Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy, an article critical of folksonomies (a term he coined), gets at the heart of the problem here:

“This assumption…that taxonomies are great and help people find things by providing the authoritative terms is wrong. Taxonomies are always less than perfect and most often far less than perfect for helping people find and refind information they need. But, we do need taxonomies to provide that foundation structure. We need solutions that can help the many people whose terms and vocabulary are left out of the taxonomy.”

This is, on some level, a platonic vs relative argument. Either you believe meaning is inherent in the natural structure of the universe, or you believe that meaning is relative, personal, and different for everyone.

The biggest cleavage along these lines, as Shirky alluded to, is Google Search (meaning is relative and can be modeled by links) vs. Yahoo Directory (meaning is inherent in the structure of information). We all know who won that battle, but did you know that the Yahoo Directory isn’t even on the Yahoo homepage anymore? Yahoo has all but demonstrated that the directory model, and not the folksonomy model, doesn’t scale.

In many ways, the success of Google’s Pagerank algorithm was the harbinger of all this. The simple idea that people’s actions model meaning better than a directory (even a flexible directory) is a critical step forward in thinking about the Web. The innovation we’re seeing with folksonomies, recommendation systems, social networking sites…all have their roots in the idea that modeling what people actually do on the Web is the best way to provide answers for them. And, perhaps more importantly, it is an admission that we simply can’t predict the future…we can’t design a perfect information architecture, and to attempt to implies that the world we’re modeling doesn’t change.

That said, I’m not claiming that information architecture is bad. In all probability an IA would assume that Search is part of IA, that flexible metadata is part of IA, and most of what I’m using as counter-examples are part of IA.

But the fact is that IA is a theory about the inherent structure of information…the architecture of information…and if we are moving away from that we should call it something else.

Relationship Architecture, perhaps?

In the end, Christina suggests that it is all about change, and that explains why she’s angry:

“Anger is almost always based on fear, and change fuels fear.”

Who: Social software helps people by modeling their social lives online.

What: Social software is software that supports social activities.

Where: Social software is nearly everywhere.

When: Now.

Why: Social software is important because that’s the way that software is trending.

In addition, social software is teaching us lots of interesting things. It’s teaching us that the distinction between online and offline is barely there anymore, that people are super-comfortable on the Web (it wasn’t always this way…really!), that there are multiple ways to succeed in social software, and that there is room for lots of highly-trafficked services because people don’t mind subscribing to multiples. Also, with gaming, dating, and new media sites/software we’re seeing that there is huge money in it.

At first glance, geotagging doesn’t seem that exciting. You’re simply adding coordinates to pictures, right? But after taking one look at some of the early activity that Flickr users are doing with it, combined with the additional magic of mapping and search that the Flickr folks have included, and you might wonder why every site isn’t clamboring to add tags and geotagging to their arsenal. (I bet many will soon be considering it)

Here’s the skinny on the feature.

Tag photos with location coordinates

This is the first step in the geotagging process. Adding location coordinates simply means adding a longitude and latitude attributes to a photo. You know, those crazy numbers like 43.877293 Latitude and -69.4911 Longitude. This is an exact spot on the globe, allowing anybody else to find it.

Thankfully, you don’t need to know actual coordinates to use geotagging. Instead, you can simply enter addresses and Flickr figures out the rest. When you use the Flickr Organizr (no e) to organize your photos, you’ll notice a new tab called “Map”. Simply find a location by entering a street address, and the map updates to show that location. (Notice that there are already 2 pictures of mine geotagged at that location)

Then, simply select the photos taken at that spot and drag them onto the map at that location.

Done. You photo is geotagged. All software should be this easy!

Here’s a shot of the actual geotags and their coordinates. It’s a shot of my wife and kid at a wharf in New Harbor, Maine. (also notice that you can set the privacy settings on a per-photo basis)

View or share them with others

The personal value of geotagging is clear. You can group photos according to location, and see them all on a map at once. To see your map of photos, simply access your photos using a URL like this (with username/map/ added at the end): http://www.flickr.com/photos/bokardo/map/

This is a totally cool way to browse your own pictures or share them with others. Now my parents, who live in Gardiner, Maine, can go see all the pictures I have geotagged with their address. Of course, I’ve only geotagged a few pictures so far…it does take time. (and not to mention, if you have lots of photos…discipline)

Holy aggregation possibilities, Batman!

The stuff that I’ve showed so far is really fun. Geotagging is just a great idea. But even more impressive than showing family and friends pictures tagged at a certain location is what people are already doing with aggregating geotagged photos over more than one user. It’s fun to see what photos one person has taken at a particular place, but way more fun to see what everyone has done!

The Flickr Map is the place to look for everyone’s geotagged photos. Here is the Flickr map trained on Newburyport, Massachusetts. There have been 30 photos geotagged in town so far. Considering a visit to Newburyport? Maybe you should check out the map first and see what folks are finding there.

One thing that has been bothering me about mapping software…why don’t the maps always open to wherever you are? (and if they don’t know where you are, they should ask for a default location)

And the show has just begun…

This is what I love about cool features like geotagging. People figure out the most useful ways to stretch and bend them. Ok, so we’ve got a bunch of geotagged photos and a cool mapping feature that allows us to see them. We can type in an address and see all the photos geotagged at that location. Cool. But what if we start cross-referencing those geotagged photos with regular tags? (Flickr already has great tag support)

Here are just some of the views possible with geotags and tag search. Remember, when you’re looking at these maps, think about how the ability to do this stuff came overnight. When Flickr updated with their global maps and new search functionality, combined with the tags already applied to pictures, they made this stuff possible. It’s a combinatory effect. As Stewart says…imagine what we’ll have after everybody gets wind of this and adds millions more geotagged photos!

• Great Lakes Lighthouses
• Pics tagged “Lost” in Hawaii
• Sunsets in California
• Red Sox pics in Boston

With geotags, Flickr pushes the envelope that much forward. I think it’s a great social feature, and one whose surface has only been scratched so far. I’m excited to see what other views people will come up with, given what we’ve seen in the first few days.

“If web design were not an art, then we would always get every part right. But it is an art, and, like all arts, it deals with the subjective. The subjective is something you can never get 100% right.”

I think Jeffrey is right: no designer can expect perfection in design. They can neither expect to create the perfect design nor expect to be able to know it if they did. And even if they did, somebody would hate it just because it was perfect.

Web Design

But web design is design after all, and as such we need to know when it works and when it doesn’t. If people use it, it works. If people don’t use it, it doesn’t work. Though people’s comments about it might be subjective: “I like it!” or “It’s ugly”, web design, like all design, succeeds or fails based objectively on how well people can use it. We may argue about metrics: (do 60% or 80% of people need to succeed in order to call it good design?) but we aren’t talking about someone’s subjective opinion…we’re talking about their actual behavior. That’s the beauty of behavior: it’s verifiable and objective.

The obvious way to find out what works and what doesn’t work is to watch what people do with your design: how they use it. Every designer who has done this has undoubtedly been shocked to learn that non-designers don’t see the world in the same way that they do. When non-designers use web sites, they ignore everything that doesn’t help them achieve their goal. They are amazingly narrow-sighted in that way…pigeon-holed into their own context and problems. And the funny thing is: designers are this way, too, when we’re not designing. That’s even what prompted Jeffrey’s post: as a Flickr user he was a befuddled.

Designers Don’t Want to be Judged Objectively

The truth is, web designers are nervous that their (read: my) work will be judged objectively. They fear that their designs will prove less than useful. They hate the notion that their work will be edited, or even worse, redesigned because of user feedback. But it happens, to very well-respected designers and professionals. I know of many cases where the work of someone you probably have heard of was completely scrapped in favor of a redesign that just worked better. Unfortunately, we hear little of these stories that could serve as valuable lessons.

There is a lot of ego tied up in design. What makes designers want to achieve great things for users is the same urge that makes them hold passionately to their original ideas. It’s a conundrum. Designers are rebels, for the most part, and most of them don’t want people changing their stuff, which would inevitably happen if someone were to objectively judge it. Part of their resolve to distrust evaluation is that designers have a clear vision other people aren’t privy to. I sure as hell wouldn’t allow someone to change Bokardo, even if in some small way they were right. This is my design. My creativity. My colors. My flag.

I think that’s partly why MySpace is so successful. Even though we might find someone’s profile pages revolting…it’s their revolting page, not ours. As a few people have said to me since I wrote The MySpace Problem, MySpace is very much like a teenager’s bedroom…

For my job and my hobby I’m a designer. The other part of my job is that I watch how designers work and how designs fail or succeed. I get some perspective from both sides of the fence…but it’s really difficult to articulate the issues that I feel strongly about. The tension between creativity and success is one of those issues. I will probably continue to struggle with that…sometimes Jekyl wins and sometimes Hyde wins.

Art and Personal Expression

Many designers that I know design to express themselves…they are more like artists than designers, really. I’m glad that in this day and age artistic people can make good money doing web design, but they will often be judged objectively, not subjectively. It’s just a part of the design world. I think there is a trend here, too…and it’s not the direction that artists will want.

I want design to be personally expressive, too. I want people to appreciate my work and the time I spend doing it. The cold hard fact is, however, that my expression is subordinate to the needs of the user. No matter how great I think my design is, the resolution of success comes only after other people have used it. I have very little control over that. In this way I become transparent as a designer: my work becomes defined not by what I’ve done with it, but by what other people have done with it. Their achievement is my achievement. In Art, it can work the other way around. Not so in Design.

Reconciling Design and Expression

Thankfully, if we recognize this we can still win the game. We can design things that work for others but that still satisfy our own needs as creative beings. Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano, in Designing Visual Interfaces, put this nicely:

“Unlike the fine arts, which exists for their own sake, design must always solve a particular real-world problem. Functional criteria govern the range of possibilities that can be explored; aesthetic possibilities that are not compatible with this minimum standard of usability must be quickly discarded, if they are considered at all. Fortunately, there is almost always a wide latitude for aesthetic expression within these bounds, and experienced designers realize that solving a problem in a manner that is uniquely appropriate brings an aesthetic satisfaction all its own”

It kind of sounds like killing two birds with one stone. We’re designing first to solve a problem, while also satisfying our own artistic needs. As long as we can do both, we can choose which one is the real reward.

Podcast: MarketingMonger Podcast #26 – Interview with Joshua Porter of User Interface Engineering ( 30 min )

Eric interviewed me as part of his quest to create 1,000 podcasts. I’m #26, so he’s got a ways to go. But at the rate he’s going he’ll probably get there within a couple years. Good luck, Eric!

Some of the other casts that I’ve been listening to are interviews of Ryan Carson and Jason Fried. Both good listens.

1. They’re never built.
   I’ve had the same conversation with many folks: good idea for web application, but not enough motivation to build it. In fact, I fall into this category. I have several prototypes sitting on my hard drive of little applications that could be something someday, and I’ve run out of steam developing them. I get distracted, start doing something else. However, this is probably a confidence issue as much as a time issue. We’re simply not sure if what we build would be successful and investing the time it takes to push it to completion is daunting. An interesting story cropped up recently about this: Michael Arrington of Techcrunch wrote about how Squidoo.com seems to be failing, suggesting that it cast a dark shadow over Seth Godin’s reputation as a marketer, and that it wouldn’t be long before Seth distances himself from it. In other words, Mike was equating Seth’s reputation with the product he built. This is precisely why it is scary to build something in the public eye. People can ridicule it, and often do. But even if Squidoo doesn’t succeed (which is uncertain) I doubt that Seth will see it as anything other than a learning experience. Now if only the rest of us could.
2. They’re modeling an offline activity incompletely.
   This happens a lot in banking web apps. I recently switched from my bank to one with better online features. It wasn’t that my former bank couldn’t handle the transactions, but they could only do so if I actually went to the bank and talked with a teller. This is completely frustrating. An incompatibility between an online app and an offline store doesn’t make sense. How many times have you tried to redeem a coupon or gift certificate only to find that you have to go to the store? Well, we’re so used to the online world now that the web app is the store, in both a physical and non-physical sense.
3. They’re ahead of the curve.
   Some applications are simply ahead of their time. There were online bookmarking sites way before Del.icio.us. There were photo sharing sites way before Flickr. Why is it that now these types of sites take off when before they didn’t? One answer to why bookmarking sites didn’t take off is provided by Ari Paparo, who started Blink.com in 1999. He had 13 million dollars in investment money, and he and his company couldn’t make it work. His post about why Blink.com failed is a fascinating chronicle of a company ahead of its time. He points out that bookmarks weren’t public by default, the site used folders instead of tags, the service wasn’t instantly useful, and that technology was too often a factor in decision making. Paparo says the company wasn’t ahead of its time, but I think it is pretty clear that these lessons are exactly the type that an unforgiving network teaches us over time. And 13 million dollars said that they didn’t have much time to play with.
4. They don’t plan for change.
   One of the most common battle calls of web developers these days is that you have to plan for change. One certainty is that the app you’re working on right now isn’t the one that will be there a year from now, a month from now, or even a week from now. The software cycle is speeding up. And interestingly, it isn’t just the new, small web apps that lead this charge. It’s Amazon, Google, and eBay, who have such sophisticated backends that they’re able to manipulate, test, and retest different features on the fly to a subset of users. They didn’t get to where they are today by coming up with a fantastic initial design that “just worked”. No, they’re tweaking, tweaking, tweaking while you and I sleep.
5. They don’t charge money.
   This is a more interesting problem than it first appears. At first glance, it would seem that charging might not be all that important to a web application whose creators are going the “let’s get a huge user base” route. This is the route that Writely took. They never charged for anything, built an awesome product and a huge user base, and got bought out by Google. But more likely they’re the exception, not the rule. At some point buying out Web 2.0 companies will slow or stop. When you charge for something, though, an interesting thing happens. You have an implicit relationship with the customer. They are literally invested in your product, will spend more time using it, and will care about whether it lives or dies. All these things add up to better feedback for the development team going forward. In addition, there is also the psychological bias of getting what you paid for. When you charge for something, announcing to the world that you think this is worth something, you are actually implanting the same thought in other people’s heads. They start to think it’s worth something, too.
6. They have no barrier to entry…at all.
   The biggest problem with Myspace is identity. There is simply no barrier to entry for the service, not even to identify who you really are. Obviously, this helps growth because anybody can use the service. However, it also lets in anybody, and that means people who have nothing to lose and who do evil things. If they had their identity to lose, like those who get caught in the weekly sting operations we see now on TV, then that becomes a strong barrier of entry for them. For people who are simply on there to hang with friends, this is not a problematic barrier at all. They want people to know who they are! Having a small, but real, barrier to entry will trip up those people who really shouldn’t be using the service in the first place.
7. They don’t think holistically.
   The amazing thing about Flickr is that nobody uses the service to upload pictures. Nobody says to themselves “I need to upload me some pictures”. Instead, they’re satisfying some other need in their lives, like showing off the new kid to relatives. Or showing their friends how their trip to Europe went. Or letting their co-workers in on their conference activity. All of these things have to do with their life, their relationships, their everyday activities that aren’t centered on the Web, but are made much easier by it. If we look closely, that’s what most successful web apps do: they make our offline lives richer.

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.
4. They sell it the wrong way.
   Web apps are not about Ajax, tags, Web 2.0, SOA, REST, or any other technology. Why do so many startups and web pundits focus on these terms when talking about a product? To get a better frame of reference, talk about how your app empowers users to improve their life. Think about how the long-term successful companies sell their stuff. They relate it to some bigger idea. So, for example, Nike has always embraced the hero archetype. They might talk about how great their foam arch is, but that’s always secondary to how buying their shoes makes you a hero. Their commercials are often amateur runners out running in the rain. How cool is that? Way cooler than double-density shock foam. A good example of this in web apps is the messaging from 37signals. They’re not selling software, they’re selling rebellion.
5. Not in it for the long haul.
   If you build it, they will not come. There is too much competition right now, so another wiki-type application isn’t going to set the world on fire. I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard about web apps that became successful only after they adapted to their user base over time (short periods of time, but over time nonetheless). Their initial effort didn’t work, or was too similar to another one, but they were in it for the long haul and they adapted to what their users wanted. Flickr is a great example of this. Flickr started out as a game called Game Neverending. That didn’t work, but their second attempt did. Many web app makers would never make it to the point of seeing the light (or admitting the failure).
6. They show too much of what’s going on, and get gamed.
   One of the big promises of aggregating the wisdom of crowds is building systems that use the input from huge user populations to come up with value. However, as people get used to how the wisdom is aggregated, they figure out how it all works, and the more public the mechanism for aggregation, the easier it is to figure out. That’s why gaming is such an issue with Digg. The voting on Digg is public, so you can see which items have the most votes before you submit your vote yourself. This goes against one of the principles of the Wisdom of Crowds, which states that in order to successfully harness it, each member of the crowd needs to be making an independent vote.
7. They don’t have an underlying business strategy of improving people’s lives.
   Most business strategy is about making money. However, this is a short term goal. If you focus only on ways to make money, then you’ll make decisions that in the short term seem good for the balance sheet but in the long term actually work against it. Take the case of LLBean. Where everyone else is trying to get away from call centers and move all of their customer interaction to a web site, LLBean actually allows you to talk to a human being almost instantaneously. Their phone number is easily found on their web site/app. This probably does cost them a lot more than if they had some contact forms or an instant chat room, but it sure does make it quick and easy to give them money. My sister worked at LLBean for a time, and I was always impressed by the way that they empowered her to handle customers. It probably cost them money in the short term, but people remember when you make their lives easier, not harder. Many companies, unfortunately, see the Web as a way to reduce direct communication with customers, when in reality it should cause an increase in communication if you’re successful.

Update: 7 More Reasons Why Web Apps Fail

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.

Web 2.0 – Leveraging the Network (2.74 MB pdf)

In the talk I spoke about how Web 2.0 companies distinguish themselves by leveraging the network of which they are a part. Brittanica, for example, has had a web site for quite some time and were slow to leverage the network in any particular way. Wikipedia, on the other hand, exists only because they used the available network to improve their contents communally. And Wikipedia, of course, is a much, much more popular site.

As in my last talk: Web 2.0 for the Rest of Us (which includes a podcast), I started down the road toward Web 2.0 from the standpoint of those Web companies who have excelled: Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay. They obviously know more about succeeding online than anybody else, and have become so successful so fast that we often take them for granted, even though they are barely a decade old. So, I find it particularly useful to ask: What makes them so special? What have they done that others haven’t? And I find myself coming back to the same answer over and over: they know how to leverage the network. From Google’s pagerank algorithm to the APIs of eBay and Amazon to the movie ratings on Yahoo, these companies know how to harness the collective activity and intelligence of people to make their services better.

For those who want only the quick and dirty (without the pretty pictures), here are the talking points:

1. The home page is no longer the most important page on your site.
2. The information architecture that people use to find your content is, increasingly, not yours.
3. Each feature added to an application is more to think about – for everyone.
4. Folksonomies are a way for users to map their own, familiar vocabulary to your alien one.
5. Words are the currency of the Web. Spend the most time on your words.
6. Seducible moments are those increasingly rare moments when you can talk to your users in an appropriate context.
7. Recommendation systems are a forced move.
8. Users want control.
9. Users appreciate tools that help them make their own well-informed decisions.
10. The best software models human behavior.
11. Links model how users value content, and are only the start…
12. Sometimes it is easier to design for yourself than others.
13. There is always an opportunity for a better interface to data.
14. All things being equal, faster interfaces allow for more innovation.
15. Most people are willing to trade their personal information for good service.
16. As choices grow, so does the importance of learnability.
17. Redesigns are dead.
18. Network effects are rare, and killer.
19. Network effects work in the opposite way for teams building software.
20. Personal value precedes network value
21. People rarely do things for the “good of the network”
22. Del.icio.us, though providing very cool tagging features, is mostly about a single person remembering items for later.
23. “The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous”

I would appreciate any and all feedback, as I’ll be giving this talk in the future and would like to improve upon it in any way that I can.