I just read about how four families are suing MySpace after their children were assaulted by someone they met on the site. I hate this sort of stuff because something horrible happened and there is no clear answer to who is accountable and why. There are two parts to this problem. The first part is […]

Continue Reading: MySpace sued over predator assaults

Nicholas Carr has a great post on Sharecropping the long tail “One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because […]

Continue Reading: The Value of Self-expression

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

A recent Washington Post story titled In Teens’ Web World, MySpace Is So Last Year would have us believe that MySpace is a passing fad because of the group mentality of chasing cool. The story itself, however, then proves otherwise. There are concrete reasons why teens change their mind, and it’s not always about being […]

Continue Reading: Is social all about cool? (Or why teens switch from MySpace)

Top-of-mind was just sold for $1.65 Billion dollars. That’s the amount Google paid for the social video site YouTube, which owns the top-of-mind space for the word “video” in the minds of the populace.

When I think of the word “video”, I immediately think of Youtube. When people want to upload “video”, they immediately think of YouTube. When people talk about where they saw the latest episode of the Daily Show, they talk about YouTube. When advertisers think of “video”, it’s all YouTube.

YouTube is what people think about when they think of the word “video”…

Continue Reading: YouTube and the Importance of Top-of-Mind

From a recent comment on The MySpace Problem:

“About 1-2 weeks ago depression hit me for a few days. As usual, it wasn’t just one thing; it was a combination of several things. MySpace and their seemingly undeserved popularity was one of those contributors. I kept asking myself, “Why!? Why is it that the worst things are the most popular?” Then, a few days ago while I was getting in the shower, I had a thought: MySpace is successful because it gives people freedom.”

This is exactly the sort of conundrum I was trying to explore in the piece. MySpace, in all its visual glory, is a paradox for designers, who, with their refined aesthetic sensibilities, cannot fathom how people value such decoration.

What we’ve learned, I think, is that in some cases giving people the ability to express themselves is more important than the designer’s ability to do so. Or, in other words, the designer’s ability to let people express themselves is often an important goal in social web design.

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

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

Social software has been around for a long time. Email, after all, is the canonical example. But it’s been only recently that web designers as a whole have embraced it and really started innovating. We’ve got social news aggregators, social encyclopedias, social bookmarking, social networking, recommendation systems, social tagging…all of these things add up to huge changes in the way we use the Web. Though some folks see it as nothing more than social networking, there are elements of social software being built into most software today.

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.

Continue Reading: The 5 W’s of Social Software

In Why I Don’t Use Social Software, Ryan Carson of Vitamin magazine (where I published The MySpace Problem), asks some tough questions about the rise of social web apps. The biggest question is: Are social web apps here to stay?

Using his own tendency to shy away from them as evidence, Ryan wonders if the excitement of social networking apps is a bit over the top. He asks: “is the market already saturated with products that no-one yet uses?”. His reason for not using social networking apps is a good one: he doesn’t have time because he’s busy getting work done. But even if he were to use them there are still too many services out there competing for our limited attention. So how would we find out about them in the first place?

Continue Reading: Are Social Web Apps Here to Stay?