Here’s an indication that the word “social” is becoming significant to lots of people:

Continue Reading: Use of “Social” Exploding

Update: 7 More Reasons Why Web Apps Fail

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

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

Continue Reading: 7 Reasons Why Web Apps Fail

The amazing popularity of the bookmarking site Del.icio.us is one of the hallmarks of the current social software renaissance happening on the Web. Along with Flickr, Del.icio.us is a poster child of tagging, a simple feature whereby people attach words or phrases to an item. In the case of Del.icio.us, those items are bookmarks.

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.

Continue Reading: The Del.icio.us Lesson

On your first glance at the tech.memeorandum home page, you won’t see anything all that special. You’ll see some links to blog items down the left-hand side labeled “Top Items”, and some smaller links to the right labeled “New Item Finder”. It looks like a hundred other blog aggregators being released nowadays…no big deal, right? [...]

Continue Reading: Tech.Memeorandum’s Filtering Illustrates Web 2.0’s Most Important Skill

Doc Searls has a nice writeup of Blog Search engines, including the new Google Blog Search, IceRocket, PubSub, Technorati, Blogpulse, and A9.

He answers the question: What’s the difference between a Wide Web Search and a Live Web Search?

The difference? Syndication. I wonder how long that distinction will last.

Thomas Vander Wal makes some great comments on my latest post: Technorati Tags: What Are They Really?. He points to something that has been nagging at me, that the most useful tagging being done is selfish…
It’s not nagging me because it’s selfish. I’m not sure selfish is even the word, because it implies a choice [...]

Continue Reading: Selfish Tagging

Round and round we go, where we’ll stop, nobody knows! The crazy game of tags gets crazier. What are Technorati tags really? And should we use them now that categories are being indexed in the same way?
Jeff Jarvis has started another good conversation about tagging over at Buzzmachine. (He started another good conversation about [...]

Continue Reading: Technorati Tags: What Are They Really?

Jonathan Boutelle brings up an interesting point after attending the BayCHI Web2.0 panel the other day: the Web 2.0 companies heavily promoting their APIs (Technorati, Flickr, Google) are glad to have developers create interesting new interfaces out of them…unless you want to make money from that interface.
This discussion is just the tip of the [...]

Continue Reading: Interface Remixers will Pay for Privilege of APIs

Last week I published two posts that had very different results. One post was a pointer post to my buddy Jeff’s web site. I wrote it very quickly because there was not much to say other than to point to his site. Another post was about tagging called Technorati and Del.icio.us Tagging: A Quick Comparison [...]

Continue Reading: How to Know if a Post is Interesting (or Not)