Usability and Social Applications

I’ve been thinking a lot about social networking and it’s application in the real world. Social Networks (of the internet kind) are here to stay, and everyone is now trying to “socialise” their websites and online interaction by adding commenting or by blogging or something similar.  You can even go on Facebook and Throw Sheep and other items (which I personally think is pointless).

Social networks are (and are increasingly going to) change the world we live in. The New Scientist article on Innovation: How Social Networking Might Change the World is an interesting starting point for the conversation.

Usability

I’ve been thinking about the applications that I use on these social networks and why.  To be honest, the socialisation of the web is due to one factor and that is usabliity.

Most people when talking about usability focus on visual design, or if you’re very lucky, on how a user travels through a web experience. The functional design is sometimes discussed as well, and these kinds of applications often are better than most, but there is a more important factor

Simplicity and Speed of Interaction

The applications and social networks I use the most are Twitter, Email (yes it is a social network), commenting on Blogs and then Facebook. I am using Facebook and Email less and less, and here’s why:

It takes very little time to tweet and comment

In my busy day (and social networks makes life more busy, not less) I don’t want to have to write a full email, or even a blog post to get most of my points across.  I want to be able to make my point, see the reaction and have a conversation.

My favourite apps that I use regularly:

• Twitter – simple way of just saying what you’re doing right now, and having a conversation with your friends
• SuperBadger (Facebook App) – change the world with a few simple clicks – and it really is changing the world!

People are now getting used to real time interactions, and there is beginning to be real time search too. http://search.twitter.com can now be incorporated into google using a Greasemonkey script: Greasemonkey Twitter Script.  The speed with which we expect to interact is changing.

Building Social Applications

The issue with applications is now simplicity and speed. Barack Obama realised this with his twitter stream and iPhone app for the 08 Election in the US. Quick information, simple interaction and you can get it now.  It was always about getting noticed, and the world is becoming more simple, not more complicated.

The applications that will win, are those that provide the user with the most power, whilst asking as little as possible in terms of time and thought.  Twitter wins and so does SuperBadger for me.

Who am I? Reassessing my online profile

My Social Graph

I’ve been really thinking about my online profile and the links I have. It’s intriguing to play with the Google Social Graph API even though it’s only useful if you’re trying to build a social app (which – well – everyone is).

I’ve also looked at lots of tips on blogging, especially a recent post from Chris Brogan on Ten Secrets to Better Blogging. I’ve only just started blogging recently, but I know I’m being a little haphazard about it.  I’m probably not even following it for this blog.

I’ve also been looking into my social networks and who I follow and who follows me. I love social networks and I love interacting with them. Twitter and Friendfeed are where I get a lot of information from. The thing is for some reason I constantly feel under pressure to make a difference to people’s lives through my interaction.  Twitter is slightly different, but… why can’t I just be me?  Am I being me or not?

Friending is a currency

Links were the currency of the early noughties, and now friending has become the major currency we’re all trying to achieve.  Things like XFN and microformats have sprung up to help us connect with each other and Google is obliging so that we can get at that information. So, now it’s not just the HTML links we have pointing to our content, it’s also the virtual connections between me and somebody that we have on the web that matters.

So, it’s becoming all about getting “as many friends as possible”.  Having 100,000 friends on MySpace wasn’t (and still isn’t) impossible, but calling them friends is quite blatantly wrong – at least, if you’re primary use of the web is as a businessman.  It smacks more of a marketing strategy and something (shock horror) viral and insipid than of a social network.

Being in Business

Being in business, I am attempting to make money (doesn’t have to be a lot, just enough). In some ways, I find that it’s odd mixing my online business activities and the idea of “friending” with my business. It makes it all the more personal, and less about business.

In some ways, my online profile is me and it’s separate from my business. That separation is blurred now, with LinkedIn and others who force me to portray myself in terms of business.  Facebook is different in that it allows me to be me and gives me a semblance of control over who and what people see of me, and it’s much more personal.

The funny thing is that the people that make a lot of money out of the social networks are the network owners, the people who run the things.  Now, in an equivalent of a dot-com boomtime, we’re in a social-network boomtime, where the VC money is going into things that are about “building communities” around a topic.

Who Am I?

So I come back to my original question. Who am I? Am I the businessman on LinkedIn or am I the friendly guy on Facebook?  Am I the stream of random thoughts on Twitter or am I the stream of life information on Friendfeed.

One things for sure, I don’t think any of these things mean that anybody else can truly know who I am.  The funny thing is, I’m not sure that I always know either.  Maybe the interactions on social networks are part of what shape me?

What do you think?

Difficult Social Media Questions

After reading Andy Piper’s blog I found one of his delicious links very intriguing:

Ten Questions Not To Ask A Social Media Panel

It’s basically asking difficult questions around the subject of how Social Media is seen in the advertising/marketing world.  Things like “How do you plan a Social Media Campaign?” and “What’s a friend worth?”.

All really valid questions, but it does raise some interesting points. The best part of the article is the comments though.  Why? Because they bring more pertinent information out about the state of the market and how executives and corporates see the Social Media world.  Especially F100 companies in the US (and therefore FTSE100 in the UK).

I recently had the opportunity to sit in a marketing meeting with a large clothing retailer in the UK.  It was an odd meeting as they were being sold a marketing campaign around real metrics (100k+ people) with the aim of “getting more email addresses”.  In other words, sending an email out with a 50% off voucher, and “send to a friend” emails.  The aim was to increase the number of people they could spam to.  How very 1990s.

The interesting thing is that this ideas is self-perpetuating for the marketing company (not the brand).  If you get a whole load of email addresses in one campaign, you’re going to do the same campaign the next time.  What happens when email becomes less important?  What happens when all the important conversation is on Facebook, or worse, distributed over different social networks?

The conversation then turned to Facebook because the key demographic fits the Facebook profile.  Their question was “How do we use it?”.  I think there’s a fundamental flaw in that exact question.  In the end, I advised the company not to even go near thinking about engaging with Facebook (or any other Social Media) unless it was going to change it’s entire marketing approach. Why? Because people are far less easy to fool directly (on a 1 to 1 basis), rather than as a crowd.   Social Media works at the 1 to 1 level.

Social Media is not to be used, it’s to be engaged with.  It’s not to be controlled, it’s to be released.  It’s not for trying to get more “customers” it’s for trying to create brand advocates.  It’s higher risk, but with much higher reward.

Brands and Companies need to realise that Social Media is not a “strategy” that is either easy or non-disruptive to their organisation. There is no easy way to start a “campaign” – and as the blog post says, there’s no guarantee that there is such a thing as a “campaign” in Social Media.

So, how do you incorporate Social Media into your brand or company? I think I’ll leave that for the next blog.

Web 2.0, cash flow, valuation and business models

I like Web 2.0. It’s a great idea and a fantastic buzzword. It allows me to seem “in the know” to people who are only just beginning to get Web 1.0.

But the problem is that Web 2.0 seems to have a slight identity crisis, certainly within the business world. A lot of discussion has happened and is happening around the idea of revenue and cash flow for web 2.0 businesses.  This comes on the back of Twitter securing $15m funding for continuing to grow it’s business, when there are many in the business world who are asking where the business model is.

This article in the FT a few days ago, it suggests that most financiers are at the very least unsure about why they should invest in a company.  Web 2.0 to them is about social online behaviour, and so far, very few of the recent startups has shown enough promise to start making money.  Twitter, for example, is being backed because of the strong early adopter user base it has grown very quickly.  The interesting thing is that there’s still no obvious business model, even now and it’s been going a while.

But maybe the key is that it is changing our online behaviour.  It used to be just about email and phone, then came online ads, and now it’s about putting out your online personality.  This will create groups (I don’t want to use the word “crowd” here) that can then start to become the next business communities.  So maybe, Twitter will just become a community around which business is done.  What business and how much that will make for the users or for Twitter is unknown, but Dell and others are beginning to use Twitter to get information out there about their businesses.

Some of the other businesses that are touted as Web 2.0 are Slide (how it’s worth $500m I will never know) and Ning. Because all of these businesses start with open source software and tend to be beta versions at launch, then the technology tends not to be the valuable part.  The value appears to be in the number of users that they can get as quickly as possible.  So making something that is “useful” and/or “fun” for a large number of people appears to be how to make a Web 2.0 startup. Monetisation is not the key.

Jemima Kiss points out that it’s not simply enough to look at the finances of a business.  Web 2.0 is still young as an industry (if indeed it is a separate industry to the “normal” web) and these businesses springing up are less about the traditional and more about the innovative side of business.  Maybe Web 2.0 is the future of all business and maybe it is going to be much more disruptive than even we are seeing now.

My opinion is that Web 2.0 companies are here and here to stay and I like them.  I still fail to see how Twitter is going to make a lot of money (and certainly not out of it’s current user base) without someone there creating a micro-payment model (of some sort) on top of it.

The key to a successful Web 2.0 company appears to be finding the right angel to invest at the start (if needed) and the right VC to fund it after the initial launch, and the right company to purchase after a short-ish amount of time.  It’s less about the business model and more about fashion.  Maybe the business model is more like that in that it’s more of the web’s “luxury item” than previous companies were. Luxury and fashion may be the way to view Web 2.0.

Social Network Feedback Loops

I was just chatting with my mate James Ogley (a curate in the Church of England down in Bursledon and also a SuSE evangelist) and we were just trying to figure out if it’s possible to create a feedback loop.

While it may or may not work (or be socially/internet responsible) it is something that should be considered.

If networks such as friendfeed did something like auto-post comments to another social network, and then that network auto-posted those comments back to friendfeed you could end up with a feedback loop very easily.

The thing is, has this been done, and if it hasn’t how do you stop it happening?

Every post must have a unique URL against as an identifier of course, but if when you pull a post from somewhere else it gives it a new unique URL, then what’s to stop it being a perfect feedback loop?

I’m not suggesting this is a good idea as it’s likely that at least one of the networks online would be overrun and brought down because of it.  However, maybe there needs to be a more robust solution for handling posts posted in one place being sent to another.  Maybe a post should only have 1 unique URL.

The problem is, that if you use a multi-posting client like twhirl then one post to twhirl can create 3 identical but essentially unique posts elsewhere.  Which one is the master post?

This could be a problem folks…

Spamship – Spam friendship social networking

Over the past few years, I’ve watched and been a part of several social networks. My favourite (currently only) is twitter.  I have developed lots of friendships over the years, some entirely online, and some I’ve made online and continued in real life.

What I’ve seen before, but I’m noticing more and more is something I like to call spamship. What this is is a person making a cursory link between themselves and yourselves on a social network.  The better ones at it make an attempt at a conversation, but there are enough out there who are just setting up profiles to gather “connections”.  The worst ones are those who think that the number of friends on a network somehow signifies either popularity or value or expertise.  It’s rubbish.

An added extra that has emerged is distributed spamship which is even more annoying.  Someone “friends” you on one social network, and then “imports” their friendships from that network into another network.  What happens if you’re on both networks? You’re automatically joined to them there too.

It makes the idea of friendship less and less useful and more and more annoying. It is friendship spamming and it’s something that I don’t like. The only beneficiary is the person who is doing the spamming as you end up with pointless connections that have zero value to you elsewhere.

I like the idea that twitter uses of followership. Where you choose to follow a person, and they can follow you, if they want. There is no need to reciprocate if you don’t want to. Twitter puts me in control of my own friends and means that I don’t have to follow anyone I see as a spammer that chooses to follow me.

What will emerge in the future is that followership is going to become a much better guide to expertise, popularity or value than the number of friends a person has.  I know this isn’t new, but it is going to emerge.

We need to organise our lives around something. The internet allows us to have massively connected networks but we just can’t cope for long periods with so many relationships. We will have to focus our time and energies on certain niches and networks whilst staying aware of the outside world.

Spamship will decline as networks mature.  We will need to be more in control of our networks than we are currently, but there will always be a need for openness and collaboration, and we shouldn’t stop people who wish to watch/follow from doing so. We’re all open for collaboration.