Comments on: Social design explosion: Polls, quizzes, reviews, forums, chat, blogs, videos, comments, oh my!

By: staffing1

staffing1 — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:17:50 +0000

Great thoughts, and good work thank you sir

By: Mike Schinkel

Mike Schinkel — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 03:33:44 +0000

Solution #4 FTW! Create off-site APIs and activities

By: wendi93

wendi93 — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 01:34:08 +0000

PLEASE DONT READ THIS. YOU WILL GET KISSED ON THE NEAREST POSSIBLE FRIDAY BY THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE. TOMMOROW WILL BE THE BEST DAY OF YOUR LIFE. HOWEVER IF YOU DONT POST THIS TO 3 VIDEOS YOU WILL DIE WITHIN 2 DAYS.NOW UV STARTED READIN THIS DONT STOP THIS IS SO SCARY. SEND THIS OVER TO 5 QUIZZES IN 143 MINUTES WHEN UR DONE PRESS F6 AND UR CRUSHES NAME WILL APPEAR ON THE SCREEN IN BIG LETTERS. THIS IS SO SCARY CAUSE IT ACTUALLY WORK

By: Marcy

Marcy — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 03:38:18 +0000

Voting or “liking” is missing! (I hate voting “down” though, I'm just saying. It shouldn't be allowed!)

By: Andrew Korf

Andrew Korf — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:51:04 +0000

Anyone that you feel has taken the classifieds idea to the next level? Add social context to listings perhaps around a vertical? Certainly a etsy begins to get this right but the level of social integration is somewhat limited, I would love to see oAuth, Open ID, and FB Connect on etsy, and more groups/geo-location grouping.

By: DavGarcia

DavGarcia — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 21:05:16 +0000

Solution 5 is so difficult to remember when 1 is so easy but so messy. But I try to remind myself that 5 is my goal.

By: Tara Kelly

Tara Kelly — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 07:36:03 +0000

It's social feature creep. It's pretty common, expected even, that just about any application has a social component to it - be it public or private, for work or for personal.

I run an online password manager and we offer collaboration features for professionals. Does that make us a social app? I'd say not. Yet we have to manage social feature creep nonetheless.

For instance, we have to let people invite peers or clients to "friend" them, and we have to allow them to send login information, share passwords, exchange encrypted messages. But should we allow them to run a private encrypted chat too? Should we turn the logs into status messages?

The question is: How far is far enough?
Only testing can tell (as Tyler pointed out), but my tendency is towards solution 5.

By: Andrew Chen

Andrew Chen — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 23:05:29 +0000

Interestingly enough with Craigslist though, they are able to add more categories for listings, and more specialization around geographies, and still maintain the cohesive product experience. I think there, the additional extensions are “natural” and fit well into the UI… that is maybe the key to making these additional features work within the context of an existing site.

By: Andrew Chen

Andrew Chen — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 23:03:55 +0000

Great thoughts! Thank you sir.

By: Andrew Chen

Andrew Chen — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 23:03:41 +0000

Yes, I thought of you when I wrote this – the idea of “running out of attention” or attention being the scarcest resource is definitely an interesting idea.

Similarly, I've seen in my work a diminishing returns for advanced features, where you can often remove 50% of the advanced functionality but still preserve almost nearly 100% of the core activity – the activity just goes elsewhere on the site.

By: Tyler Willis

Tyler Willis — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:26:13 +0000

Read once that Google Usability had a rule that they wouldn't expose a new feature (even as an element in a submenu) until tests indicated it would be used by 5% or more of their userbase, and that they wouldn't make any changes to the main interface unless 20% or more of the userbase would use the feature.

Perhaps one solution is to develop a place (de-emphasized in the UI) where users can play with new features, and then be more judicious about what features we display to the non-early adopters in our userbase.

I'd propose this model:

Build >> roll out to early adopters for testing >> fix bugs >> run a/b tests into nav elements >> if increased user behavior is high than launch, if it is not, go back to square one to build new feature or improve this one.

the definition of "high" increased user behavior will be a variable that changes based on your products size and scale. I'd recommend planning periods for removal testing as well. A feature might be highly engaging in month one and be a net-negative piece of clutter in month 6.

By: Ted Rheingold

Ted Rheingold — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:16:02 +0000

This has been a challenge/reality of ours since about the 2nd year. I'd add to the laundry list votingup/votingdown, questions/answers/advice, gifting, classifieds.

The challenge isn't adding the new features, it's finding the place to promote these new features. You run out of nav space, you run out of homepage space. Basically, you run out of attention. We try and remove low performing features whenever we can to reduce attention dilution. It's very easy to become yahoo and have more content than anyone can find. It's much harder to be wordpress and have just enough. (That's where the API/plugins architecture is so key)

By: Vincent Chan

Vincent Chan — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:43:23 +0000

In your social web laundry list, I would like to add voting and rating, too. I agree that Solution 5 is tough but Craigslist is a famous example of this model. I wonder who else can do the same thing again.