web 2.0 - updated presentation

Yesterday I was giving a presentation about web 2.0 for a group of Danish CEO's. The core of my web 2.0 presentation is still the question of identity and how identity in a 2.0 world is defined by creation more than consumption. In this presentation, however, I have added a couple of ideas from the Web 2.0 Expo conference in New York.

First of all Barry Libert's S.C.O.R.E approach to involving your customers, and secondly a couple of slides about future trends (1. Web meets world, 2. Gestural interfaces and 3. web 3.0)

Watch or download the presentation on Slideshare:

Web 2.0 presentation

AAAARRRRGH!

I am usually always struck by a mild degree of depression when I come back to Copenhagen after spending time in New York. Usually it helps to stretch out in the couch and read today’s newspaper and slowly get back into the local rhythm.

This was, however, a very bad idea today.

I don’t really know whether I am in a state of chock, despair or outright frustrated rage, but after reading an article in Politiken I just realized that the traditional Danish media or at least the editorial board of Berlingske Tidende seems to have understood nothing and learned nothing of the last five years development on the Internet. What seems to be common sense and ordinary street knowledge for media and advertising people in New York is apparently exotic, dangerous, and threatening lore to the established Danish Media industry.

I am quoting from the paper (which ironically proves my point) version of Politiken:

“Der er grund til at være agtpågivende over for en så stor spiller på markedet som Google. Vi ønsker, at vores egne hjemmesider, ikke Google, skal være indgangen til nyhedsbilledet”, siger Lisbeth Knudsen, koncernchef for Berlingske media.

And Ebbe Dal from Danske Dagblades forening:

Det er udmærket, at Google har nogle motiver om, at de vil udbrede information. Men det bortforklarer ikke, at Google er et af verdens største brands og er udpræget forretningsmæssigt anlagt. Hvis de vil benytte danske avisers stof, så er der tale om en forretningsmæssig handling, og så er der et økonomisk mellemværende mellem Google og aviserne

I could start to argue about the importance of deportalization, co-creating, syndication, transparency, conversation and openness, but I would rather encourage people to read my 11 previous blog posts from the Web 2.0 Expo conference in New York. They somehow perfectly sum up what is wrong with the above two quotes.

Web 2.0 Expo 11 - Second Life gets a second life

We probably all remember the short but brightly burning burst of hype surrounding Second Life. Finally the web had become something that looked like the futuristic vision by authors such as William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Companies, organizations and individuals scrambled to the new virtual worlds for diverse reasons spanning from profit-making, branding and pure curiosity.

Personally I always found the hype somewhat strange. First of all there wasn’t really anything conceptually new about Second Life. Virtual worlds had been around for almost 20 years – although in more primitive shapes, and in many ways Second Life reminded me more of Teledanmark’s failed Opasia initiative than the brave new future of the Internet. Secondly Second Life re-introduced spatiality and bodily presence on the Internet, which in many ways was a medium which has gained success exactly because it transcended spatiality and bodily presence.

Well, not surprisingly the Second Life (virtual worlds) hype did not last long. In a matter of about six months it turned out that there weren’t that many citizens living a second life and companies started to realize that they had created abandoned ghost towns in stead of shining brand castles.

But virtual worlds are not completely dead. In a presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo, Wagner James Au talked about the post hype state of virtual worlds and pointed out that there is still a heart beating in virtual worlds and more specifically in Second Life.

First of all James Au pointed to three different reasons why the hype around virtual worlds never became more than hype:

1. The citizen statistics were heavily over-inflated. Many one-time visitors or non-active citizens in Second Life were counted as active citizens.
2. Companies misunderstood the culture of user creation within Second Life. They didn’t understand that this was a new world with new rules – and these rules were mostly defined by the susers.
3. Companies mistook virtual simulated locations for geographic reality, which is not a super cool thin in a world of instant teleportation and flying avatars.

Overall companies never really understood how Second Life was unique in comparison with good old physical life. Companies and old school advertising executives simply for the first time thought that they understood the Internet because it looked like something they already knew. But basically they did not understand anything. They did not understand that in a virtual world like Second Life you need to leverage the worlds’ unique strengths and characteristics. For example Second Life is about transgressing gravity and physical laws and therefore it makes sense to create applications that address this.

Companies need to understand that you can’t use traditional in-your-face branding techniques in virtual worlds. Companies trying to force-feed their messages to the citizens of virtual worlds will soon experience how teleportation and flying avartars mean that customers are even harder to fixate and engage than in a physical world. Just like in the world of web 2.0 user generated communities companies must learn that branding and communication with customers grows through conversations and through offering the users truly useful applications, services and information which serves their needs in the specific virtual world. It also means that you need to see your brand with new eyes. Nissan may give away free Nissans in Second Life, but who would like to drive a free Nissan when you can buy a reasonably priced but supercool Masserati in the (virtually) next door Second Life neighbourhood?

Just like in the world of web 2.0 companies must also learn that they must passe over control over the branding experience to the users in exchange for genuine user passion and creativity. James Au mentioned the example of Paramount which gave away free Iron Man costumes in Second Life and encouraged users to take pictures and make movies of themselves wearing the Iron Man costume. Of course some of these users behaved wildly inappropriate in their Iron Man costome – almost as bad as Robert Downey Junior in his pre rehab period… But the fact was that the users interacted with the brand in a way which created a strong brand presence and a lot of awareness of the Iron Man movie.

Finally James Au talked about the enterprise level possibilities of virtual worlds. In many ways virtual worlds are actually more suited to things like meetings between business partners and job fairs than direct to consumer marketing.

Web 2.0 Expo 10 - Unleashing the Power of Crowds in Your Business

Sometimes conference presentations are just that: conference presentations. Sometimes conference presentations take you to another level. And then again – but not very often – conference presentation can be somewhat like entering an evangelist church.

In this presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo Barry Libert, CEO of Mzinga introduced the audience to his church. The god was WE, the son was Barry Libert and the Holy Spirit was the conversations that companies need to engage in order to understand WE.

As a secular Dane visiting gods own country the experience was somewhat disconcerting, but the fact was that Barry Libert had a number of forceful statements – not necessarily very new or original, but forceful and convincing.

First of all Libert stated (and I couldn’t agree more) that web Web 2.0 is fundamentally not about technology – it is about enabling companies to be human again – it is about having conversations with their customers. It is no longer about the company, the product or the enterprise – it is about WE. It is a matter of interacting with customers where they are, and on their terms.

This is of course a philosophy which we have known since the Cluetrain Manifesto, but the difference today is that, according to Libert, leading American companies are starting to understand WE. Not least attributable to the fact that Libert himself has convinced a significant number of these companies about the value of WE.

Barry Libert then unveiled his five commandments that must be obeyed by all companies aspiring to enter the heaven of WE.

As Libert said: When you S.C.O.R.E. you win the benefits of WE:

1. Be Social (everything in business is social and about social interactions)
2. Be Co-creative (I don’t necessarily know where to go, so I will accept that you help me develop my company and my products. I accept that my customers are smarter than me)
3. Be Open (start a company blog, join a social network)
4. Be Rewarding (Prize people outside your company for contributing to your company)
5. Be Evaluated (Use surveys, comments and ratings to improve your product)

And that was it. There was no more to it!

I, of course, missed a bit of context and examples from the real world and from real companies that have SCOREd, but I was afraid to be expelled as a heretic from the church of WE so I faithfully kept quiet.

Web 2.0 Expo 9 - Ten tips for managing creative environments

Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson from Adaptive Path spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo about how to manage a creative organization.

Based on a study of several different creative organizations ranging from theatre groups, over symphonic orchestras to a restaurant kitchen Mason and Nelson had created a list of 10 (turned out to be 11) tips to people trying to manage a creative organization.

You can agree or disagree with these tips, and in many cases the experiences from an avant-garde New York theatre group may not be directly applicable to the world of marketing and digital strategies. However, I find it to be and interesting list to keep in the back of your head if you are sitting on top or in the middle of a creative organization.

The 11 tips:

1. Cross train the team. People should understand the entire working of the company.
2. Rotate creative leadership. Change the person who is in charge of projects. Reduces competition because people get to change roles.
3. Actively turn the corner. Creative processes go through 2 phases. Divergence and convergence. Divergence is about opening up. Rules are not that important in this phase. In the convergence phase rules becomes more important. So turning the corner is about actively expressing when we move from the divergence to the convergence phase.
4. Know your roles. When it is production time, everybody needs to know their roles.
5. Practice as a team. Like sports teams.
6. Make your creative mission explicit. As a company or organization, which creative problem are you trying to solve?
7. Kill your darlings softly. Be respectful about what stays in and what goes out. Develop ways to speak when you are killing ideas.
8. Leadership is a service. The creative leader must make sure that creative people have the tools and the environment where they can perform.
9. Generate projects around creative interests. Find work that really engages people. Work with side-projects, because it will engage people and because side-projects can become major projects.
10. Remember your audience. Look around – take a look at your audience or your potential audience.
11. Celebrate failure. To be creative you must try things and some of them will fail. It is important to be able to talk about failure and learn from failure.

Web 2.0 Expo 8 - Social Marketing

Michael Lazerow, CEO at Buddy media gave a presentation about Social Marketing here at the Web Expo conference.

His presentation can be seen here:

http://www.slideshare.net/lazerow/social-brand-marketing-for-web-20-presentation/

Check it out – especially some of the cases are quite interesting.

Basically Lazerow’s point was that social advertising SUCKS!

It sucks because it just doesn’t work to throw banners in the face of people interacting on Facebook and other social networks. The old advertising model where you basically shout your message to your audience is dead and does not work in social networks.

What works is social marketing which is all about engaging in conversations with your customers. A conversation which can be more or less sophisticated and integrated with your CRM systems, but nevertheless a conversation where your customers participate by their own free will and because it creates value for them.

Lazerow then talked about the App as the new add. Apps are not only Facebook apps, but any kind of social network applications, where you use social components as part of your marketing and communication with your customers. These apps can live in Facebook, Orkut, Bebo, Myspace, Linkedin or even in your own community networks. Apps can also be integrated with existing webservices like iLike, Tripadvisor etc. etc.

Lazerow then showed some interesting Facebook App cases from FedEx, New Balance and Bud Light. Check them out in his presentation.

Finally Lazerow talked about how to generate traffic to your app, which from my perspective actually was the most interesting part of his presentation.

Lazerow basically declared the viral marketing of apps dead. Today there are more than 25.000 apps on Facebook, so the chance of your app becoming a viral success all by itself is almost none. Apps like any other product in a multi-product world must me marketed and it order to have success with your app you need to market it heavily and be willing to pay the cost of this marketing.

Marketing of apps can take place both within and outside the social networks, but Lazerow specifically mentioned that his company often used other popular apps to market their own apps.

Web 2.0 Expo 7 - Filters and Information Overload

OK – I am attending a lot of presentations today at the Web 2.0 Expo, so I will try to shorten down my summaries a bit in order to squeeze them all in…

Clay Shirky – the author of “Here Comes Everybody” – gave a quick keynote presentation, which was about information overload and the filtering of information.

Basically his point was that information overload as a phenomenon has been around since the days of the Gutenberg press, where we encountered a world containing more information than any single human can absorb in a lifetime.

What has changed with the Internet is therefore not information overload, but rather the economics of information overload.

In the pre-internet age publishers of information – be it print, audio or video – had to take a risk when choosing to publish a book, print a newspaper or run a television program. This risk was related to the fact that it was fairly expensive to be a publisher.

This has changed today where the costs of publishing are approaching zero. Today we can relatively risk-free publish anything we like. This means that filtering of good and bad content has moved from being a pre-publishing event to a post-publishing event.

So we are still experiencing information overload, but in stead of having publishers filter our information, we now have number of other services that do the filtering for us. This is services like Google, Spam filters and everything else which helps us sift the relevant from the irrelevant.

It was not super clear exactly what Shirky wished to communicate, but basically his point was that the challenge today is not information overload – the challenge today is to constantly design and re-design filters that can help us navigate in a post-publishing information overload world.

Web 2.0 Expo 6 - Web Meets World

I just came out of Tim O’Reillys keynote speech at the Web 2.0 Expo.

In a speech that ended up on a rather political note, O’Reilly touched upon two themes that are related through the fact that the web is increasingly meeting the world.

The first theme was the changing interrelationship between people, things and events in real life and the virtual world. People meet in real life because of online social networks; people navigate user interfaces using fingers, bodily movements and sound; and people increasingly sell and produce real life products in the online world.

The web is meeting the world in a very physical sense.

This creates huge opportunities for enterprises and companies to use the web solve real life problems and challenges. But this is exactly where companies are failing today, according to O’Reilly – and this was the second theme of his speech. In an age of environmental crises, financial meltdown and global wars, we are still using social media and web 2.0 applications to poke friends, bite zombies or send virtual birthday cakes!

According to O’Reilly great challenges create great opportunities, and we are really facing great challenges today. And web 2.0 and the fact that the web is meeting the world, means that the opportunities to create change are very much present right there in the universe of web 2.0 applications.

O’Reilly then mentioned a number of companies that are actually using web 2.0 to create change in a challenging world:

- Benetech
- Omidyar network
- Google.org
- Amee
- Energy Camp
- Click Diagnostics
- Prosper
- Patientslikeme
- 23andMe

I, of course, agree with O’reilly that we are living in a challenging age and that much more could be done to meet these challenges. But, as opposed to O’Reilly, I actually think that web 2.0 is already being applied to many serious challenges. Of course web 2.0 is being used for silly and stupid social interactions, but the virtual world would be a boring, Stalinistic world without such social glues, which serves a very real purpose – that of getting people to meet and talk together.

Web 2.0 is not a monolithic entity which should only be used for serous purposes. Web 2.0 is a new social structure, which naturally will contain everything from zombie bites to global warming interest groups.

Web 2.0 Expo 5 - Disruption in the Music Industry

My last session today at the Web 2.0 Expo was the brothers Hadi and Ali Partovi from the music service iLike, which according to the brothers is the largest music provider to social platforms such as Facebook, Bebo, Orkut and hi5.

The Partovi brothers were talking about some of the radical changes which the music industry is undergoing these days:

- Albums are being unbundled
- Economic recession
- Squeezed by powerful retailers
- Competing with free (file sharing)
- Digital sales rising, but not enough

But as their own business testifies, the Internet and specifically web 2.0 may have challenged the music industry, but they have also opened up completely new business opportunities.

The Partovi brothers mentioned specifically four areas where there is room for both monetization and innovation.

1. Downloads
2. Artists as channels
3. Streaming
4. Live music


1. Downloads

Trend:
Right now music downloading is moving from the DRM (Digital Rights Management) paradigm to the DRM free paradigm.

Who are the players:
• Itunes
• Rhapsody, Amazon, Napster
• Ringtones: Thumbplay, Jamster

Where does the money come from:
Consumers are paying for downloads

Opportunities:
• Mobile
• Social /enabling discovery through friends
• Syndicated (you can buy music anywhere on the web)

2. Artists as channels

Trend:
• Musicians communicating and releasing music directly to fans
• From albums to continuous release

Who are the players:
• myspace, iLike
• Kyte, Nabbr, ReverbNation

Where does the money come from:
• Advertising
• Subscription

Opportunities:
• Personalization
• Syndication

3. Streaming

Trend:
Streaming is the new downloading

Who are the players:
• Radio: Pandora, lastFM
• Video: Youtube, Yahoo
• On-demand: Rhapsody, iMeem
• Social media: Myspace, iLike

Where does the money come from:
• Advertising
• Subscription

Opportunities:
• Mobile
• Syndication

4. Live Music

Trend:
Rising ticket prices

Who are the players:
• Ticketmaster, LiveNation, Stubhub
• iLike
• Eventful, Songkick, others

Where does the money come from:
• Ticket sales (consumer pays)

Opportunities:
• Personalization: concert alerts
• Syndication: “on tour” notifications
• Social concert tools – invite friends to go to concerts etc. etc.
• Mobile:
o Concert alerts
o Ticket purchase
o Bar codes
o On-site connected experience

Web 2.0 Expo 4 - Gestural/tactile interfaces

Tactile interfaces may not be directly related to web 2.0, but it is, however, in my opinion one of the most interesting developments in user interface design right now.

Here at the Web 2.0 Expo Dan Saffer from Kickerstudio gave a brief introduction to the area of what he called Gestural Interfaces.

First of all, gestural interfaces are not a strange development, because human beings are not really designed to work with a mouse and a keyboard in front of a computer screen. Saffer was quoting David Liddle for saying that: “Wer’e using bodies evolved for hunting, gathering and gratuitous violence for information age tasks like word processing and spreadsheet tweaking.”

Gestural or tactile interfaces are a much more natural way to interact with computers, but these kinds of interfaces creates new challenges.

First of all Saffer talked a bit about the history of touch screens, which basically goes all the way back to the 1970’s. Personally I would actually recommend reading this story in The Economist, which gives a very good overview of the history of touch screens.

But gestural interfaces are more than touch screens. Saffer showed a list of the most common sensors that can be used for gestural interfaces:

• Pressure
• Light
• Proximity
• Acoustic
• Tilt
• motion
• Orientation

When we are starting to use the human body for navigating digital interfaces we need to pay attention to thinks like kinesiology and physiology. Working with computer interfaces and user experience we need to understand the human body and especially the human hands and the human fingers.

Looking at fingers as a navigational tool there are a number of things we should be aware of:

- Fingernails – can be useful but also problematic
- Fake fingernails – are almost always a problem
- Finger oil – greases the screen
- Fingerprints
- (left) handedness
- Accessibility issues
- Wrist support
- Gloves
- Inaccurate (compared to a cursor)
- Attached to a hand aka. Screen coverage (when people are touching with fingers, the hand may end up covering the subject on the screen)

When designing touch interfaces we should generally make sure that the touch target is at least one centimetre wide. There are, however, two tricks to go around this limitation:

1. Iceberg tips: the sensitive area is actually larger than what is seen on the screen
2. Adaptive targets: The interface increases size of targets based on a guess of what the user is going to press (the Iphone does this)

The following standard navigation tools are also problematic in a touch interface, and should be used with care or not at all:

- Cursors
- Mouseovers and hovers
- Double-click
- Right-click
- Selected default buttons
- Undo

Documenting gestures

Saffer talked about some of the problems about documenting touch interfaces in wireframes. Basically he did not have a fixed solution for this, but he recommended many different solutions such as storyboards, architectural visualizations and video clips to document a gestural interface. The problem of course is that true gestural interfaces involves the human body, and therefore the body and its movements need to be part of the documentation of the interface.

Communicating gestures

Another issue concerning gestural interfaces is that people may not even know when they are interacting with a gestural interface. We probably all know the hand dryers or towel dispensers that are operated by an infrared sensor. Sometimes we are simply not aware that the machines are operated by our hand movements, which may result in unsuccessful usage of the dryer or the towel dispenser.

It is therefore important to create gestural interfaces which communicate that they are gestural and at the same time give clues as to how they are operated.

Choosing gestures

Finally Saffer talked about which gestures to choose. He didn’t give any specific advice but kept the advice to the overall conclusion that gestures should be chosen based on three things:

1. The avilable sensors
2. The task that needs to be performed
3. The physiology of the human body

Besides that it is important that the complexity of the gesture should match the complexity of the task at hand, which basically means that very simple commands should also be matched by very simple bodily gestures.

Web 2.0 Expo 3 - People Powered Products

I attended this panel discussion about People Powered Products, which was quite interesting because all of the participants in the panel were succesful entrepreneurs of companies selling customer produced physical products online.

The four companies and panelists were:

Etsy.com
Matt Stinchcomb

Crushpadwine.com
Michael Brill

Blurb.com
Eileen Gittins

Moo.com
Richard Moross

I am running out of time before the next session here at the web 2.0 Expo, so I will simply just drop my top-of-the head notes from this session here:

Gittins:

What we are doing is about three things:

1. Democratizing the tools of production and
2. Democratizing the tools of distribution.
3. Connecting supply with demands.

Stinchcomb:

People don’t want to watch just “what is on”- they want selection. And that is the same for products.

Brill:

In traditional production and distribution processes customers do not have control – they do not have a way to express their creativity.

Gittins:

We are removing the friction in the middle – all of the fat in the production and distribution chain.
We are also more ecological as we are only producing goods, when they are actually demanded.

Moross:

Because of digital technology risk has been removed from the productions chain. You no longer have to produce 10.000 items – today you can produce simply one item.

Stinchcomb:

We didn’t really think community from the beginning. It simply developed by itself. We were simply just very open and transparent. I think the future is all about giving people tools and areas where community can grow, and then not get in their way.

Gittins:

Offline is the new online. We are experiencing how people are using the online environment to actually meet in real life.

Moross:

We have decided not to have our own community tools. We use existing community services like Flickr.

Gittins:

In order to generate trust in our products we have always tried to be physically present at events. Also we have a lot of trust because we have grown through personal recommendations.

Stinchcomb:

People are putting a lot of personality and personal history into the products they are selling on etsy.com. The people who are buying the products buy both the product and that history.

Moross:

A lot of companies create crappy products but excellent advertising. We are trying to move some of our energy from communicating the product to producing the product.

Brill:

Not all products are suited for this model. Some products are sheer mass production products that people will never care about.

Web 2.0 Expo 2 - Designing for Community

My second session on the Web 2.0 Expo was a super interesting presentation by Joshua Porter who is working at Bokardo Design and the author of ”Designing for the Social Web” (a book that is on my shelf and which I am planning to write about on this blog).

Porter’s presentation was split in five main parts which I will quickly run through here:

1. What is community?

First of all Porter defined community as: “A forced move resulting form inefficient ecology of the industrial revolution” – which probably needs an explanation…

Basically community in Porters perspective is about getting back in touch with the people who produce things. In the pre-industrial age people would talk directly to the people who produced things (at least most of the time), but in the industrialized age we lost contact with the producers of goods because mass production and industrialization moved producers, products and consumers away from each other.

Online digital communities are all about re-establishing the link between products, producers and consumers. On Amazon.com for example, people are able to interact with other people around the products which are available on Amazon. And sometimes the producers will join the conversation as well.

Porter also defined communities as something which is related to specific activities. When your are on last.fm the activity is all about music, when you are on Linkedin it is all about professional relations and when you are on Dogster it is all about dogs.

When you as a company are trying to build a community strategy for your customers you should always ask yourself the question: “What exactly are we trying to enable people to do?”

Basically – and I couldn’t agree more – community is not a feature of software, it is about supporting an activity – it is about making people better at their specific activity.

Porter then added more detail to this through the following nine statements:

1. Software doesn’t make communities, people do
2. You don’t create community you cultivate them
3. You probably already have a community
4. Communities change over time
5. Communities need to be managed
6. Community form around activities
7. You can’t own a community
8. Not everyone gets along in a community
9. Communities are about always getting better.

2. Growing your community

Making your community grow is basically all about modelling the interactions that already exist between your potential users/customers:

- How do people currently do it
- What problems do they have
- How do they currently solve them
- Who do they communicate with

And these four questions lead to the guiding question for the company/person trying to design a community:

How can we model this in software?

Porter then described how to develop this model using what he called the AOF method:

First you need to choose an Activity (A) for your community. This may sound pretty straight forward, but in many cases it can be difficult for companies to determine exactly which activities are relevant for their users.

When you have decided on an activity you must find out what kinds of Objects (O) people use for this activity. In the case of Youtube these objects are videos and in the case of Netflix the objects are movies.

Then you need to find out what people do with these objects. This is the verbs of your strategy. In the case of Youtube the verbs are features such as play, rate, share, upload, subscribe, embed etc.

Finally the verbs of your community are what ends up being your Features (F).

When you have settled for your activity, your objects and your features it is time to start growing your community. Porter recommends growing the community outward in the following steps:

- Start with people you know (friends or current customers)
- Get them to speed – get them to use your stuff
- Let them invite the next round of people.
- Get those people up to speed
- Let them invite the next round of people.
- Rinse and repeat

An important element of this growth is the community manager which Porter defines the following way:

1. Responsible for the morale of the community
2. Responsible for greeting new members
3. Responsible for handling incoming complaints, compliments and feedback
4. Responsible for advocating for users with the rest of the team
5. Responsible for watching for and identifying trends in use
6. Responsible for keeping the peace
7. Responsible for enforcing the rules for participation
8. Responsible for evangelizing the software and the community
9. Responsible for growing support documentation.

3. Designing for reputation

Creating a reputation system for your community is all about creating the positive and negative incentives which will make people participate in a positive way towards the collective good of the community. Porter mentioned a number of examples where reputation systems had the opposite effect of what was intended.

For example Amazon.com is creating a list of the most active book reviewers, which has resulted in Harriet Klausner, which is an extremely active bookreviewer on Amazon who on average reviews 5,56 books per day, and has done this for the last many years. This is of course very unrealistic and most of her book reviews are indeed not very useful and are in most cases quite superficial.

The problem about the reputation system is that it only rewards activity and not the quality of the activity, and therefore the total result of the reputation system is low quality book reviews which are not beneficial to the community on an overall level.

Porter mentioned a number of other examples, put pointed to the Yahoo Pattern library, which has a very useful section for companies or people working on a community reputation system.

Yahoo Reputation Pattern Library


4. Dealing with hiccups

Most communities of a certain size will experience hiccups, where the interests of the community (or part of the community) collide with the community manager. Porter mentioned the example of Facebook, which in 2006 created the Newsfeed, which resulted in an uproar among users of Facebook, because it suddenly made somewhat private information very public to all of Facebook’s users. Facebook tried to diffuse the crisis by pointing to the fact that this information was already public, and that Facebook had only created a new way of publishing this information. The problem about the argument was that people on Facebook didn’t see it this way. For them the Newsfeed meant that they were loosing control of their personal information.

The solution to the Facebook Newsfeed hiccup was the creation of a privacy control page in Facebook. In this page users can control which pieces of information they wish to publish in the Newsfeed. At the end of the day only a very small fraction of users is using this functionality, but the tiny fact that this functionality was created totally defused the Newsfeed hiccup.

The conclusion was that very small design details can have huge effects on a community. Small changes of interface design can create uproars and even smaller changes can defuse crisis again.

5. Cultivating passion

Cultivating passion is ultimately what community building is all about.

The task is to create software that makes people better at the activity they’re passionate about. It is not what you sell - it is what you help someone learn that matters.

The conclusion of Porter’s presentation was that communities must be more than mere meeting places for people. A community must be a place where people get together around the things they are passionate about and a place which provides tools that make them better at the activity they are passionate about.

As examples Porter mentioned Dogster.com, which helps dog owners become better dog owners and Patientslikeme.com which helps patients of a number of chronic diseases gain control over their disease through information and measurement tools.

Update: I just got a link to Porters presentation on Slideshare:

Design for Community

Web 2.0 Expo 1 - Documenting Rich Internet Applications

Here is a quick update from the first workshop which I have attended at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

The speaker was John Yesko and the topic was how to document Rich User Interfaces from a User Experience perspective. In other words it was about how Information Architects or User Experience people work with wireframes and documentation in a time where web applications are becoming less HTML-ish and more interactive and fluent.

John Yesko provided a link to his presentation and his cases which can be found here:

Rich User Experience Documentation

Yesko’s presentation was very example based and therefore difficult to summarize easily. But in short, the overall point was that as user interfaces are changing so is the way that we need to describe these user interfaces for developers and clients. Yesko was building on a process model which is very similar to the way we work with website development in Hello Group. The process basically has four steps:

1. User experience brief (containing research, personas, etc)
2. Concept mapping
3. Site structure mapping
4. Wireframing

The most important changes due to Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) are happening in the wireframing phase, but there are also important consequences for the user experience brief and the concept mapping.

Yesko’s overall point was that in the old days of simple HTML websites there were relatively small incremental steps from the wireframe to the design to the actual development. The design basically added color to the wireframe and the development basically put life and interaction into the design.

Today things are different.

Today, in the age of more interactive websites, wireframes have limitations, which means that the final design of the website will typically be qualitatively different from the wireframe. The design needs to take a step away from the wireframe in order to create a truly rich user experience. Similarly the final development of the website needs to take a step up from the final design. Designs are typically static pages in photoshop, whereas a final RIA website is a highly interactive entity with transitions, drag-drop functionality, mouse-overs etc. This means that compared to the old days there is a somewhat larger step from final design to final website.

This new situation means that UX people are faced with new challenges. First of all it means that we need to create better UX briefs and better concept maps, because if the foundation of the project is clear from the beginning, then there is also a greater chance that the overall strategy and philosophy of the projects will survive through the stages of wireframing, design and final development.

Secondly it means that we need to work with new ways of wireframing and documenting the information architecture of the website. Basically Yesko did not come up with a final solution on how to do this, but he provided several different examples. Overall, however, it comes down to moving away from a page based paradigm to a ”multiple states per page” paradigm. This can be done in many ways, but the most common technique is to “explode” the wireframe which basically means that you pull out certain page elements and work through the sub-functionality of this element. So instead of building a wireframe page by page, the wireframe becomes a document containing pages, sub-functionalities, process flows – basically whatever it takes to describe a rich user interface experience.

Personally I was happy to see that a person like John Yesko is grappling with some of the issues that we are also discussing on a daily basis in Hello Group. It shows that the entire UX community is aware of these challenges, but it also shows that there is still no standardized way of working with documentation of rich internet applications.

Web 2.0 bonanza

I am sitting here at Rivington Hotel in New York City getting ready for the O'Reilly web 2.0 expo/conference, which runs from Tuesday to Friday this week. I am planning to blog about the whole event during the week so be prepared for a true web 2.0 bonanza exploding on this blog the next couple of days. Joining me as a guest blogger will be Allan Rechtman - also from Hello Group - who will help me covering workshops or sessions that I am myself unable to attend.

Rock'n Roll 2.0 :-D

New Facebook sucks big time

I have just waisted almost a day of my life trying to create a ”page” in Facebook. In the days of the old Facebook this was fairly easy to do. The usability of Facebook has always been terrible, but creating a Facebook “page” could typically be done in less than half an hour.
But now Facebook has decided to change to “New Facebook” apparently without testing what this means for people like me – trying to create business critical pages for my company. The whole interface is so full of bugs and inconsistencies which means that pages created in the New Facebook does not show when you are not logged in to Facebook (which is the raison d’etre of “pages”) and pages show differently in the old Facebook and in the new Facebook.
Basically Facebook have created a virtual web 2.0 usability monstrosity, which doesn’t really help people like me arguing that companies easily can use applications like Gmail, Google Docs and Facebook as serious business applications. Google may stay in beta for years, but at least their products are not infested with bugs and inconsistencies. Facebook in this way ends up looking like the company it actually is: A company run by a 24 year old CEO growing too fast for the developers to actually keep up with the growth…

Presentation about the consequences of online social networks within organizations

I gave a speech at a VidenDanmark ERFA group meeting Friday September 29, 2008.

I have uploaded the presentation here:

Social Software: Udfordringer og muligheder for videnledelse

The theme of the presentation is how organizations should react to the challenges and opportunities offered by online social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. My overall opinion is that there is a vast abundance of opportunities, but also a number of pitfalls. In this presentation I outline the basics of web 2.0 and online social networks in the first half of the presentation. In the second half I outline some of the pros and cons of social networks within organizations.