Upon designing a social application, we need to focus on three main social ingredients that make up the recipes for social interactions:
1) Role: the person's acting role within the community.
2) Relation: the inter-person relationship.
3) Re/action: the action/reaction behavoir under certain relationship.
At flickr, it's easy to see two different roles: content producers and content consumers. However, there are social roles that sometimes may not be quite obvious, such as newbies, fans of certain photographers, subject specialists, gear lovers, critique, moderators, etc. Definitely the same person may assume multiple roles, and roles of the same person can be shifted from time to time.
Relationships are formed and shaped by connecting roles among people. A subject specialist on seascape photography, or a gear lover collecting Canon lens is likely surrounded by newbies. Fans would enjoy reading quality critiques. Reputable moderators would settle the flame generated by the hostile commenters. A community cannot be well forms if certain important relations are missing.
Re/action makes the social dialog and keeps the relation live. Re/action behavior is conducted under social norms. Social features in the sense of tools can help the formation of social norms. Spam filter can fend off intruders in bad relations. Thumb-up, dig, or kudo as reaction can accumulate social equity and promote healthy relations. Beyond the tools functionality, like any society, the action/reaction behavior at the end collectively forms the culture. Users make the culture through the app. App itself won't make the culture.
Successful social apps should allow users to find out easily:
1) This is the right place for me as my role can fit into the community.
2) Based on my preferred acting roles, I can bring in and extend my existing relations from physical world if needed, and establish new relations at the virtual world.
3) I can act/react in my comfortable zone when interacting with other people in my preferred social graph.
To make 1,2,3 happen, besides building the right social features from the tool angle, human factors are more significant as they shape the culture. Checkpoint: Do you have dedicated community managers? Are you able to promote and encourage loyal users who have been taking moderator roles?
