Facebook so far has two influential innovations in social apps: mini-feed and open social platform. The mini-feed is a passive messaging system that constructs a social sensory mechanism. This feature is so successful in creating viral effect that it becomes a widely copied feature as well.
The good: the sweet-spot of mini-feed is the social messaging to enhance users' social sensory capability. It makes a lot of sense to be notified that "Nikki and Alan are now friends" and "John was challenged to a movie quiz!". (Beacon and privacy are a separate issue)
The bad: turning the mini-feed into a personal activity log. It happens on some copycats when the copiers missed the point that social messaging is about what happened on other people who are relevant to you. It's not about "I installed this stupid facebook app on Tuesday 9:34pm and found it's actually really fun". What you care about is to share this app with friends, not yourself.
The ugly: making mini-feed overloaded to the users. The feed is bulky and no longer "mini". The worst scenario is it gets quickly spammed and becomes useless. Facebook started to suffer this problem when the user couldn't digest huge amount of social messages mixed with lots of non-sense ads. The obvious simple solution is to limit the categories of emitted social messages and prioritize them. The ultimate solution is to create intelligent agents that will help the user to process and filter the surrounding social messages.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Saturday, January 5, 2008
What is the social app?
The social app is the media.
Social apps are often perceived as tools. However, it is the social usage of such tools that ultimately delivers the social experiences, and all social experiences must be interpreted in corresponding cultures. In McLuhan's media theory, the bridge between tools and cultures is the media. Therefore, the social app actively used in social context ultimately is the media. This media centric social computing model is depicted below:
As a fan of digital photography, I process RAW photos with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. The two tools are capable of delivering best possible personal experience for me. However, these Adobe tools are not social apps as there is no social experience involved in my usage. To share my personal experience with others, I post some processed photos onto Flickr. Flickr as a social app is the media for social interactions. If nobody visits my Flickr page, namely, no social usage, Flickr would be merely my personal photo storage media and won’t be anything better than my USB hard drive.
My Flickr social experience is interpreted with the culture coined by the digital photographer community at Flickr. One social norm any careful user can figure out is the photo “dressing code”. To get respect by pro eyes, usually photos need to “dress up” by post-processing. “Naked” unprocessed photos are considered non-professional and novice. Also in Flickr culture, the social value system is carried by the host sub-cultures of the peers. Photographers participated at the same group (e.g. 50mm lens, surrealism) would be more easily appreciate each other’s work and behavior.
The media is the bridge connecting cultures and tools. The active social app, in the form of media, is able to change our cultures gradually. Flickr changed the culture in photographer community. The social value system for judging a photographer is no longer impacted by the person’s profession and professional credential. Nobody cares if you are a professional photographer for living and how many awards you've received in photography contests. At Flickr, only your works speak.
“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” – Marshall McLuhan
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
When usability is useless
A common mistake in social apps is to design usability with a common conventional objective - efficiency for task fulfillment. Indeed, efficiency is the central theme of the mainstream productivity tools (e.g. word processor, spreadsheet, google search, nextag price comparison, etc.). However, usability merely for efficient user experience is useless in the context of delivering rich social experience because now we live in the web.
Facebook in early days was an CRM (collegemate relationship management) tool. In the sense of usability, the user experience was comparable to enterprise CRM (customer relationship management). The site was designed for efficient task fulfillment in profile management, friend management including a workflow for add-friend request and approval, and an inter-friend messaging system. The social experience, unfortunately, was relatively poor comparing to rival myspace until facebook embraced many third-party mini-apps. A significant number of popular facebook apps are dedicated to delivering social experience (e.g. X me, food fighting, SuperPoke, etc.). These very sociable time wasters have nothing to do with efficiency but actually destroy the productivity in user experience, making the usability for efficiency and productivity totally useless.
SuperPoke at my facebook profile page.
Conventional usability might be inadequate in describing social experience for social apps. In addition, we need to emphasize sociability aspect and create a more human web environment to live in.
Facebook in early days was an CRM (collegemate relationship management) tool. In the sense of usability, the user experience was comparable to enterprise CRM (customer relationship management). The site was designed for efficient task fulfillment in profile management, friend management including a workflow for add-friend request and approval, and an inter-friend messaging system. The social experience, unfortunately, was relatively poor comparing to rival myspace until facebook embraced many third-party mini-apps. A significant number of popular facebook apps are dedicated to delivering social experience (e.g. X me, food fighting, SuperPoke, etc.). These very sociable time wasters have nothing to do with efficiency but actually destroy the productivity in user experience, making the usability for efficiency and productivity totally useless.
SuperPoke at my facebook profile page.
Conventional usability might be inadequate in describing social experience for social apps. In addition, we need to emphasize sociability aspect and create a more human web environment to live in.
Friday, December 14, 2007
The 7th sense and intelligent client
I never waste my time on the sponsored links at my gmail client, but cannot avoid a glance on the web clip pulled from my del.icio.us subscription (pic below). After fighting through possible Google or del.icio.us ad keyword filtering algorithms, sometimes it's dumb smart as I keep "social" and "web2.0" two tags on the subscription.
This is an example of the rudimentary intelligent client at the 4th-tier with a service mashup (simply Google + del.icio.us at RSS level). In Marshall McLuhan's concept, technology, or this case in specific - the 4th-tier client, is an extension of human body. The client creates a digital human sensory system after seeing, listening, smelling, tasting, touching, and possible psyche power (the 6th sense). Technology builds up the human peripheral of the 7th sense for our cognition and perception at our digital environment.
Like our basic human sensory system, we can also develop the adaptive filtering capability in our 7th sense. In vision sensory, we can focus on the display items during window shopping, and totally ignore the reflective images on the glass (try to shoot a photo and see what you got). Similarly, I always unintentionally ignore Google ad sense content. My 7th sense was eventually trained in my brain by past negative experience (ad sense content is mostly noise to me).
PM's and developer's job is to relieve human burden at the 7th sensory, bottom line is to avoid the negative brain training for ignorance. Therefore, machine cooperated effective adaptive filtering should be built into the client, making the client intelligent. From technology side, semantic web (web3.0) will pave the path. Thereafter, the semantic powered intelligent agents (web4.0) will achieve higher level of machine intelligence, making sense for our 7th sense.
Mobile devices are naturally perfect human peripherals. The current widget trend will ease the construction of intelligent mobile clients. We will see the heated-up battle field of social apps on mobile world.
This is an example of the rudimentary intelligent client at the 4th-tier with a service mashup (simply Google + del.icio.us at RSS level). In Marshall McLuhan's concept, technology, or this case in specific - the 4th-tier client, is an extension of human body. The client creates a digital human sensory system after seeing, listening, smelling, tasting, touching, and possible psyche power (the 6th sense). Technology builds up the human peripheral of the 7th sense for our cognition and perception at our digital environment.
Like our basic human sensory system, we can also develop the adaptive filtering capability in our 7th sense. In vision sensory, we can focus on the display items during window shopping, and totally ignore the reflective images on the glass (try to shoot a photo and see what you got). Similarly, I always unintentionally ignore Google ad sense content. My 7th sense was eventually trained in my brain by past negative experience (ad sense content is mostly noise to me).
PM's and developer's job is to relieve human burden at the 7th sensory, bottom line is to avoid the negative brain training for ignorance. Therefore, machine cooperated effective adaptive filtering should be built into the client, making the client intelligent. From technology side, semantic web (web3.0) will pave the path. Thereafter, the semantic powered intelligent agents (web4.0) will achieve higher level of machine intelligence, making sense for our 7th sense.
Mobile devices are naturally perfect human peripherals. The current widget trend will ease the construction of intelligent mobile clients. We will see the heated-up battle field of social apps on mobile world.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Where is the front-end?
Can you define the front-end for the web architecture? You did know the front-end, but probably you don't know where it is today.
Check out the job posts for "front-end" web developer positions by Ning, Meebo, Jaxtr, or startups alike, the skillset is no longer Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator. Sorry, no designers please. The hiring managers look resumes for ajax, hand coding XHTML, CSS, plus PHP, or Java, Ruby-on-Rails, and even SQL. Quite a lot "back-end" buzzwords mixed with "front-end" technologies.
The 3-tier web architecture was the dominating paradigm in web1.0 time. The dumb thin-client, the browser, acts as the front-end and is responsible for presentation only. The centralized back-end services forms isolated web islands. Web2.0 movement, specially the social aspects and requirements, is driving an architectural paradigm shift, creating the continent effect. What we see is a 4-tier web architecture and the "front-end" concept might become obsolete.
The new web paradigm has much stronger flavor of SOA (service-oriented architecture):
Check out the job posts for "front-end" web developer positions by Ning, Meebo, Jaxtr, or startups alike, the skillset is no longer Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator. Sorry, no designers please. The hiring managers look resumes for ajax, hand coding XHTML, CSS, plus PHP, or Java, Ruby-on-Rails, and even SQL. Quite a lot "back-end" buzzwords mixed with "front-end" technologies.
The 3-tier web architecture was the dominating paradigm in web1.0 time. The dumb thin-client, the browser, acts as the front-end and is responsible for presentation only. The centralized back-end services forms isolated web islands. Web2.0 movement, specially the social aspects and requirements, is driving an architectural paradigm shift, creating the continent effect. What we see is a 4-tier web architecture and the "front-end" concept might become obsolete.
The new web paradigm has much stronger flavor of SOA (service-oriented architecture):- Tier 1 - data tier. Instead of conventional local storage, remote web storage as the repository service is getting popular (Photobucket, Amazon S3, Google OpenSocial Persistence, etc.).
- Tier 2 - platform tier. Companies deliver the core competence as service platforms with open APIs (mostly RESTful APIs). Check out how Marc Andreessen clarified the three levels of platforms.
- Tier 3 - application tier. The application can be conventional website, but more interestingly, it can be a situational mashup of services supplied by platforms. Moreover, the mashup itself can happen on certain platforms like Ning. Technically, the app mashup can be implemented either at client side with ajax, or at server side with mashup services. There is no clear distinction between front-end and back-end at application tier regarding the functionality.
- Tier 4 - client tier. The conventional dumb client is pushed here. However, given the power of client processing capability, the client is no longer dumb but becomes more intelligent when empowered with client-side application codes (e.g. Javascripts or Actionscripts).
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
From islands to continent
In May 2007, Facebook announced open api to the developer community, the event triggered the subsequent open api race: Myspace, Ning, Meebo, Zillow, LinkedIn ... everyone suddenly claims to be an open web platform.
In my opinion, this web revolution is driven by the way we want to live in the web. The current Internet landscape is basically formed by islands interconnected by ferries (hyperlinks). Some islands have very dense populations but still isolate from other islands. The objective of the site is to turn you into an islander (user acquisition), make you settled down there (user registration), and stay as long as possible (user retention), and hope you enjoy your information hunting in your lonely islander life (user demand fulfillment).
The web landscape start to morph into continent from social aspects. In social networks, you constantly interact within your social groups. Islander life becomes quite stone-aged as you maintain friends at Facebook, expand your professional network at LinkedIn, share hobby photos at Flickr, all in three isolated social groups even there is quite valuable overlap in your physical acquaintance. For your social life, you want to live in mega-cities at connected, merged, blended continents. Your identity will surpass the site identity. Your social interactions will go beyond the site boundary. Your continental social experience is the center of the universe, not the site.
Technically, the continent construction is addressed by social app interoperability with the effort of opening up each platform. A social app mashup layer above individual platforms will deliver boundless social experience. Alternatively, recent Google's OpenSocial initiative attempts to construct bridges to interconnect the islands. Exciting technology. Regarding the practical execution, you can sense the challenge given the island analogy.
In my opinion, this web revolution is driven by the way we want to live in the web. The current Internet landscape is basically formed by islands interconnected by ferries (hyperlinks). Some islands have very dense populations but still isolate from other islands. The objective of the site is to turn you into an islander (user acquisition), make you settled down there (user registration), and stay as long as possible (user retention), and hope you enjoy your information hunting in your lonely islander life (user demand fulfillment).
The web landscape start to morph into continent from social aspects. In social networks, you constantly interact within your social groups. Islander life becomes quite stone-aged as you maintain friends at Facebook, expand your professional network at LinkedIn, share hobby photos at Flickr, all in three isolated social groups even there is quite valuable overlap in your physical acquaintance. For your social life, you want to live in mega-cities at connected, merged, blended continents. Your identity will surpass the site identity. Your social interactions will go beyond the site boundary. Your continental social experience is the center of the universe, not the site.Technically, the continent construction is addressed by social app interoperability with the effort of opening up each platform. A social app mashup layer above individual platforms will deliver boundless social experience. Alternatively, recent Google's OpenSocial initiative attempts to construct bridges to interconnect the islands. Exciting technology. Regarding the practical execution, you can sense the challenge given the island analogy.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
We live in the web
web1.0: we use the web
web2.0: we live in the web
web2.0: we live in the web
The fundamental distinction of web2.0 is that the web is no longer a single user experience such as content search, price comparison, booking airline tickets, etc. Web experience now becomes a pervasive social experience, as long as there are user-to-user interactions or communities involved in site.
Social networks (myspace, facebook), social media (flickr, youtube), and social bookmarks (digg, del.icio.us) are obvious social applications for delivering social experiences. However, social apps are not necessarily fancy web2.0 inventions. In fact, some old web1.0 applications are extremely social. ebay is a community centric site where the feedback scores are its core asset in defending competitors (yahoo and amazon). Virtually all the online forums are very rich in social experiences, specially when the user starts to post and spends hundreds of hours in the community.
Believe or not, we live in a hyper-reality in that the artificial reality may seem more real. Watch out, our social life is engineered by social apps whenever and wherever we live in the web. Achieving healthy outcome from "social engineering" with best possible commercial gain, however, is not an easy task, if not impossible.
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