Designing for social sharing

Designing for Social Sharing Rashmi Sinha www.uzanto.com www.rashmisinha.com

browsing alone Attributed to PIMboula on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pimboula/15256153/

Part I: Why NOW?

Who is online

Broadband penetration is at more than 50%

From Pew Internet Research, for US only

Just for fun! 34% men , 26% women 37% of 18-29 yrs old , and 20% of 65 and over go online, on any given day, just for fun… From Pew Internet Research, for US only

6.5 million people

WOW is millions of people with diverse backgrounds collaborating, socializing, and learning while having fun. It represents the future of real-time collaborative teams in an always-on, diversity-intensive, real-time environment. WOW is a glimpse into our future. Joi Ito in Wired Magazine

240,000 users

Wells Fargo StageCoach Island

American Apparel

Four draws of such games

the ability to socialize

an achievement system that gives players an incentive to improve

complex and satisfying strategy that makes combat fun

underlying narrative that players want to learn more about

Many games also update continuously, adding features and addressing user requests

Alone together

Social interaction in online gaming (Ducheneaut et al. 2006)

Surrounded by others. Feel their presence, not interacting all the time

Analogy: Reading book in a cafe

Spectacle: Performing for an audience

Analogy: Playing pinball with others watching

Social facilitation (Zajonc, 1960)

Improved performance in presence of others (even if presence is passive)

Observed even in cockroaches!

Part II Social presence (integration of GTalk with Gmail) Real time collaboration with text documents

DiggSpy: real time updating

Part II: What is social sharing?

This is not it!

Hi I found you while I was searching my network at LinkedIn. Let's connect directly, so we can help each other with referrals. If we connect, both of our networks will grow. To add me as your connection, just follow the link below.

First generation Social Networks (Friendster, LinkedIn…)

How it works

Individuals connected to each other

Relationships can be marked, hubs identified

Concept of six degrees of separation

“ Are you my friend” type of awkwardness

Object mediated social networks “… call for the rethinking of sociality along lines that include objects in the concept of social relations.” Katrin-Knorr Cetina Reference: http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why_some_social.html

Coffee Dance performance Tomatoes

Second generation social networks

Put objects at the center

Social sharing

Tagging

Viral sharing

Social News Creation

Watercooler conversations around our stuff (social networks with objects in between) e.g., Flickr, Yahoo answers

How it works

People share objects and watch others

Social connections are through objects

Formation of social streams of information with emergence of popular, interesting items

Viral sharing (passing on interesting stuff) e.g., YouTube videos

How it works

Individual to individual to individual

Popularity based navigation helps track “viral” items

Tag-based social sharing (linked by concepts…) e.g., Flickr, del.icio.us

How it works

Save & tag your stuff (bookmarks/pictures).

Tags mediate social connections

Formation of social/conceptual information streams. Emergence of popular, interesting items

Social news creation (rating news stories) e.g., digg, Newsvine

How it works

Finding and rating stories

Popular stories rise to top

Objects invite us to

Connect

Play

React

Reach out

Part III: So you want to design for social sharing?

Forget the ipod!

Give up control This is messy!

Beyond hand-crafted IA

Plant the seeds, let people connect

Design for emergent architecture

Part IV: Some principles…

1: Make system personally useful

For end-user system should have strong personal use

Memorable Personal Snippets (e.g., Del.icio.us & Flickr)

Self-expression (e.g., Newsvine)

Social status: Digg

Don’t count on altruism

System should thrive on people’s selfishness

Bite-sized self-expression

Creative self-expression

Artistic expression (Flickr, YouTube)

Humor (YouTube)

Individual piece should be small

Can create sets & lists

Do Mashups

Simple, guessable URLs for everything

Leave room for games & social play

Appreciation

Stalking (some!)

Gossip

2: Identify symbiotic relationship between personal & social

Personal snippets > Social stream

Pictures > Organized by Events

Music > Organized by Playlists

3: Create porous boundary between public & private

Earlier systems

Personal (Personal Desktop Software, e.g., Picasa, EndNote)

OR Social websites (Shutterfly)

Rethink public & private

People share for the right returns

Set defaults to public, allow easy change to private

Give user control

Over individual pieces & sets

Delete items from history

Reset /remove profile

Privacy settings on Flickr

4. Allow for levels of participation

Everyone does not need to create!

Implicit creation (creating by consuming)

Remixing—adding value to others’ content

Source: Bradley Horowitz’s weblog, Elatable, Feb. 17, 2006, “Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers”

Why do people digg? “ commenting, digging, burying comments, typing descriptions, reading hundreds of articles and… … for a lot of nerds, using digg is just a casual free-time activity. Entertaining. Fun. Engaging.”

How to encourage participation

Insights from Social Psychology

Highlight unique contribution

Allow for smaller local groups

Highlight benefit to self from

Highlight benefit to group

Source: Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities, Ling et al. 2005

5. Let people feel the presence of others

What paths are well worn

User profiles / photos

Real-time updating

Like a conversation

Sense that others are out there

What people are digging right now!

6. And yet, moments of Independence…

Choreography: when alone, when part of group

Prevent mobs

Don’t make it too easy to mimic others

Incentives for originality & uniqueness

Allow for alternative viewpoints

Social sharing can lead to tyranny of dominant view

People of a group agree

Viewpoint rises to top (popularity lists, tag clouds)

Create conditions for wise crowds

Cognitive Diversity

Independence

Decentralization

Easy Aggregation

Wise Crowds: Cognitive Diversity

Need many perspectives for good answers

Groups become homogenous

Members bring lesser new information in

Diversity reduces groupthink

Groupthink works by shielding members from outside opinions

Diversity reduces conformity

Chance that you will change opinion to match group

Wise Crowds: Independence

Keeps people’s mistakes from getting correlated (uncorrelated mistakes averaged out)

Encourages people to bring in new viewpoints (diversity)

Concept of Social Proof

Milgram experiment

People assume that groups know what they are doing

Assuming crowd is wise, leads to herd like behavior

Can sometimes lead to good decisions

Information Cascades

Sequence of uninformed choices, building upon each other

Wise Crowds: Decentralization “ A crowd of decentralized people working to solve a problem on their own without any central effort to guide them, come up with better solutions, rather than a top-down driven solution.” Suroweicki

Wise Crowds: Easy Aggregation