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

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
A decentralized system can pick right solution
With easy way for information to be aggregated across system
Example: votes on Digg

7. Enable Serendipity
Don’t make navigation all about popularity
Access to some popular stuff (keep this fast moving)
Make the “long tail” accessible
Popularity as a jump off point to other ways of exploring
Provide personalization
Recommendations using collaborative filtering
Similar tags, content, others
Ad-hoc groups?

8. Most of all, allow for play

Things to try at home!
Create an account on myspace.com
Read Emergence, Wisdom of Crowds
Play a Multiplayer Online Game (WOW, Second Life)
Play with an API (try GoogleMaps API)
Try a mobile social application (DodgeBall)
Ask your friends what they find “fun” on the web

Questions? www.rashmisinha.com www.uzanto.com

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Designing for social sharing

by Jonathan Boutelle on Sep 21, 2006

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