Social Networking, It’s All about Me

I started a new assignment implementing an internal community site. That got me to thinking about how are communities different from the other information sharing techniques, such as web, SharePoint, etc. A glance at a social networking site reveals a set of features and functions that are not unique or, in some cases, not very impressive. Social networks are a form of knowledge management systems. They are also content management systems. They are also information sharing and collaboration systems. We see email functions, blogs, web pages, tagging (adding Meta data), RSS (Real Simple Syndication), WYSIWYG editors, etc.

These have been around, in some form, for some time. It is not the specific features or combination of features that are unique and different. It is the context and point of view that have made social networking sites popular. With the previous tools (web pages, content management systems, knowledge management systems, file folders, etc) someone set up the hierarchy and structure based on a corporate point of view. This could be an information architect (if you were lucky). More likely, there is no defined structure and naming conventions. Even if this was easy to learn, intuitive, and everyone in the organization could quickly understand and use it, as more information and documents are added becomes a big problem.

Adding a search engine, tagging documents, and storing virtual links (or worst copies) in multiple places are only bandages. The real problem is that people think differently. Memory is experience based. People sort and categorize information by comparing to new experiences to what they already know. Social networking has tapped into that by shifting the context from a document definition or business process view to providing users with tools to add, label, and link content based on their frame of reference, themselves.

People do not think of themselves as lines on an organization chart. Almost all work is cross functional, team based, or project focused. Social networking supports this, starting with the user profile. A number of knowledge management projects in companies tried to capture the information about skills and experience. They had limited success because they started with the corporate view and labels. Then people were told to fit into the predefined slots. The user profile in a social networking system is how you think about you.

The other key to success is providing the tools to allow information to find you instead of you having to track it down. A document and data centric view makes you figure out how things are labeled, where they are stored, and if you have access to the right systems. Using tagging, RSS, and email notification, a social network provides a simple set of tools to enable information to find you. Unlike a web page or a database, where the Meta tags are not readily visible, with social networks, all the tags are visible, along with a ranking of each. That allows a user to see quickly how others categorize the content they are entering and to map those terms to terms they use.

Attended WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference

I attended the WebGuild Web 2.0 conference, 29 Feb. They expected around 300 people and were surprised to find 1200 attending. They had two keynote speakers and sessions divided into four track. I found it a mixed experience. The sessions I attended ranged from very informative to useless. A key item missing was any definition or explanation for what is Web 2.0 and what was just an improvement over the typical website and experience.

The opening Keynote was by Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia. While the WebGuild blog posting called the talk fantastic, I would describe it as interesting. He talked about the background and philosophy of Wikia and Wikipedia. It seemed a bit “canned”. The one interesting piece was their newly launched Wikia Search. It will be worth following this effort to see if crowdsourcing and providing open access to the code and algorithms will create a search engine that can match the money and clever young folks at Google.

The second Keynote was an interview with Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist. As usual, Craig was very easy going and low key while still engaging. He was very open about the design and philosophy that drive the folks at Craigslist. It was good to hear someone resist the urge to jump onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon. His brief description of his current role as a customer service representative was amusing and served to emphasis the focus on the customer.

I found Steve Souders, former Chief Performance Yahoo!, and now working on web performance at Google, informative and inspiring. Most of the tips and techniques he talked about are of use to the current web site designers. It was good to hear about studies validating what the user centered design people say about page downloads. Bloated and poorly designed pages download slower and people notice. The Google study showed a loss of 20% of the traffic when the page download time increased by just one half of a second. For them, traffic equals revenue, so download speed does matter.

I attended a panel discussion on “Designing Search Friendly Sites”. The members of the panel were all very informative. There was Paul O'Brien, Marketing Director, Zvents, Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing, and Charles DiFazio, Software Engineer, Google. Andreas Mueller, CTO, Bloofusion was the moderator. The comments and recommendations covered the common items, such as link backs, content, keywords, and the importance of building a site that the search engine can crawl. A big warning was issued to the designers rushing to create Web 2.0 sites using Ajax, Flash, content that requires a login, images, and multimedia applications. Charles reminded us that if the site was set up so that a blind person can access the information, then a search engine crawler will be about to find it.

The panel discussion on “Designing the Mobile Web” was not as useful for me. The members of the panel were knowledgeable and were working in the area. Julie Ask,
Vice President & Research Director, Jupiter Research moderated and the panel members were: Barbara Ballard, Founder & President, Little Springs Design, Ain Indermitte, Senior Developer Relations Manager, Nokia, and Brad Lassey, Mozilla. The take away was that mobile phones in the US are becoming more functional and that people are using them to access the web. Once again, we are reminded that people need a Smart phone or one of the high end models. As these become more affordable, companies need to plan and develop ways for the phone user to access information. Some of the current web design items, such as cookies, Ajax, and even metrics do not work well when people use the phone to access the web. The work done by Apple with the iPhone, Nokia, and Google’s Android operating system for phones were pointed to as indicators.

It was good to attend. From the topics, especially the sessions I did not attend, it appears most of what could be thought of as Web 2.0 revolved around Social Media oriented work. I believe that Web 2.0 is more than just FaceBook and YouTube. What it turns out to be, only time will tell.

Technorati tags: web design; Web 2.0; web apps; business strategy;

The Future of Web Apps, Panel Discussion at the monthly WebGuild Meeting

There was an interesting panel discussion last night at the WebGuild monthly meeting. John Rowell (Chief Technology Officer, OpSource), Brad Neuberg (Developer Advocate, Google Gears), Raju Vegesna (Evangelist, Zoho), and Bill Scott (Director of UI Engineering, Netflix) gave their impressions on were we currently are on the web and the trend toward Web Apps. The trend over the last two years has been MashUps, where you build a Web App that uses information and the infrastructure of a larger application. Two common examples are small Web Apps that running inside Facebook and Web Apps that use data from Google Maps.

This trend has been gaining ground under the term Software as a Service (SaaS). OpSource and AdventNet's ZoHo are good examples. OpSource is targeting the developers at both small and large companies. They provide the infrastructure to support the Web App. The companies can now focus their resources on the product and let OpSource worry about servers, storage, security, backups, extensibility, and all the other large, complex issues that come with owning the infrastructure.

Adventnet's ZoHo product line implements both the infrastructure and the Web Apps sitting on it using this separation approach. Using a common infrastructure, web App teams only need to focus on the features and functions of their products. Each product is light weight and the development is customer driven. They only add features and functions when they are requested by the customer. The infrastructure team creates and maintains the support systems. This enables them to roll out new Web Apps and make changes to the existing Web Apps quickly.

Google is a big player in the move to open source tools and applications that make it easier to use the web. Google Gears is an application that enables you to use the data from an on-line service when you are not on-line. Basically it creates a database on the client system used to cache the data from the on-line service. When your system does connect back to the on-line service, the data is automatically synced. While a little different, it proves a developer with a toolkit to create an App that uses the infrastructure of an existing on-line service, such as Google Maps, without being part of that company.

At first, Netflix's interest in this area was puzzling. Their focus is matching movies to customers and enhancing your movie experience. They have a huge database about movies and their customers. Opening that up to outside Web App developers is not the driving factor. With well over seven million subscribers, the infrastructure extensibility and the ability to create and deploy new features are complex problems. Redesigning the system to follow the model of separating the infrastructure from the Web Apps will help them handle the current and future demands. It will also make it easier for them to move into direct distribution.

For the Web App developers and the companies that own both the infrastructure and the Web Apps, this is a great move. As on-line services and applications grow, the infrastructure complexity, cost, and extensibility have become serious issues. This model is not new. For years, the satellite designer had used a common data bus that allowed different components to plug-in and communicate. We are now seeing the concept of the web as a big data bus start to drive the thinking. The issues of costs and monetization are quietly being discussed inside the major on-line service providers. They are creating APIs to allow controlled access to their data and functions. The trend of Web App developers creating products without large and expensive infrastructure investments will continue to grow. At some point, the people spending huge sums of money on the infrastructure will a way to collect payment form those developers. If you have a closed system, like Facebook, that becomes easy. The current movement is toward more open systems and not developing more closed gardens. It will be interesting to see how the usage and payment are tracked and how the costs are allocated.

Technorati tags: web design; software management; web apps; business strategy;

Poor designers choose to user the Mailto function

I was designing websites when the Mailto: option started appearing. For the people that were doing simple sites, it provided a way to let the user send mail. Unfortunately the spammers started using web crawlers to search for Email addresses. Today, web designers that continue to use this are either (1) forced to do it by their client (2) can only use simple drag and drop tools (3) are either clueless or lazy. Creating a form and processing the request on the server is both safer and allows you to send the information to many different addresses. It also has the advantage of hiding the Email address from the spammers. There is no excuse for continuing to use a Mailto:. You can easily get a copy of a number of form processing programs that can be easily modified to fit you needs. When I pointed out to one IT manage that using this option increased the amount of spam, he replied that they used an email filtering program. He was not bothered by the fact that he had to use an expensive solution, which requires continuous updates, to solve a simple and easy problem. I believe in using a good design, not wrapping a bad design with more software.



Technorati tags: Web Design; security; internet

“Email a Friend” especially a Spammer

After reputable companies became concerned about privacy, they started to add a privacy policy to their websites and to switch to an “opt in” process for marketing email. That meant that the marketing folks could only send you an email if you gave them permission. Some clever marketing folks developed the “Email a Friend” function to get around this annoyance.

The function has several names but they all work in a similar manner. Selecting this feature, you are presented with three input boxes. You are asked to put your email address, the email address of your friend and some clever words to send to the friend. The function creates an email from you to your friend, adds some marketing message about how great the product/site/service/etc is on this page, and adds your comment. Since the email appears to be from you, then the marketing folks can weasel around the privacy issue.

Of course this is ripe for abuse and with a few lines of code can be turned into a great non-traceable spambot or even used to flood an email and perhaps create a denial of service. If the clever spammer puts an email address from an employee of the company, it adds even more fun. Since the company email server sent it out, it becomes hard to claim that someone else sent it. In addition to flooding an email box, a truly angry spammer can also add some very abusive and profane comments in the little text box.

Should this little tool cause an email server to clog and possible to shut down, then the target may call in the lawyers. While you may be able to claim that the person in the “from” line did not send out the email, you are still responsible for the misuse. If you want to appear as a leading edge technology company or want to sell technology services to other companies, the bad press alone will cause a large chunk of revenue.

In a company I worked at, we had one of these popup on a website. When confronted with the potential danger, the marketing person’s response was that very few people use it and no one has abused it yet. Some how leaving a loaded gun on the street and claiming that it was Ok since no one was shot yet seemed a bit weak. After a chat with our legal folks, a quick directive landed on the desk of that marketing person’s top management ordering that it get removed immediately.

Somehow adding a function to one company website that is reckless and dangerous, has no measurable benefits, and is rarely used by the customers does not strike me as a good idea.

Technorati tags: Web Design; security; internet