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Bootstrapping your niche is easier if you leverage existing motivation.How do you bootstrap your social site if you’re targeting a group that doesn’t yet use software (or doesn’t seem interested in using software)? While software designers can often see how useful their tool can be, normal users aren’t so prescient. How do you get them Go to site
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- » Passionates
- Robert Scoble has a nice piece on “passionates”, people who are early adopters of technology. He says that companies need to focus on passionates in order to drive their business forward, as non-passionates just don’t care enough to share and promote your stuff as well. He makes a really good point: it’s better to have
- » Interface Design Principle: Let people learn more
- I received an email that was supposedly from Slideshare. I don’t know if it really is from Slideshare, but it’s a devious email either way. Here is a screenshot: As you can see, there is a single link in the email. It is a confirmation link, meaning that if you click on it then you
- » Newburyport Meetup this week, now with talks!
- This Thursday we’re holding the next North Shore Web Geeks Meetup, our monthly meeting for web geeks who live up in in Northern Mass/Southern New Hampshire. This month we’re changing to a new format. So far we’ve been completely unformatted…everyone simply showing up and talking for a while. This has worked out well, but it
- » Social design: from customer service to innovation
- Boston.com has a nice story on the growing trend of companies keeping real-time tabs on what their customers say on the Web: Hurry up, the customer has a complaintBy using services like Twitter and Google blogsearch, companies can quickly respond to people who vent their frustrations. In some cases, they can actually provide real customer
- » Co-evolving
- I heard a term the other day that I really liked: co-evolve. It was said in the context of humans and technology…humans and technology co-evolve together. In other words, we change technology by creating it, and then it changes us as we use it. Many times when we talk about it we talk from the
- » Bill Gates upset with Windows Usability
- This is just too juicy to not share with everyone. Here’s a 2003 email from Bill Gates in which he vents his frustration with the Windows interface…in quite excruciating detail. Epic Bill Gates email rantMy favorite bit: “This time I get dialogs saying things like “Open” or “Save”. No guidance in the instructions which to
- » Social Design Patterns for Reputation Systems: An Interview with Yahoo’s Bryce Glass (Part I)
- Of all the social software built on the web in the last two decades, none are as important yet as little talked about as reputation systems. Reputation systems have driven the entire business at eBay.com, much of the business at Amazon.com, drives activity at Digg.com, powers the moderation system at Slashdot, etc…and yet for all
- » 5 ways to improve reputation systems
- As more and more companies “go social” (as the NYTimes just did), we’ll see a growing need for well-designed reputation systems. Reputation systems can be defined as systems that help people judge the reputation of others in order to make better decisions about what to buy, who to listen to, or generally what to do.
- » Learning 2.0: The Threat (and promise) of Social Interaction
- The mere threat of social interaction changes our behavior…if you know your work is going to be put on public display, you’ll be much more motivated to make it good.There is a moment in every blogger’s life when they realize that yes, other people are going to read what they have to say. Perhaps they
- » Speaking at 2008 d.Construct
- In September, I’ll be speaking at the dConstruct Conference in Brighton, England. The conference is billed as the affordable one day conference for people designing and building the latest generation of social web applications.Last year, dConstruct sold out in 6 hours!Several reasons why I’m excited: The topic is social. For Bokardoans, you’ll know that this
- » The growing importance of Design
- It’s happening slowly, but surely. Design is becoming news. Take the example of Facebook’s recently redesigned Profile pages. Huge news both for the users of the site as well as the developers Facebook is trying to court. The design decisions made in and around the profile is tantamount to the future of Facebook, who is
- » A simple illustration of social design
- There is a lot of “social” talk these days, whether it’s social media, social marketing, or social design. Frankly, it’s hard to keep track of it all. When I get into a discussion with someone on one of these subjects, I rarely know where it will end up…are we talking about social interaction or something
- » Early reviews of Designing for the Social Web are in!
- Well, Designing for the Social Web has been out for about a month and I’m happy to report that the early reviews are positive. I can’t tell you how nervewracking it is to have a book out there…it’s such a mix of emotions generally…will they find it useful? Will they like it? Will they tell
- » Interface design, writing, and sincerity
- Over time, I’m having more and more conversations about the similarities between interface design and writing. Here’s a great quote from George Orwell, who wrote 1984 and Animal Farm, that made me instantly think of interface design. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s
- » Designing for the Social Web: Signs of Life
- It has long been known that savvy restaurants use a bag of tricks to build buzz and interest. One trick is to seat early customers near windows so that people passing by will think the place is full. This has the effect of making the place seem full as people usually can’t see the empty
- » More on the Usage Lifecycle: Lifecycle Messaging
- A great example of the Usage Lifecycle in practice.The other day I wrote about the idea that people go through a progression as they use your software, what I call the Usage Lifecycle. I described how Tripit.com was doing a good job at getting people over the hurdle of Sign-up with several really nice features
- » Designing for the Social Web: The Usage Lifecycle
- The Usage Lifecycle describes how far a person has progressed in using your web application, helping to identify the hurdles someone needs to overcome to become regular, passionate users.Babycenter.com has a really great newsletter. Once you tell the site when you’re expecting, it sends you a weekly newsletter targeted at the specific stage of pregnancy
- » The Importance of Quotes in Books
- As anybody who has ever read anything knows, the most important part of a book are the quotes sprinkled throughout it. Yes, if you are able to pick the perfect quotes to start your chapters with, then you’ve done the majority of hard work in writing. The words that you write yourself, the other 50,000
- » Bootstrapping a Niche Social Network
- Bootstrapping your niche is easier if you leverage existing motivation.How do you bootstrap your social site if you’re targeting a group that doesn’t yet use software (or doesn’t seem interested in using software)? While software designers can often see how useful their tool can be, normal users aren’t so prescient. How do you get them
- » The Power of Niche Social Network Sites
- Just ran across an interesting site the other day: Ravelry.com. Ravelry is an online “knit and crochet community”. A site for knitters? What will they think of next…a site for dog owners? The reason why these sites seem so alien is because they support communities that we often don’t see. My wife is a knitter,