Software, Software Development and other Atrocities

This post is a continuation of the post below this one titled Social Networking. Since I wrote that post many things have come to my mind regarding engagement in online communities, particularly social networking sites. One question I see everywhere is how do you create a successful online community or social networking sites? How did Facebook manage to take over MySpace? Why are those sites so popular? What do they have that the others do not?

In my last post I talked about people. People you find in those places. For me they key is finding friends and people I know. For others it could be finding new friends or contacts. But something I did not address in that post was how those people ended up in those places in the first place.

You cannot expect to turn up at one of these sites and find everyone already there waiting for you. Open arms and big smiles, and then you stay there. These communities grow slowly. Users come and go, and if more users keep on coming than going then you have good chances to become a successful community.

So there should be another factor that makes people come and stay in a social networking site. And I guess that is its tools. Good looking, user friendly tools that do not fail, provide security and gain the trust of their users. And if with them you can do cool things you never dreamt of, you'll get thousands people joining, acting like kids with new toys.

When I joined MySpace I really didn't like the looks of it. I could design my own website, by using html, etc... but I didn't have control over everybody else's websites. I like it clean and simple. But I found websites so so ugly and unreadable I wanted to cry. Just the look of their websites prevented me from talking to their owners. But on the other hand, being able to design their own space must have attracted thousands of people. I bet lots of people did not feel intimidated by the fact that they needed to learn html but maybe thought that was something cool to learn. So the same feature attracted some people but prevented others from participating.

Facebook... what can I say. hmm I liked its white and simple style. Everyone's got the same looks in their profiles. The differences depend on the tools people choose to use and of course in the actual content. Another think I like is this easy customization, i.e., adding of applications. You just need to pick an app from a list and voila. Facebook have done various modifications to their platform across the years. Just in a few days they are going to introduce another one in their homepage. I see many people annoyed with these changes, but I do not see them quiting. It must be because those changes work. They are easy to learn and do not interfere with users ongoing interactions.

Twitter... Twitter IS THE PLACE TO BE at the moment. Twitter is very simple, it has a text box and you can enter 140 characters each time. You have followers who read your entries (or tweets) and you can follow other people whose tweets you read. Personally, I see Twitter as a messy, context-less bulleting board. But that is a content issue. As a tool it works. How could it not? It is a simple idea. One thing I like about Twitter is not the Twitter site itself but all these Twitter desktop and mobile clients (Twhirl, TweetDeck, Twibble, etc) which are much nicer than the original site. They use Twitter's feeds and organise them in different ways, for example according to topics.

And if I want to talk a bit more about Twitter I have to talk about content (I think this is the weakest link of Twitter at the moment). Users of Twitter or Twitterers or Tweeterers continuosly develop new conventions of communication. I guess, because they need to put some order into those millions of context-less posts. One of these conventions is the Hashtag. Hashtags are like metadata within the content of tweets. They define "groups" or topics of conversations. For example, if I include #watchmen in my post, I will be creating or participating in a group conversation called watchmen. If you want to know who else is talking about watchmen in Twitter you can search for your hashtag in the hashtags site: #hashtags. I think Twitter has an interesting model for creating and connecting data. 140 character posts which can be interconnected by different kinds of tags. Sounds cool, especially now that the semantic web is getting more attention. Not saying that Twitter could ask people to use semantic web vocabs (nooooooooooo!!!) But twitter's future certainly looks semantic webbish to me... if it is going to survive it needs to improve the quality of their content by adding meaning to it.

So yeah, many things to talk about in this area. New software tools are created all the time and it is hard to keep track. Thing is, we should think on keeping a balance between programming the best, coolest, state of the art applications and seeing what users really want and do with them.