SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

Diversity and social design

In a post last week, Adrian Chan called out claims that competitive motivations are predominant in human nature. One such quote comes from Louis Gray, writing on the need for more meaningful metrics than followers. “Humans have this innate sense of need to be ahead of all others, to measure themselves, and deliver some level of self-assigned worth thanks to what are questionably valuable statistics.” Adrian rightly observes that, “it’s not humans or human nature that are ...

Identity, Privacy and Differences for Women Online

Lately I have been thinking a lot about identity online and how things like age and gender affect how you approach projecting an online identity. Working with a startup that is creating opportunities for kids to be digital citizens with ownershop and accountability for their online identities made me wonder about what should be encouraged and what tools we need to be creating, implementing, educating people about when it comes to managing who they are and how they will be seen online. Can teachi...

The revival of groups in the age of the network

In a recent blog post, David Weinberger writes about how networks have surpassed groups in recent years, as ways of defining social connections online. “In the past decade, we’ve gone from talking about social circles to social network. A circle draws lines around us. Networks draw lines among us.” Social network messaging, where communication centers around the individual user (such Facebook and Twitter), have rocketed to prominence, far ahead of group-based tools (such as ...

From followers and game mechanics to more valuable social functionality

Some interesting perspectives appeared this week on game mechanics in social media and the corrupting devaluation of social systems, user experience, and metrics that seems to accompany follower counts, foursquare check-ins, and other numerical incentives to use. I just want to throw in my two cents from a social interaction design perspective. I agree that the simplicity of incentive models predicated on growing your numbers (and status) exist. (What I’ve called the appar...

From followers and game mechanics to more valuable social functionality

Some interesting perspectives appeared this week on game mechanics in social media and the corrupting devaluation of social systems, user experience, and metrics that seems to accompany follower counts, foursquare check-ins, and other numerical incentives to use.I just want to throw in my two cents from a social interaction design perspective. I agree that the simplicity of incentive models predicated on growing your numbers (and status) exist. (What I've called the apparency problem in social m...