SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

Designing for dates: when contact needs a helping hand

I got into social media more or less on the heels of running an online dating service in the late 1990s. It was the san francisco bay area franchise of matchmaker.Com, and I was co-owner with a friend. I made no money on the experience, in part because of our short-sightedness, in part because we were too early. We were the first in the franchise to permit user photos. Yes you read that right. A survey of online dating pictures was making the rounds a while back. It set me to w...

Bing Likes Like, But Does it Mean We Do

Last week Microsoft Bing and Facebook announced Facebook is now part of Bing search. The part that has been touted the most is Bing's inclusion of Facebook Likes. For me this is really surprising as Like has very little value, what little value is has is confounded by it lacks any explicit understanding of intent. Search is about finding what is being sought, which is much harder than it sounds, particularly with massive amounts of information, or when searching across contexts and influence...

Zero-sum social

Ralph Koster’s comprehensive presentation about social game mechanics at the most recent Game Developers Conference includes some pithy and striking definitions of social concepts and how they relate to games: * “Identity: Means of displaying status and role via rivalrous goods.” * “Gift: “transferring a rivalrous good to another actor to increase their status.” * “Community is where we play games on you.” * Mutual improvement is anathema to games ...

The social layer – who benefits from silos?

Mark Zuckerberg is on record dismissing the idea of a social layer. He makes a good point that good social experiences need to be fostered with design, not simply tacked on. This is true but not but does not contradict the need for a “social layer.” People want social experiences, and they don’t want those experiences to be tied to specific tools. Robert Scoble told the story very well when he described his needs for location-based services that drew on data and functionality f...

Facebook groups are forever

Brian Solis uncovered an interesting feature of Facebook groups – if you unsubscribe from a group, you cannot join it ever again. This is portrayed as a feature to improve the social dynamics of groups, by making people use care about which groups they invite others too, and which they expect. Update: Actually, you cannot be re-invited to the group ever again. If it is an Open group, it’s possible that you can choose to rejoin it (if someone has tested this, please write in commen...

Facebook groups – design flaws in social scaling

I am very glad to see Facebook launch better groups. But the implementation has some serious social design flaws. Groups are very valuable in signifying the social context in which people feel comfortable sharing. Even when information is not private or secret, people use social group context to choose what and how to share. It is not a secret that I went to services on Yom Kippur, but I have no interest in boring and annoying friends or family who are indifferent, or triggering debate with b...

Designing social tools: core user types

In rolling out and growing a successful social product we need to always think from the user’s perspective. Audiences don’t view the product as we do, and we should have no reason to expect them to do with our platform as we have engineered and designed it. What it does, what it’s good for, and how it’s used should simply make sense. The catch here is that audiences will naturally follow the lead of those who use the product the most. It’s the activity and communication left beh...