SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

The interest graph needs design love

In order to make content filtering and interest graph gardening usable and useful for most people, Google will need to give it the same design love it gave Circles. The playful gestures of encircling are intended to make it feel natural and fun to add people to circles, and to move people among circles as things change, thus describing and updating one’s social graph. What many people are noticing as missing in Google+, though, is the ability to communicate and consume according to topic...

Is location social anymore?

When FourSquare first came out, its social design supported a strange mix of invitation and competitive motivations. “Swing by and say hi!” said the standard message when you shared with Twitter or Facebook. At the same time, the service promoted competition for mayorships and badges for frequent checkins. Many people “checked in”, not because they wanted to meet up with their friends or show off their cool choice of hangout, but because they wanted to rack up points. ...

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...

Lobsters, pandas, and Jane Jacobs

An insightful and catchy post in July by iFindKarma made the case that Google can’t get “social” because their model of behavior is utilitarian. Facebook succeeds because their model of behavior is social and fun. This is intriguing, and on some level really disturbing. Google provides a service that meets users needs as “pandas” independent, self-directed individuals, slowly foraging content on the worldwide web, and leaving links and messages behind. The conten...

What social media influence isn’t

Bernardo Huberman’s much-tweeted recently published study reveals that what makes people influential on Twitter is decidedly not their follower count. Based on analysis of 22 million tweets, the study looks at what factors correlate most closely with the spread of ideas as represented by links. Some celebrities and institutions with many followers are effective at getting pickup, and others aren’t. And some with not that many followers have influence well beyond the sphere of their...

The trouble with Facebook for organizing

As the dominant online social network, Facebook is place where activists and organizers head to help their movements and ideas spread. People are already on Facebook, and can share discussions, events, actions, with their networks of friends. This is great. But there’s a pretty serious problem, it seems to me, in the use of Facebook for organizing. It’s hard to get to know people on Facebook. In the Facebook social model, it’s not very socially acceptable to “friend&#...

Who likes being mayor? On the narrow appeal of FourSquare

Who gets a thrill from the being mayor of their local coffee shop? According to a recent Forrester study the users of location-based services (such as FourSquare, Gowalla, and, Brightkite) are 80% male and 70% are aged 19-35. Usage is concentrated among a relatively small number of very heavy users: “only 1% of those that use them do so more than once per week” – but this tiny minority has accounted for over 100 million checkins to FourSquare, the current leader in the space...