SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

I just killed a social game mechanic

Techcrunch this week posted a copy of a social gaming playdeck used by SCVNGR. Social gaming is indeed hot these days. But there’s some confusion around game mechanics and social gaming dynamics. I don’t see any social in the playdeck provided below. So I’ve added my own commentary to each of the deck’s 47 points. My apologies to its author, but the descriptions completely and entirely miss the socio-logical factors that make social gaming what it is. The...

The Like as interest and social gesture

I have been meaning to write about Likes and users interests for quite some time. But the matter is complicated. So rather than wait to write the perfect post, I’m going to lay down some cornerstones, sketch a few concepts and maybe develop some key arguments. I’ll begin with a bit of the raison d’etre. Likes are not just the core social gesture on Facebook. They are a one-click sign of interest used on many kinds of social services. Likes are like social bookm...

The Like as interest and social gesture

I have been meaning to write about Likes and users interests for quite some time. But the matter is complicated. So rather than wait to write the perfect post, I’m going to lay down some cornerstones, sketch a few concepts and maybe develop some key arguments. I’ll begin with a bit of the raison d’etre. Likes are not just the core social gesture on Facebook. They are a one-click sign of interest used on many kinds of social services. Likes are like social bookm...

Hey startup, what’s your social interaction model?

I’ve been doing an awful lot of talking to potential clients in the past weeks. As a consequence, my social interaction design pitch has tightened up. I’m going to attempt a brief and concise (un-Chan-like) summary of why it is that I believe social media startups and services ought to know their social interaction design requirements. I think that all companies involved in social media should have an interaction and communication model. This applies to those buildi...

The strange culture of social technology, and its makers

In the past months I have been systematically scoping out social media businesses, startups, services, agencies, and more. It’s what us “freelancers” do &emdash; especially now that the industry has matured. I have a filemaker database of more than 650 companies worth tracking. Along with notes, and various other sundry details. If I were to rush my way through the database, read company descriptions provided by founders, reviews gleaned from techcrunch, ki...

On Fire with Social Progressions

When talking with organizations about social tools and logical social flows for information from ideas all the way to formal outcomes (white papers, process docs, product enhancement requirement documents, etc.) there have always been stated steps. Some of these steps have different incarnations and labels, depending on how things are done conventionally. But, there is a usual natural progression of how these flow that is rather common and universal across organization types (formal or not). To...

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&#...

Tummelvision recap: On social interaction design

I just signed off Tummelvision, a weekly podcast/videocast (in some cases) led by Deb Schultz, Heather Gold, and Kevin Marks, where we had a fascinating conversation about designing for social interactions. I was a lucky guest along with Julie Hamwood from Adaptive Path. The conversation was really stimulating, and wound in and out of perspectives about social interaction design (sxd). At first we were discussing Google Wave’s demise and Google’s inherent lack of social understanding...

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...