SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

Social Interaction Design: Ratings

I had other things in mind for this morning until a client sent me an article in today's Wall Street Journal about online ratings. She, like many others running review and ratings-based sites, is "suffering" from excessively generous end user ratings. The article, which surveys a number of online properties, cites the tendency to 4.3: On the Internet, Everyone's a Critic But They're Not Very Critical. Offering up a number of anecdotes as reasons for the broken state of online ratings, the articl...

Twitter, Google Wave, and Online Talk

This post is a reflection on some questions raised by Adina Levin in a post on Google Wave dated July. I haven't myself used the product, so this is not a product review but is instead a continuation of some of the thoughts Adina raised around Wave's social models. I'll speak here more to the ongoing innovation in conversation tools rather than attempt even educated guesses as to Wave itself. I should also say that this post is un-premeditated and off the cuff.Wave is a communication tool. In th...

Foursquare vs Yelp: Recommendations and Reviews

Foursquare and Yelp are each sites that capitalize on user-contributed reviews and recommendations. Users contribute their favorite places and things to do, spotlighting best-kept secrets and customer favorites. Users get visibility and even some amount of notoriety for their contributions. Their enthusiasm for, or against, a merchant can have substantial repercussions for businesses. In the age of social media, might sometimes makes right, whether the customer is "right" or not.Social interacti...

Social Interaction Design: Leaderboard

11.On the heels of a bit of to-and-fro with Josh Porter (@bokardo) and Adina Levin (@alevin) on leaderboards as used in social media, I have to confess that Josh may be right. Designers do influence users. That is, insofar as my writing this can be construed as a reflection of a designer's influence on me. This is in the spirti of collegial discussion. ;-)The leaderboard debate is not a new one. I don't mean to bring it all back up here. I want, instead, to show that the leaderboard in social me...

Social media: the attention economy explained

I started wondering last evening what twitter would be like if in addition to followers we could also see who was actually being paid attention to. The groups many of us use in clients like Tweetdeck or Seesmic, for example. So in the midst all of our positive talk of transparency and authenticity, I found myself chuckling at the opacity we in fact rely on to make it through the day.There's nothing wrong with this, and while some may see a cynical twist or twitter's dirty little secret (nobody's...

Activity Streams: Realtime and Streamtime

The realtime web is living on borrowed time. Not in the sense that time's running out on realtime. But in the sense that the realtime web actually involves two kinds of time. One is the time in which information is delivered. We call that realtime. The other is the user's time, which I'm going to call streamtime.Realtime is immediate, streamtime is borrowed. The realtime web operates immediately. The streamtime experience is immediacy.A lot has been said about realtime and our immediate access t...

Sociability: Usability for Social Media

People who know me personally are familiar with my baroque inclinations for turning simple things into brid"s nests of complexity. I'm drawn to what lies behind, below, before, and because of anything that has to do with people. For reasons I have spent much of my life working through, I am naturally and insatiably interested in what people mean — much more than what I mean to people.This makes me a pretty good accidental observer and, incidentally, analyst too. So when I work with social ...

Social Interaction Design: Structure

This post is inspired by today's excellent reflection On the thoughtful use of points in social systems by Adin Levin of Socialtext. Adina summarizes a twitter conversation that unfolded yesterday among "Kevin Marks, Tom Coates, Jane McGonigal, Tara Hunt, Josh Porter and a few others on the thoughtful use of points and competition in social systems."I'm going to spin this off in a different direction for reasons of my own, but I highly recommend visiting Adina's post.I want to address just a few...

Activity Streams: Content and Flow

The realtime trend continues unabated, with presentations at TechCrunch50, Facebook's recent updates, and next-generation newspaper designs all extending the impact and value of the stream in social media. Disaggregation begets reaggregation, as demonstrated by the newcomer threadsy this week. As client applications and new services add organization and structure to activity, news, status, and twitter streams, we see hints of what is likely to come in the months ahead.I think there are two disti...

Social Interaction Design: Beyond Use

Interaction design works, in part, because it is able to anticipate user behaviors. Design theory models interactions: with products or services and their features, functions, interface, and so on. And if we're reasonably competent and a little lucky, we get the outcomes we expect.But it's one thing to model interactions with software or hardware, and another to model the social interactions so critical to social media.The conventional (non-social) approach to interaction involves a single user ...