Symphonious

I have a very simple benchmark for judging how much emphasis a site puts on people instead of technology - I look at how it identifies those people. Sites that don’t have anything to do with people treat everyone the same and don’t have a name for their users at all. The next step up is sites that let you log in some how and then refer to you by your username or email address. At least you exist, but in a very abstract, computer oriented way. Getting in to the area of treating you like a real person is where the site refers to you by your real name (or the pseudonym you put in the real name box). That’s a really big step towards having people form connections. Where it really makes a giant leap forward though is when you have photos to identify people.

Using any image consistently to identify a user makes such a huge difference to how people relate to each other because the human brain is so used to identifying people by the way they look. It takes another giant leap forward when people use an actual picture of themselves instead of some random muppet (even if he is cool and plays saxophone like I do - I even have a case and stand just like that). Your brain isn’t just tuned to recognizing visuals, it’s tuned to recognize faces. There’s not a lot developers can do to get users to upload a picture of themselves if they don’t want to but it would probably be worth trying to explain the benefits rather than just providing an image upload box.

All this brings me to Atomic’s Gravitar service which is a pretty cool idea. The basic concept is that you upload your avitar (shame they didn’t call it picture to encourage real faces…) to their site and then everywhere else you comment can just retrieve it from there. It’s like OpenID for your face. Here’s part of their description:

Gravatar aims to put a face behind the name. This is the beginning of trust. In the future, Gravatar will be a way to establish trust between producers and consumers on the internet. It will be the next best thing to meeting in person.

Here’s the problem with faces - your brain is tuned to match them with that person and assigns a level of trust based on how you recognize the face as. Yes, that instinct can and should be overridden when your surfing around on the public internet, but it’s very naive of the Gravatar folk to start talking about your avitar as providing trust. It got even worse when I went to sign up for the service.

The sign up looks simple, you enter your email address to start it all. Unfortunately, when I entered mine it said it was already in use. The problem is, I haven’t signed up for Gravatar before - the identity they’ve got listed is a fraud. If you’ve seen my comments around the internet accompanied by an offensive image, now you know why.

The reality of course is more likely that they just abused the privacy policy of wordpress.com and imported all those accounts. Since you can’t use Akismet without signing up for a WordPress blog that’s probably the chain of events that occurred. I’m sure in the normal case they send you an email that you have to click as well to verify that you have access to the email address, but email isn’t exactly a secure communication channel.

The reality is, it’s foolish to assume that anyone on the big, wild internet is who they claim to be because sooner or later it will be a phony and attempts to establish identity that don’t involve some serious encryption and all that jazz are always going to be flawed.

But hey, who can argue with cool pictures when you post comments? I certainly can’t resist shiny stuff, and I’d rather it be me that signs up than someone pretending to be me.

So if I build a social network on Ning I can add forums which are kind of cool except that noone actually knows that new stuff has been posted and don't bother checking back in. It doesn't seem to matter what options you provide - RSS feeds, offers to email notifications of new threads etc - people drift away from forums very quickly once their question has been answered. On the other hand, mailing lists tend to be harder to get people to use in the first place because you have to subscribe, but then they tend to stick around longer because they've already subscribed. If in that time you manage to teach them a few things they didn't know they needed to know they hang around permanently and the community grows.

Coming back to Ning, it has lots of cool features and user management etc etc etc, but it doesn't seem to have any kind of mailing list at all. Ideally I'd like the forums to also have a mailing list option but if not, is it possible to just have a mailing list so people can join a group and they're automatically added to the mailing list? I can even host the mailing list software myself but it would need to be kept in sync.

It goes without saying that whatever solution I come up with would be clearly labelled as subscribing to a mailing list etc etc etc - it's not an attempt to fool people into opting into e-mail. All done in good faith and with all the nasty little details to be thought out in full before implementation, but right now I'm brainstorming.

I'm setting off on a fairly major trip, firstly to Lotusphere in Orlando (20-24 Jan) where I'll be facilitating a BOF session (BOF112) titled "Mashup Web 2.0 with Web Content Management". Sadly it's been scheduled for 7am Thursday, 24 Jan which seems like a rather silly time to expect people to be up, out of bed and ready for intelligent discussion. So if you're around I'd really appreciate you getting out of bed early and coming along to make sure it's not an empty room. Ephox will have a booth on the show room floor and cosponsor a couple of parties as well (details here). I'm really looking forward to actually getting to meet some of our clients and partners - they don't tend to drop by Australia very often and pretty much never come as far north as Brisbane.

From there it's back over to Lake Tahoe for a fancy corporate retreat and a whole lot of major planning which should be fun.

Finally, I'll be spending February in London to help kick our European sales along, so if people are around I'd love to catch up and meet some new people.

Since I'll be doing a fair bit more travel in the future, I've joined up with Dopplr to help keep track of it and succumbed to the horrors of widgets in my sidebar to display my upcoming trips. If you're using Dopplr I'm registered under adrian@symphonious.net (screen name ajsutton) so feel free to follow my trips and let me know if we're passing by. I'm really looking forward to meeting new people now that I'm getting around the world some more so don't be shy.

PS: Apologies to the Planet Ephox subscribers who have now had three posts about Lotusphere in rather quick succession.

It's a common question - what's the point of social networks? The most common answer is basically none. Most social networks provide yet another way to get in touch and keep in touch with people which is great but lets face it, there are about a billion different ways to communicate and leaving messages on someone's wall only looks good compared to sending smoke signals. Some people might argue that it lets you map out and visualize your social network but seriously I know who my friends are, why don't you? The address book has been around a long time and it still works seriously well.

I think the best way to highlight how seriously useless plain social networks are is to look at the 10 Best Facebook Applications For Business Professionals:

• Conference Calls
• Voicemail
• Asking Questions
• Posting Video Messages
• Introductions
• Business Cards
• Phonebook
• Recommendations
• Defining other people with a tag cloud
• Business directory

Anyone see anything new in there? Anything remotely likely to change the face of business? Nope. Gimmicks galore and sure you can make yourself look all hip and web 2.0. Yes it's very important to reach out, connect with your clients and be part of the discussion but social networks aren't suddenly making it possible to do that, they add the burden of yet another way you have to do it and most of them put up all kinds of walls to make it difficult to do so.

Now that's not to say that the idea of social software is bad - just the idea of social software with no point. What if instead of just building up communities for the heck of it, we built up communities to achieve a common goal or a series of goals? In other words, what if there was a point to it all? That's what LiveMocha is doing by building a social network of people who want to learn a foreign language. Dan Kaplan put me onto LiveMocha and he nails the key cognitive change between what we'll look back on as the hype of social networking and what actually stands the test of time:

The key is that, unlike so many of the wannabes in the social network game, LiveMocha’s social network is not the central focus of the site but simply a feature.

Social networks are not the point, social networks are the tool and it's about time we started realizing that and start putting it to work. There are two ways for this to unfold, either we'll start seeing really useful Facebook applications being built - I imagine it would have been possible for LiveMocha to be done as a Facebook application, or the explosion of different social networks will expand to the point where users simply demand openness and the ability to move their social network around.

Either way the time is coming where the social network will be a feature and a tool, not the entire system. Frankly, I can't wait.

I got some really positive feedback on the various community/openness projects that I've been spearheading within Ephox from one of our OEMs today. Apparently they've discovered our early access program and are already trying out our brand new Express Edit functionality1.  It's really nice to actually hear from clients that these elements are useful as we haven't really managed to build up a community, even if we are seeing gradually increasing traffic. For a while now we've had potential new employees commenting on Planet Ephox which is great, but we haven't really heard from clients taking advantage of it, even if we've seen some of the indirect effects via analytics and support cases.

Now getting great feedback from one client is satisfying but it's not the end game - of course we want to impress all our clients like this by whatever means it takes. What I find most exciting about this is that it demonstrates to the sales and marketing teams that our openness and even our engineering practices2 are actually valuable to clients, particularly OEMs where the relationship is more important and long term. The business users and product managers probably don't care about automated tests and early access, but the engineers that have to actually integrate our product do. If we can provide them with tools like the hints and tips on LiveWorks! or early access to new features, they can better integrate our products and get the most out of them for the actual end users. In the end, that's what everyone should be working towards and we can and will help out on multiple levels.

1 - Don't forget to let us know how it goes and how we could improve it btw….↩

2 - continuous integration, TDD and all the other things we do to ensure quality↩