Andy Baio did an experiment with Mechanical Turk which is somewhat interesting on it’s own, but what really caught my eye was:

Upload a photo of yourself…

DON'T provide any identifiable information, like your name or email, since that's a violation of MTurk policy.

When did technology take over so much that our face, the single most important aspect our brains use in identifying people, become not personally identifiable information?

Ephox provides a bunch of different sites with feeds to help people keep up to date about what’s happening with our software and the company.  For example, LiveWorks! helps you learn more about our products and get the most out of them, the releases blog keeps you up to date with the latest stuff and the official Ephox blog has all the company news. Then of course there’s a range of blogs by Ephox employees like this one and they’re all gathered up at People@Ephox. So guess which feed is the most popular by far?

Yep, People@Ephox. Now, People@Ephox obviously includes the posts from all our official blogs so you get the hints and tips from LiveWorks!, the release notifications and the official company news but the majority of posts that come through are from employee’s blogs discussing random stuff from Guitar Hero, to rebuilding PCs, touring around the Australian outback and even sometimes talking about work. Add to that the fairly significant number of visits to the actual People@Ephox site as well and it’s even more impressive.

Personally, I think that’s fantastic. To be honest, when I put together People@Ephox, I didn’t really expect it to be that popular – almost just checking off the “hip company that cares about it’s users” list. We do genuinely care about our users and I’m always looking for ways to stay in touch with them and make sure they’re getting the most out of our products but I would have thought the majority of people these days would only be interested in the more official sites. I tend to subscribe to employee’s blogs for companies that I deal with, but everyone keeps telling me how unusual I am. At least in this case they’re not entirely right (though in many others they definitely are).

Companies spend a huge amount of time building up contact lists and trying to get clients to opt-in to receive newsletters and whatever else and while they certainly go out to far more people than People@Ephox does, there’s a really important difference.  People@Ephox really hasn’t done anything to make it easy to opt-in to. There’s no email subscriptions, no fancy Web 2.0 buttons to subscribe in a million different web based readers, not even the marketing department obligatory call to action, just an RSS feed, and people subscribe.  I’ll bet (hope) they’re far more interested in the content too.

So to all of our clients, partners and users who come to read this – thanks for taking an interest. I’d love to stay up to date with you and your companies too so please do post the URL to your blog in the comments whether it’s official or unofficial and even if it never mentions anything to do with EditLive!

UPDATE: Since it’s so easy to do, now you can subscribe via email. Just visit the site, put your email address in the box, solve the captcha and click the link in the email you get. Don’t forget to thank the spammers for making the internet such a pain…

Kevin Gamble:

I know I must sound like a broken record on this point, but the message just isn't sinking in. What's it going to take for people to "get" this? A million dollars or 10 million dollars. It doesn't matter. The people are not coming. You have to go to them. It's pretty simple actually.

The thing is, corporate thinking is all about owning stuff. So the natural tendency is to want a community that you “own” and thus you have to build a new community and get people to come. It’s nice to see some studies highlighting how rarely that actually works though.

Now this isn’t to say that you should tear down all your web properties and start using FaceBook pages instead – it just means that you have to go over to FaceBook or where ever your users hang out and interact with them there. You can still publish useful content on your own site and link to it as appropriate, just don’t expect your site to become the hub of the community.

I find the third key problem from the Wall Street Journal article Kevin references resonates a lot with me:

The third problem with online communities is how businesses go about measuring the success of their communities. Businesses say that their primary objectives are generating word-of-mouth marketing and increasing customer loyalty. Yet the metric that businesses use most often to measure success is the number of visits to the site.

The thing about word of mouth is that it quite often is just that – words from people’s mouths. It’s not called spreading news by links to web pages or by visiting sites – it’s word of mouth and that’s incredibly hard to track. Unless you’re insanely caught up in the blogging craze you have to realize that people are more likely to recommend your products by speaking with others, or via email or IM than they are to actually publish a web page that links to yours and recommend people go join up to your community. Most companies focus on something other than creating a community site and it’s that original product that gets recommended, even if it’s because of the community site.

For example, LiveWorks! receives very little traffic when compared to the main Ephox website, but it’s still very high up the list of referring sites but more importantly when you talk to people and say that there’s a ton of information and early access to our products on LiveWorks! they think that’s fantastic and are far more likely to recommend our editors – which live on ephox.com.

Of course, LiveWorks! doesn’t really try to be a community site – it allows comments and provides a mailing list/forum but really it’s a great big collection of useful content about our product. You can’t create an account or a profile there even though we’ve talked about doing something like that. This kind of research makes me realize why that’s never seemed like an absolute must-do idea for me.

Now the question is, where is the community around our products and how do we best go out and join it?

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.