Webvisions: Designing for community interaction
Speaker: Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine
- Lot’s of stuff about Newsvine and news sites, how design can enhance your product/community.
- News moving from pyramid to hourglass (comments being the bottom portion).
- Identify interaction goals (comments, stories, posts, etc.)
- Funny (but slightly controversial) riff on PeopleAggregrator and how horrible the design is and even though Marc is a smart guy, everybody is blowing it off because of the bad design.
- Cork’d good because you learn about wine from common people/friends rather than wine afficianados. Not a myspace for wine drinkers because the focus is on talking about wine.
- Friendster is only a social network, there’s nothing else to do (LinkedIn like it).
- Flickr a photo site and a social network, it could exist without the social network. It’s a great place to “be a picture” (quote from Caterina?)
- Concentrate on product first, then social features.
- Active users vs. passive users, most (90%) are passive, get them to come back again and again.
- Users need to hear about something from two unrelated places to try it.
- Post-registration, let the user do more before throwing the registration wall.
- Only collect as much information as you need
- Give people something to do immediatly after registering
- 3 strategies (real information like banks require, anonymous, and pseudo-anonymity). Recommends pseudo-anonymity, because even though anonymous can be successful (nichen? paradox) because registration can keep out good posters, people get less out of being anonymous. People are looking to build up a reputation. “Anonymous can’t counter sanity.”
- Critique of fellow Seattle company Judy’s Book, and how it’s bad to give users a 0 “trust score” when they first sign up (telling a new user they’re bad). General discussion of repuation building.
- Users are not stupid, just efficient (Veen quote)
- Users confuse freedom of speech with membership (newsvine has a code of honor and rating system for comments)
- Platform mostly open-source (PHP) but using SQL Server because the open-source db market still needs work.
- Companies have inquired about buying Newsvine technology.
Tags: webvisions, webvisions06
Web Things Considered » Webvisions day 2 said,
July 21, 2006 @ 9:40 pm
[...] (notes) This and Mullenweg’s were my favorite sessions. I actually was looking forward to Dan’s session (Bulletproof web design), but thought this one would be better for me since I’ve seen Dan’s slides and can use the book. Mike was one of the first people I read when I discovered blogs a couple years ago, and this was my first chance to hear him speak. [...]
Web Strategy by Jeremiah » WebVisions 2006: The Blog, Picture, and Video List said,
July 22, 2006 @ 7:47 am
[...] Designing for Community Interaction (thanks for this, I missed it) [...]
Web Things Considered » Proving Mike Davidson right said,
July 23, 2006 @ 7:01 am
[...] No, not trying to suck up, just found that it was incredibly ironic proving one his points from the Webvisions session. The point he made was that a person will try something out if they hear about it from two unrelated sources. [...]
Jason the Content Librarian » Back from Webvisions said,
July 25, 2006 @ 8:45 am
[...] Finally, I have to mention the Designing for Community Interaction session with Mike Davidson. There are some good notes about it at Web Things Considered. He talked a lot about his company, Newsvine, which looks very cool. He had some great practical suggestions for designing websites that encourage interaction. Some suggestions include weighing registration needs and anonymity, how to create light registration methods which won’t turn people away, and ways to build reputation without discouraging users who first register. [...]