Tag: community

Adam Rifkin:

Put another way, Google designing social apps is like Microsoft designing iPod packaging.

Anything social by Google has been an abject failure, in my view. They’re just terrible at doing anything that doesn’t make Google better as a company. For most people at Google, life is 98% work, 2% sleep, and they design products with that lifestyle in mind.

A graphic of the privacy settings available in Facebook.

To be fair, privacy and settings are parts of the product that I’m sure are underfunded. They don’t drive any growth or revenue, so they probably just have a very basic and cluttery framework.

The big question is whether or not they can take the next step without really addressing these types of issues. I think they probably can — while many people gripe, the number of people willing to kill their Facebook accounts over difficult settings is likely pretty small. That’s clearly where Facebook is putting their money and resources right now.

Jason Calacanis pretended to know iPad specs first-hand, and duped a lot of people. Why anyone would trust anything that man says is completely beyond me, but many bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Mike Davidson has some sage wisdom to share, and provides some perspective about people in our industry who are increasingly filled with hot air.

Popularity based on votes seems like a super-simple algorithm at first, but it can get pretty hairy once you get into the details. This post dives into some of those details and discusses how to make an algorithm that is complete and effective.

Launched today. For amateur typophiles like myself, this will be an addicting site.

PsyBlog looks at ten studies that bear out rules of thumb for predicting group behavior. One is that that gossip is inevitable and, on the whole, quite accurate:

Simmons (1985) analysed workplace communication and found that about 80% of the time people are talking about work and a surprising 80% of the information was accurate. Other studies have come up with a similar figure, suggesting that while details are inevitably lost along the way, the grapevine is mostly accurate.

Others include how leaders emerge from groups of conformists, people take their assigned roles seriously, and how groups become closer as they become more exclusive.

Anil Dash:

FAIL is over. Fail is dead. Because it marks a lack of human empathy, and signifies an absence of intellectual curiosity, it is an unacceptable response to creative efforts in our culture. “Fail!” is the cry of someone who doesn’t create, doesn’t ship, doesn’t launch, who doesn’t make things. And because these people don’t make things, they don’t understand the context of those who do. They can’t understand that nobody is more self-critical or more aware of the shortcomings of a creation than the person or people who made it.

Thank god. That took long enough.

Gamasutra interviews Nicole Hamlett, community manager of MMO developer Cryptic Studios. On measuring results:

I’d like to say that it’s all very standardized; it’s just not. Benefits are still, largely, intangible. I would like to see more concrete methods used to gauge success, actually. My team uses a variety of metrics to determine ours. Some are based on forum comments, contest entries, traffic, outside influencers. We are working on getting a better system in place.

Lots of other gems. These are the types of folks we can learn boatloads from, and really start figuring out how to qualitatively measure our sites, rather than simply relying on the quantitative metrics.

It’s been tough to be the organizer of Refresh DC lately, specifically when it comes to finding a venue that can handle ~100+ people near a metro station.

As a consequence, we actually had to bail on this month’s meeting, so in my disappointment and shame on Friday night, I sat down a wrote a little web app/microsite to solicit and manage sponsors and speakers.

If you have a venue available, would like to sponsor refreshments at a Refresh DC meetup, or if you’re up for giving a talk to the largest active group of web professionals in the DC area, step on up!

I’m not one to support Calicanis too much, but:

Digital communications is a wonderful thing–at least at the start. Everyone participating in digital communities is eventually introduced to Godwin’s Law: At some point, a participant, or more typically his or her thinking, will be compared to the Nazis. But that’s only part of the breakdown. Eventually, you see the effect of what I’ll call Harris’ Law: At some point, all humanity in an online community is lost, and the goal becomes to inflict as much psychological suffering as possible on another person.

It’s this propensity that keeps me on the skeptical side of the long-term value of “social media.” My hope is that the web develops to the point that responsibility for one’s actions online becomes the norm, rather than the exception.

The Economist has an interesting little story about Dunbar’s Number, the theory that it’s difficult to maintain stable social relationships with more than ~150 people:

Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming“. In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of mental computation. You need to remember who is allied with, hostile to, or lusts after whom, and act accordingly. Several years ago, therefore, Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop.

I try (unsuccessfully) to keep to following fewer than 200 people on Twitter, but even that makes it tough to keep current. Following my ~1000 friends on Facebook is unpossible and I’ve given up.