The Intermission

As an interaction designer, I try to keep my eye on what’s happening in the world of online communities. Also, as an interaction designer, I’m occasionally asked to help design online communities. This has got me thinking about the problems with online communities as they currently exist. So I’m going to examine some of the problems I see and recommend some solutions.

Problem #1

Most communities allow too much anonymity to provide a useful view of who’s reputable and who isn’t. Consider this example. In the real world, I might own a restaurant. However, I’m rude to my customers and the food is rancid. It won’t take very long before people stop coming to my store. If I tried to overcome my bad reputation by opening a different restaurant, people would take one look at me behind the counter and leave. I have ruined my reputation and now nobody trusts me. Rightfully so.

In contrast, in the online world, I might be a private seller on eBay. If I consistently make false claims about my products, ship them late, or ship them damaged, my reputation goes down. But I can always just create a new email address and start all over again.

This problem is compounded when you consider how it plays out across multiple communities. I might be an excellent community member at Slashdot, but when I open an account with eBay, none of that good karma carries over. Alternately, I might have proven myself to be an unreliable seller at Amazon, but I get a fresh start at eBay.

Solution #1

Somebody (I’m nominating Google, but any Internet startup could take a shot) needs to create an XML-like file to describe an online person. This online person must have a single match to a real life person. Your online person contains links to all of your online activities… your Facebook profile, videos you’ve uploaded to YouTube, photos you’ve uploaded to Flickr, product reviews you’ve written on Amazon, etc. It also contains a single “karma” or “reputation” points system, which reflects on you wherever you go.

Whoever eventually does this will be taking on a huge task. It involves getting numerous web services to all agree to one standard. But the practical upshot is that people will be just as accountable for their actions online as for their actions in real life. I can no longer troll on Slashdot and still expect to get good business on eBay.

Problem #2

I have a hard time keeping track of “where” my friends are online. An average friend online might have an account at Facebook, Xanga, Flickr, LinkedIn, Orkut, YouTube, Digg, Meetup, not to mention IM accounts with AOL and MSN, and email accounts at Gmail and Yahoo. How can I keep track of what they’re doing if all of their online activities are at different sites, likely with different user names? I want to keep track of my friends, not my friends’ online accounts.

Solution #2

After everyone has a single online persona, then I can (like in reality) become friends with a person, rather than make all my online accounts become friends with all their online accounts. When I log into my online persona at Google (or whoever develops it), I see a list of my friends, and each friend in my list is tied to all their online accounts. For example…

Welcome Jeff Stevenson!
Your reputation is currently 80/100.

Your Friends:

Sandy Phelps
View Sandy’s profile at YouTube.
- Sandy uploaded the video Max Jumping Through Hoops (27Aug2007, 3:47 PM EST)
- Sandy commented on the video Roller Nightmare (27Aug2007, 3:30 PM EST)
View more…

View Sandy’s profile on Facebook.
- Sandy added 5 photos to the gallery Girl’s Night Out (25Aug2007, 12:10 AM EST)
View more…

View Sandy’s profile on Digg.
- Sandy dugg 8 Most Successful Movie Franchises of All Time (22Aug2007, 1:13 PM EST)
- Sandy dugg How to Wash Your Clothes (22Aug2007, 1:10 PM EST)
View more…

…and so on. No more logging into 10 different accounts to see what my friends have been doing.

Problem #3

Every one and his mother wants to build an online community these days. I won’t name names, but some of the clients I work for are basically asking us to build MySpace inside of their site. This is a tremendous waste of resources for several reasons, even aside from the fact that they’re just throwing in features without any understanding of what they do (”give us a tag cloud, and blogs, and groups” which you might as well translate into “give us Web 2.0″ in terms of meaningful requests), yet they’re unwilling to pay for something as simple as a host (I’m using “host” in the same way Powazek uses it in Design for Community) to raise the quality of the community. But if you do end up creating an online community for a client, it costs an arm and a leg, because all the community features need to be developed from scratch.

Solution #3

Someone should create a decent set of freely available APIs for adding community features to a web site. (I’m nominating Facebook, since their work has already begun, or PublicSquare, since they seem to really understand what users and site owners need.) That way, next time one of my clients asks for community features, we don’t have to build an expensive, proprietary system. Instead, we’ll plug into the same architecture that everyone else is using, and we’ll share access to the same reputation points as all other online communities.

If Facebook or PublicSquare provides this toolbox of community features, then interaction designers can pick and mix the parts they need to create a community appropriate for their clients. It’s win-win-win!

Your thoughts?

One of the things that irritates me is when people talk as if their personal music tastes are “correct”. I suppose it irritates me because I have abnormal taste in music, so I’m often on the wrong end of someone’s soap box speech against my favorite band. So I prefer to talk about peoples’ music preferences with terms such as “like my own” or “not like my own”, rather than “good” or “bad”.
Perhaps your music tastes are like my own, or perhaps they are not. Either way, I think we can be friends.

So here’s some music I’ve been enjoying lately…

Mockingbird by Derek Web
I love Derek’s intelligent lyrics and obvious dedication to living a godly life. He doesn’t accept clichés in life, and he doesn’t write clichés in his music. Also, he has a pretty good sound. It’s sort of a muted, acoustical sound that took some time to grow on me, but it suites the tone of the lyrics really well. If you want to download a single from iTunes, I’d recommend “Mockingbird” or “I Hate Everything (But You)”.

Derek’s latest album is The Ringing Bell, which I’m also coming to like. It sounds very different than Mockingbird, but again, it suits the tone of the lyrics. I’d recommend trying “I Don’t Want to Fight”. (In fact, I’d be very interested in hearing someone’s interpretation of those lyrics.)

Credit for this find goes to Cindy Wallace, who mentioned Derek Webb on her excellent blog.

Our Time in Eden by 10,000 Maniacs
10,000 Maniacs is one of those bands that I remember hearing about in high school, but which I never listened to. So I’m just now discovering some great music from 1992. The songs do get a little repetitive sounding, but they’re very mellow and make a perfect background for working or hanging out with friends. I don’t know the album well enough yet to recommend any specific tracks.

Credit for this find goes to Kyna Southworth, who played this a couple months ago while Sarah and I were at her house.

Everything by Buckcherry
No, not literally every song. The only Buckcherry song I’ve ever heard is the one called “Everything”. I like it a lot. I remember when I first heard it on the radio, I couldn’t decide if I liked it right away. It’s pretty repetitive and the lyrics straddle that line between “interestingly confusing” and “totally meaningless”. But the song is a lot of fun and has made its way into my regular rotation.

Credit for this find goes to 94.9 The Sound, my new favorite radio station in Cincinnati.

I owe a lot of my recent musical discoveries to 94.9. Back in college, I had a friend with her finger on the pulse of unknown, upcoming music, and she would send me songs and CD compilations all the time. But since graduating, I’ve dramatically slowed my adoption of new music.

Just a quick comment on the disappointment I’ve had with some of the online music discovery systems out there (such as Pandora and Last.fm). Pandora and Last.fm are pretty cool, and I enjoyed them greatly… for about 3 days. But the problem is that they just feed you music you’ve already said that you like. My college friend regularly gave me stuff I didn’t care for. But hearing that music helped to evolve my tastes and broaden the scope of music I like. Pandora only ever gave me 5 or 6 knockoffs of the bands I already know. So, all you Web 2.0 gurus out there, take note: If you’re going to create an intelligent music recommendation system, can you make it so it builds into my music taste, not just creates a feedback loop into what I already have?