Web 2.0

Beginners guide to social networking

Tuesday, 6 January, 2009
By: marc

So Jeremiah Owyang is on Twitter Hiatus as he evaluates how he uses social technologies. One of the tools he points to is FriendFeed. FriendFeed certainly aggregates your on-line social activity, but I’m still not sure. One of the things I think that such a tool needs to be is in your face, front of wallet and FriendFeed just doesn’t do it for me. Give me time and I may change my mind.

Here’s a question, if you were starting afresh, or wanted to get on the Web 2.0 boat, where would you start? I know more than a handful of people who consider it to be little more than FaceBook and they want nothing to do with that. They don’t want to dredge up old and lost friends and acquaintances from school and past lives, they are old and lost for a reason thank-you very much. But there is more to social networking than Facebook. Here’s where I would start, not just with a bunch of tools, but also the reason why you should use them. (As I re-read this, it seems a bit noddy, very little is ‘new’ here, but not everyone knows this stuff and you have to start somewhere). I’d welcome comments, suggestions…

iGoogle

Ten years ago ‘portals’ were all the rage, in fact they’ve never really gone away. Trouble with them was they were always ‘walled gardens’ giving you a portal into what that website wanted to see, not what you wanted. iGoogle enables you to bring together in one place all the information that is relevant or important to you. OK, so this one is not social networking, but it is a useful tool that will start you on the road to being a Web 2.0 zealot.

Why: A homepage that is truly flexible, bringing together (‘mashing up’) information from multiple sources.

Alternative: netvibes or pageflakes and take a look at WidgetBox for widgets that you can mash into your new homepage.

Google reader

We’ll assume that content is interesting to you, you are not just using the web to transact. We will assume that timely content is also important. Rather than visiting individual websites to read content, you can take the content as a feed. When you start reading blogs, the number of sites you would visit will dramatically increase. So rather than all that clicking, an RSS reader enables you to aggregate all those feeds into one place. It also enables you to categorize and manage them. With iGoogle you can display your feeds on your homepage, and using google gears you can do this off-line as well.

Why: A single place to read articles (news, blogs etc)

Alternative: Is there one?

Following the assumption that ‘fun’ social networking is out of scope (many would argue that there is more to FaceBook than Fun Wall, puerile quiz’s and sending friends garbage). LinkedIn is a professional networking site. The cynics would say it is all about ego, to see how many connections you can acquire, that may be true, but it can also be a useful tool for keeping abreast with your industry.

Why: Guy Kawasaki provides a number of compelling reasons, my top two would be that “By adding connections, you increase the likelihood that people will see your profile first when they’re searching for someone to hire or do business with” and “People with more than twenty connections are thirty-four times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than five.” In the current economic climate that is a pretty good reason to be on LinkedIn.

Alternative: Plaxo does some of this, and also has some handy address book features, but I’m not convinced. Linkedin gets my money.

Twitter

Twitter was starting to get big in 2008, in 2009 it will be the next FaceBook. Your elderly relatives will have heard of it. Just because it it big does not mean you should use it though. firstly what is it. AKA ‘micro-blogging’ it enables you to publish your status in 140 characters or less. Your status can then be ‘consumed’ by people who subscribe to it, either on twitter itself, on the mobile phone, or as a feed, for example on iGoogle. If you use FaceBook you can synchronize your Twitter status to FaceBook.

Twitter enables you to keep you your colleagues/ contacts up to date on what you/ they are doing. “But I don’t care what they are doing / I don’t want everyone to know what I am up to”. That is one way of looking at it, but think about the times when you have been trying to get hold of a colleague, only to reach the answer phone or have no response to your emails. If she had updated her Twitter status – “Downtown at client meeting” you would know. Or maybe you subscribe to one of your customers, they tweet “Sending out RFP”, you know. Once you start using Twitter the value should become apparent. The challenge is filtering the noise, but of course there are tools out there to help you.

Why: Rather than sending emails (that lack context or won’t be read) on what you are doing, (e.g. I’m out of the office), publish your status on Twitter. People who follow you will be kept abreast of what you are doing. By following your colleagues and ‘luminaries’ you can prevent duplication of effort (because you know that someone else is doing it as per their ‘tweet’) or learn what the masters in the field are doing.

Alternative: Yammer. This is great for internal use within the enterprise, enabling you to microblog in a closed environment rather than to the world outside your company

Instant messenger

Let’s not forget IM as a social networking tool. Instant messenger applications enable you to ‘ping’ people you are connected to, sending and receiving messages. Which IM tool you use depends upon your social group and what they use, but it might be yahoo, messenger or Skype (which also has the advantage of being primarily a voice service as well). If you cannot access the aplication (for example at work) then you can use meebo as a web aggregator to access your IM accounts. With multiple accounts use Trillian or Adium to aggregate them into one place.

Why: Immediate bite-sized communication for when a phone call is not possible or required.

Delicious

What do you do when you find a website that you like? Chances are you bookmark it. Delicious addresses two issues with bookmarks, firstly that they are bowser specific. You use your browser on your machine to store them. This is not much use if you have more than one computer; you can’t access the bookmarks on your work computer when you are at home. The second issue is that bookmarks can only be saved within a file structure (if you are organising them at all). As you start to bookmark an increasing number of pages, managing the volume becomes harder. Delicious enables you to store your bookmarks ‘on the cloud’, meaning they are accessible on any machine. When you save a bookmark you can tag it – potentially with multiple tags to increase findability (delicious will also suggest tags based upon the page content or how other people have tagged the page). The Social part of delicious is in its ability to see who else has bookmarked that page. What use is that? It helps you find people who bookmark similar items, and by adding them to your network you will find more relevant information.

Why: Store and manage your bookmarks (the webpages you like) on the internet, not on your browser. Find similar pages from people with similar interests to yourself.

Alternative: Digg and Stumbleupon. These are more social in their outlook, when you visit a site that you think is ‘cool’ you can digg it. Visit the Digg website and you’ll find what’s popular out there. Assuming you are agnostic towards social networking, there’s definite utility in delicious that you may not find in Digg

Take a look at…

For our social neworking agnostic, that is probably enough to start with. They are the ‘must have an account withs’. There are a number of other networking sites that I’d say ‘take a look at’ but you don’t need to sign-up.

YouTube: The future of TV? (Alternative – Vimeo).

SlideShare: People sharing their powerpoint presentations. Chances are that you’ll find something that will enlighten and teach you something new.

Videojug: If Slideshare is about sharing ideas and learning through presentations, VideoJug does it through video.

Flickr: So you may not be quite ready to share your family snaps with the world, but there’s some pretty good photography out there. Alternatively Picassa, a google product that has a great application that manages your photos on your windows machine and enables you to share them on the web. Of course if you use FaceBook you may as well use that for sharing your photos.

Pandora: This is your radio, but if you can’t access Pandora there’s last.fm or imeem which is more social in their nature.

Behaviour, intentions, interactions and corner cases

Saturday, 3 January, 2009
By: marc

According to an article on eMarketer the method customers book travel depends upon their needs. Nothing revolutionary there; what is interesting is that fewer travelers are booking their trips online overall.

“This is not due to personal financial concerns—online travel bookers are an affluent demographic,” Mr. Grau [senior analyst at eMarketer] said. “Rather, it is caused by frustrations related to the planning and booking capabilities of OTAs (on-line travel agents). This, in turn, is spurring a renewed appreciation for the expertise and personalized services offered by traditional travel agents.”

“Online travel bookers are an affluent demographic” and yet we continue to let them down with poor customer experiences and an inability to let them do what they want to do. As an e-marketeer, your sales numbers may be satisfactory, but how much more traction could you get if your customer interactions were more realistically modeled around their behaviours and their intentions. You may point to your personalization engine, but that is probably doing little more than offering up pages and offers based upon information the customer has told you, or prior pages they have visited. It is not going to be a challenge to “the expertise and personalized services offered by traditional [insert domain here] agents“.

Customer frustrations with the web are more often than not due to usability and restrictive Web 1.0 interaction paradigms. It need not be like this. Interactivity can be more human. Some sites such as Kayak.com are introducing web 2.0 interactivity to introduce more fuzzy searching to find what you want. Forms can be more like their real-world brethren. Rather than the “command and control” approach of imperative programming that drives a sequential, rule driven flow, the declarative approach to programming enables greater flexibility and puts the user in control.

So we can do something about the technology to provide a better customer experience, but that won’t be enough. The perfect customer experience will not fit in business rules your IT analysts have determined. In the real world, corner cases and ‘exceptions to the rule’ are abound. In the real world sales people, customer service reps (or their supervisors) have ‘management discretion’. They can listen to the customer, understand their story, recognise them as a loyal customer who made a mistake, and override the business rules to satisfy/ delight the customer in a way the cold logic of the business rules never considered. True personalization will focus upon the corner-case long-tail.

The next generation of eCommerce will be declarative, forgiving and understanding. Rather than being based upon a paradigm that is the result of the technical constraints of the channels early days, it will be something that more closely mirrors the real world. Getting there however will be difficult. As a first step Marketing departments need to address the shortcomings of their existing digital channel before their IT organisation embarks on new channels such as mobile and TV.

Are you who you say you are?

Wednesday, 24 September, 2008
By: marc

I set this website up in 2001 to record the overland trip Lindsey and I took to India. I wrote my diary entries (I’d not heard of the word “blog” at the time) onto my palm pilot and uploaded my notes in internet cafes when we found them. I called the site “dancingmago” for reasons that are not so clear to me now, (in the early nineties I’d spent a year living, working and studying in Calcutta and had grown rather partial to mangoes and the name stuck with me). With social networking sites popping up all over the place, it only seemed right to register myself as Dancingmango. So I’ve got a pretty good claim to the username “dancingmango”.

However. On the web it doesn’t quite work like that. There’s only so many sites I can claim my username as my own. On the web it is first come, first served. It seems that I am not the only dancingmango. Nor am I the only Marc McNeill (the guy who supports Rangers on Bebo is definitely not me!)

The point of this is that in the social web of the web, are you who say you are? Which dancingmango is me? Which Marc McNeill is me? This wouldn’t really matter, but I read that one in five employers use social networks in the hiring process. This is inevitable (I’m hiring in Hong Kong and will Google prospective candidates), but I’d be concerned if it was used as part of the screening process. Excluding someone because they have the same real name or the same user name is clearly wrong. It is hard to see a solution; but if you are looking for a job, make sure that you have photographs associated with your social presence, and if there are multiple ‘you’s out there, ensure that you are distinctively you to prevent mistaken identity.

Front of wallet

Monday, 15 September, 2008
By: marc

Credit card companies talk about “front of wallet”. With customers having a number of cards at their disposal, how does a credit card issuer ensure that their card is the customer’s card of choice; the card they will pull out first because it is at the front of the customer’s wallet?

How do you make sure that your website is “front of wallet”? One solution is to become the wallet. In Web 1.0 many organisations tried this, branding themselves as “portals” trying to be a one stop shop to do everything. The reality was that people liked to “jam jar” their experiences. They didn’t trust one one provider who did one thing well to sell them unrelated products; that just didn’t fit in their mental jam jar. They buy insurance from an insurance site, cars from a car site. So if they wanted to buy a car they would go to Autotrader. It was not a banks place to offer car sales in their portal offering. (The value proposition to the bank of course looked good on PowerPoint, sell people cars on the banks portal web and there was a ripe market for cross selling finance and insurance at the same time).

Web 2.0 brings a new “portal” to the playground. A concept rather than a product. Thus we have iGoogle and netvibes and mash-ups. No company can become the wallet, they must resign themselves to being the cards inside. They can do this by offering rss feeds and widgets. Making their content and functionality promiscuous, divorcing it from their site and allowing the customer to consume it how and when they want it. Sadly the banks have yet to grasp this concept. Their technically savvy customers would love to have their balances and recent transactions displayed on a widget or as a feed. Sadly they listen to the masses and their inherent conservatism prevents them from such offerings, killing it with what-ifs and unfounded security concerns (“what if a husband and wife shared the home computer and the wife saw suspicious transactions…” yawn).

Anyway, so there’s Twitter. I’ve signed up to it and for a long time it just sat there I had a subscription, but out of sight and out of mind. It wasn’t at the front of my wallet. It wasn’t even in my wallet. Until I got round to putting it on iGoogle. Suddenly it is visible to me. I see it every time I log in. I get bothered by the inane, uninteresting tweets that most of the people I follow burble, but I also update my status on it (and it updates my facebook status as well). Twitter is now part of my on-line experience. It is now front of my wallet.

Unlike the banks who I visit periodically to check my balance and pay bills (in-out, no lingering). Now if my bank balance was a feed on iGoogle I’d have more of an interest to drill down into more detail. I could manage my money better. I could establish a better on-line relationship with my bank. If they gave a little away, I’d give them so much more. But for now, they are back of my wallet.

Why must social networking destroy politicians?

Tuesday, 2 September, 2008
By: marc

This appeared as a headline in my iGoogle world news tab today.

A series of disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain’s choice as running mate, called into question on Monday how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket.

Now I care little about American politics and even less for the Republicans, but it strikes me that vetting politicians for anything and everything they have ever done (or indeed anyone close to them has done) is a path to ensuring politicians of the future will have to be closeted and avoid living “real” lives.

To be young in e-enabled socieites means to be connected. Myspace, Facebook, Bebo… If you do not have a page yourself, chances are one of your friends will. And if they have a Facebook page they’ll probably upload photographs to it. And if you happen to be in a photograph…

Pictured: The mayor who got drunk and climbed up a pole to celebrate friend’s birthday

In the photo published on the social networking website he stands on two metal bollards for support while clutching the lamp-post as his two friends pose underneath him (Deputy leader of the council and a Tory county councillor.)

In a connected world the “vetting” process becomes scary. The message it sends out is that if you want to be a politician of the future, stay away from social networking sites, stay away from anyone who inhabits them… in other words stay away from “normal people” (who as a politician you will one day stand up and claim to represent).

We crave politicians who are human yet in a world where any indiscretion becomes instant public knowledge, and becomes acceptable to everyone but politicians, what of our people of power in the future?

Can you imagine the following dialoge on a social networking site and the impact it would have on the politicians career:

B: Sir, you are drunk.
C: And you, madam, are ugly. But in the morning, I shall be sober.

How times change.

Web 2.0, retail banks and a Slide Share presentation

Tuesday, 29 April, 2008
By: marc

This is nothing new, but there are still people out there to whom Web 2.0 is a bit of a mystery. What exactly is it, and more to the point, should our business care about this stuff? Or, as I have heard senior executives argue, is it just another bubble, a distraction to let others waste their time, effort and money on. In an attempt to challenge this assumption, I’ve used a model with a few sceptical clients to hang some structure on. This is central to the below presentation that I’ve given to a few financial services organisations. It discusses what Web 2.0 is, and towards the end describes what it could mean for their on-line retail bank website. (Thanks to Duncan Cragg and Prashant Gandhi for some insights).

[slideshare id=377944&doc=web20public-1209431680446543-9&w=425]

Does enterprise IT know what Google is?

Thursday, 17 April, 2008
By: marc

Imagine an investment bank, a trader has a requirement for a tool to screen stocks. The requirement is to select stocks based upon different parameters, so for example find companies with a market capitalisation between a selected range, and a P/E ratio, Dividend Yield and Net Profit Margin between other selected ranges. And maybe the ability to add additional parameters.

Typically the process will be for these requirements to be captured by the Business Analyst who acts as the conduit to the development team. Nowhere is the user interface explicitly referenced – it will almost certainly be articulated in the reality of the current systems; what the BA knows and understands. Despite the iterface being delivered through a browser, the developers are not web developers. Inevitably the finished product will be functionally correct, it meets the requirements, but it will be clunky: select parameters > search > results… because it reflects the requirements as the trader put them “I want to do this and this and this, press a button and get a list back“.

So what are the chances of an internally developed investment bank application looking like Google finance’s Stock Screener? And what would your trader rather have?

Real world forms

Tuesday, 12 February, 2008
By: marc

In the real world, when I get an application form I’ll flick through the pages and have a look at what is required. I can choose which fields I complete in whatever order I like. If I want to take a break half way through I can. I can complete it when I like and how I like.

So why aren’t web forms like that?

The usual format for a web form starts with some copy that describes the form (which people skim through at best). The user clicks to the next page and the form commences. There may be a step indicator showing progress through the form, but almost certainly progress through it will be linear. You have to complete each page before progressing to the next. If you are lucky you’ll be able to click to previous completed steps. But the experience is nothing like a real-world form. And when was the last time a real-world paper form “timed out” half way through, demanding the user to start over again if they left it idle for ten minutes?

The web forms we see today are a relic of their tecnological past. There is no reason why they must be linear, (and if there is logic in the form, there is no reason why the user can’t explore the different routes – you do that with a paper based form). There is no reason why the user can’t click to whatever page in the process they like (just like with the paper form). There is no reason why a page must be completed before progressing to the next. There is no reason why the form should time out and forget everything the user has entered. Fields can be saved as they are completed against an anonymous user, until the user wants to provide personal credentials.

Bottom line – the web has moved on. Instead of reflecting technical constraints of yesterday, it can adopt more real-world metaphors. But do we have the courage to start introducing new paradigms? Are users, information architects and usability experts so ingrained with broken web metaphors that they will shun a new model, (a real world model) of completing a form?

So here’s a rough example. It’s an application form for a savings account. Ignore the content, field labels etc, it is more the model that is illustrated.

1. The user can move between the sections (tabs) to see the fields that are required. There is clear feedback on each tab that it has not been completed. The “Direct Debit” section is optional hence no indicator. The ability to save the application is seperate.

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2. The user selects “Bank details”. They’ve not filled out all the fields on the first tab “Personal details”, but it doesn’t matter. There is clear feedback that this tab is yet to be completed.

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3. The user clicks right through to the confirmation tab. There is nothing to confirm so the page remains blank, with a prompt to fill out other sections.

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4. When sections are completed the indicator on the tab changes to show completion. Here the user has completed step two ahead of step one.

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5. Finally, when all sections are completed the user can review the entire form.

I’m not saying this is perfect, it’s a start. A start to re-thinking the way we design forms on the web and think about modelling them on real world behaviour instead of technical constraints of the past.

Will corporate websites remain spotty teenagers or will they grow up to be beautiful?

Friday, 25 January, 2008
By: marc

In the corporate webspace most design is little more than mediocre. Interaction design has changed little since coporations first realised that this is a channel thery should exploit. Web 2.0 is slowly making in-roads with basic use of Ajax functionality, but there is nothing that is really breaking the mould. Despite its infancy (for most organisations ‘e’ is barely 10 years old, Amazon, the granddaddy of eBuisiness is only 13, born in 1995), conservatism rules; the corporate web is just not growing up. It would be easy to blame the technologists for being risk adverse- for having invested in architectures and frameworks that do not allow innovation. REST and all that declarative goodness may be great, but of little interst if you have invested in a propiertary framework that does not support it. But the business is also responsible for tardy innovation.

It doesn’t know what is possible. A miss-understanding of accesibility clobbers rich interactions; “no javascript” becomes the mantra, despite the guidance being “provide alternatives” and progressive enhancements making basic and rich interactions possible with the same code. And maybe as usability testing becomes the norm, and testing concepts with consumers throughout the product lifecycle is baked into the process, this is acutally the final nail in the creative coffin. Let me explain.

When you are developing new features or propositions it is only right that you should conduct market research, talk to your customers and get feedback to refine your ideas. But sometimes you need to ignore what you are being told and challenge the perceived wisdom. Imagine the scenario; you are developing a social networking site. You recruit a bunch of consumers to participate in user testing sessions. They match the socio-demographic profile of your target audience, they use the internet more than five hours a week. You let them loose on your concept boards and prototype. They like what they see, they like the blogs… but commenting? The feedback is that none of them would leave comments. So what do you do? Kill the commenting on the basis that the users who matched your “average” profile would not use this feature.

I’m not saying that if you are building a conventional, transactional experience; a retail shop, a financial services provider, you should not test the proposition with users that match the target profile. But beware that they will steer your thinking into the realm of the ordinary, the expected and the average. Try testing it with trend setters, gamers, teens, mybe even anti-personas to push the boundries and harvest real innovation insights.

And maybe testing the proposition is not needed at all. But don’t leave the design to the comittee or the accountants. Sometimes it is more important to have a real visionary driving the product development. Apple is a great example of this, no more so than with the iPhone bounce. When you scroll down a list, when you come to the end, the last item “bounces”. Where’s the “business value” in this? Isn’t this gold plating in the extreme? The development of this bounce will not have been for free, it will have come at a cost. This could have been a financial (more development effort) it could have been at the expense of another feature, or it could have been time. In most organisations this would not get get through the design by commitee. Apple can do such great things with their UI because they’ve got a visionary at the helm who understands the importance of good design and is passionate about it, and their customers become to expect it.

Enterprise twittering

Wednesday, 2 January, 2008
By: marc

I’ve been interested in Twitter for a while now – it is probably one of the flagship web 2.0 innovations, (and its Ruby on Rails). But I’ve had a problem with it; I can’t answer the question “what’s in it for me“. What is the point of Twitter? I signed up a while ago and invited a few friends, but the responses were generally along the lines of “what’s wrong with FaceBook status” (one tweet read, “[name] doesnt understand how this is any different from his IM or facebook status). This is a good question. Instant messenger can change the way an enterprise communicates – what’s wrong with IM? Why not put your status alongside your IM ID? Staying with the enterprise theme, you can’t walk into an investment bank without seeing someone scanning their blackberry. Why would an enterprise need Twitter when eyes are glued to the ‘berry?JP Rangaswami has been blogging a series of articles on Twitter – I commented on one post asking these sorts of questions. In a follow up blog, he has answered my questions. I’m beginning to see the point of Twitter – more to the point, when I’m talking to clients about enterprise 2.0, I’ve got a more compelling Twitter story to tell. So (borrowing from JP), why Twitter?

1. Publish – subscribe. Unlike email where an author publishes a note to a group of people she feels will be interested in it, with Twitter people can choose whether to subscribe to what the author writes. If they like what they read they can continue to consume the ‘tweets’. But how is this different to subscribing to a newsgroup? With a newsgroup you can only select to subscribe to the topic, not the author. Unless you use some clever filtering, you can’t choose whose words you read. And filtering takes time and is rarely straight forward; bringing on the second point for Twitter…

2. It is easy.

3. It is multi-device. Not only do I choose who I receive tweets from, I choose how I will receive them – via SMS, email, rss etc.

4. It is succint – 140 characters is not a lot of words to write with

Anyway, an enterprise example…

Today:

Jack Fiction knows something – he’s learned a great insight about a potential client. He sends a mail to people he thinks might be interested in this insight. He includes a copy to the Business Development email interest group that was set up by IS
– It is a closed circle. People not on the cc list will never learn of the insight.
– It doesn’t mean anything to them at that time. They delete the mail. It has no history.
– Many interested people are not on the IS email list
– People who are no longer interested still get sent mails to the group.

Twitter:

Jack knows something – he’s learned a great insight about a potential client. He tweets about it.

– It is public
– It has history

Jack doesn’t need to think who will be interested in what he writes; people who value what he does subscribe to his Twitter. They can see an archive of his previous tweets on his Twitter space. If they no longer want to listen to what Jack says they unsubscribe – the UI is elegant and simple.

This model assumes thats people interested in the insight know Jack in the first place, but that is generally the way that social interactions work. Let people communicate between themselves – it is far easier to choose who you want to listen to, to who you want to talk to. And in doing this it is far easier to cut out the noise.

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