Making your app social
Created Slideshare for sharing your presentation slides online. Launched one year ago.

Social design of Slideshare. Idea was that presentations are hard to share, co-founder noticed that pics at conferences went to Flickr, videos on YouTube, but nowhere to put presentations. Can favourite and tag presentation.

Users drive navigation, using tags and popularity. Can do “slidecasts” where you mash-up slides with audio.

What do people share? More variety than you’d expect. Mainly expect it to be talk slides because that’s what we geeks use slides for. But within first few hours people were uploading “church 2.0” stuff, poetry, all sorts of things. Simplest way to get multimedia stuff up on the web.

Object-based social network. Social networks have been more about linking to people, but now they are more object-based, where you have the object that’s mediating the interaction, and in some sense it’s a powerful way to have a social space, because people want to share things, have an individual motive.

Lessons about Slideshare: Forget the iPod. Apple do great things but not social. People do what they want with Slideshare, cannot be a control freak. Have to give up control. Watch people make connections, and watch what emerges. Om Malik said yesterday that there’s a lot you can do when you think about online office applications, and people are going into the editing. I think that’s going to take a long time because people are specific about how they want their docs to look. Slideshare just wanted to solve one problem really well, which is to share slides.

Good beginning for a social app is one problem, really well solved.

Then take this and embed it in a social context. People don’t just keep presentations just for themselves – they are inherently social documents that you pass on. To find the social context that it fits in, which means Slideshow must be embeddable and have comments, and be linkable. Events are a powerful way for gathering slideshows.

Different choices people might want to make, e.g. use Facebook. Slideshow is a social space, but also a widget you can embed elsewhere on the web. People think of the social web as public, but actually it’s more about small social circles. Content going from public to private, it’s not a binary choice, it’s a range of choices. Google never forgets, and there should be forgetting in search engines, but then you have an ‘only in this place’ choice where you won’t allow it to spread out of context, share with groups, with friends, and then ultimately just for yourself.

We have gigabytes of documents on our hard drives, and mostly it’s just for us. Need to think about where you want to place yourself in this continuum. Flickr allows people to shift back and forth between public and private, can set privacy for each photo. Del.icio.us does the same thing, can make bookmarks public and there’re real value in that default public setting. Gives a return to the people sharing, which convinces them to share stuff that they might not otherwise.

Introducing privacy to Slideshare. Giving people take control over their stuff.

Q: What about images that have people in them.
We don’t see that as much as photo sharing sites. But relationship between you and the people who took the photo should be able to mediate the situation if they take an embarrassing photo of you.

Q: How do you deal with the temporal issues around privacy, might want to share things now but not later.
If it’s not being indexed by search engines then you can share it and then remove it, so one option for privacy might be “don’t index it by search engines”.

When you think about social networks you architect them to be open, so when you try to put privacy in place it can be hard to think how to do it.

Levels of participation – 1/10/100 rule. 1 creator, 10 synthesisers, 100 consumers. So use all visitors to surface good content, and leverage their participation even if they are quite passive.

Enable social navigation. Have most viewed, most featured, tags, and ‘viral navigation’ – can see what your friends are doing, only applies to registered users, not casual browsers. Three types of navigation: tag-based, popularity-based, virality-based.

Lots of different metrics, most viewed, most commented, can allow content to rise to the top. There is powerpoint porn and people do upload it, and it always ends up in ‘most viewed’, and used to have that most viewed showing up on the front page. Now have good community flagging, and don’t show most viewed on front page anymore. But different metrics reveal different things, so most viewed, commented, favourited, all show different material.

Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki. Talks about getting wise decisions from large numbers of people. Thought a lot about that when doing the system. One thing about this is that there’s no getting away from the users. they are always there, they will email you, call you, post on your blog, write posts about you on their blogs, and it’s great because it tells you this live stream of feedback that you’re constantly getting from your users. Never did usability testing for Slideshares because the users would tell them when there was a problem. They were very involved with the system. Sometimes it can get a bit much, where you don’t want to listen to the loudest users because they are sometimes just a minority and you then miss the needs of those who don’t speak out so much.

Came back form a conference once and put up her slides, and embedded on her blog and got lots of comments and blog posts, but no one really asked it how to embed it. So just launched Slideshare without really telling anyone. Then got Techcrunched, and hadn’t really shown it to many people before that.

Any kind of feedback you get before you launch is to hypotheticals, such as screen shots, so better to put it out there. The risk of failure was not that great, but just wanted to experiment and see what happened. If it didn’t work, it didn’t work. But it did, and now the whole team is dedicated to it. For people who have another revenue stream, that’s a great way to experiment with a product. Another reason for not trying to get feedback before launching because feedback very invidualistic. But you need to see how people interact with each other in the system, and you can’t get that from individual feedback responses.

Q: Did you aim it at particular people.
Mainly people like ourselves, but people used it in ways we didn’t imagine.

Q: What about a closed beta?
That takes a lot of energy to do a closed beta, to get the URL out to people. But better to just put it out there and the people who need it will find it. If you’re quite about it… there are different ways of releasing. For us, we were really bootstrapped, small team, didn’t really have connections, so it was more powerful to put it out there and then people find it. We were not closed but we were invite-only, and that was the biggest mistake we made, because the initial momentum is enough to carry you out there, and invite-only crimps that.

Believe in “launch first, refine later”, don’t do too much, don’t try to do everything, just enough that people can see what you’re trying to do, and then refine after that.

Q: We can’t put stuff out that people depend on if it’s not ready.
Yes, it depends, we are not doing anything that people depend on it. But spending a whole amount of time creating something when you don’t know what people will do… Maybe do a small launch?

Q: Well, we can’t do that, it takes more resource. We are providing corporate apps, and they need to work.
Yes, it’s contexts. But we will end up moving in a more corporate direction slowly, as people use it in that context.

Q: What happens if you release a buggy product and people use it and never come back.
Yes, that’s a problem. We didn’t build too much, but we did try to take the bugs out. We thought about scaling, but not too much, so made sure we got the initial burst and that the site wouldn’t go down. You do have to make sure that it’s not so buggy that people won’t use it.

Q: Observation, if you’re talking non-essential B2C then you’re right, but this doesn’t work for B2B or mission critical stuff.
Well, yes, but i think there are things to be learnt from this. It’s a so much more effective way of building products. If you have an idea, and you’re thinking something, you’re wrong, part of your idea is wrong, that’s just the way it is. So put it out there, find out what’s wrong, be agile. Metrics were a huge part of that, we have a shadow app, which is all the metrics we care about.

Creating and running communities
Started as a single developer, building something after work hours, thought about turning it into a community, eventually it became a business – Metafilter. Aside from coding issues around building a community app, there’s a lot of stuff that he hadn’t thought about. Hope to provide lessons to help you avoid his mistakes.

Mefi, started off as a multi-user weblog with comments. Didn’t like /.’s interface. Sub-sites for different topics. Advertising.

Couldn’t find a Web 2.0 definition that didn’t include social aspects. Tried to find something that’s considered Web 2.0 that isn’t social but only could think of Gmail, but even that’s going in that direction. Any site you have, any idea you have, can go from good to great if you throw a network at it. Peer communities. But if you’re building an app and never thought of the social aspects of it… there are many apps that you never would think would have a community.

Running communities are tricky, lots of pitfalls. A great app and community is great both for the members and the creators.

Lifespan of a community – steep growth to start with as everyone tries it out and then leaves, so a dip, and then people hear more about it and come back or attract new people you get more growth. Three outcomes – continued huge growth, reach an equilibrium, or a decline as the creators make mistakes and the communities dies. Need to stay away from 2 and 3.

Be a third place. Most normal people have home and work and then… their third place, like a pub or sports team or World or Warcraft. Goal is that people should want to join you and enjoy their time with you, get away from it all.

It’s not as simple as just throwing up some software. A lot of thought has to go into it. Going back to very first principles, it’s about the idea behind it, the more clever and original your idea is, the faster your community is going to grow. If something’s been done a thousand times it takes a long time to gather momentum. Winnow your ideas, run with just the very best ones. If your friends tell you it’s impossible, that’s probably a good idea.

We have 10 – 15 years of prior art on communities, social apps are at least 5 years old, so if you’re going to do a new shared to do list manager, for e.g., then make sure you know the best features from everything else.

Eat your own dog food. Use your own app. If you’re building a community you love to fill some need for yourself, build it to scratch your own itch, be the best user of your app. Users will pick up on this and contribute accordingly. It’s obvious when someone is just trying to fill a niche an make a buck. Make it personal – it if makes your life better it will probably make other people’s lives better.

Reward contributors, e.g. status based on postings. It’s not just about rewarding people for contributing, it’s about the readers at the end. Makes your site more interesting to casual readers. If 10% are actively commenting, 90% of people just lurk.

Flickr was a good examples, used to be just your photos and everyone else’s photos, but now they have interestingness pile to show good stuff.

Moderators: your best contributors. Elevate good contributors to moderator status.

Don’t be too controlling, let things run their course, within reason. Be flexible – MySpace is the example where people use HTML in their name area to do mad things. Allow unintended uses – sometimes it’s the most innovative stuff. Build out based on the edges. Use the weird innovative things at the edges of the community, and when you see something good and interesting make it part of your app. Smart tech companies do that all the time – see what the hackers are doing and then do that.

Run it well. Stick with guidelines over rules, as rules put you in positions where you have to do something that you know is wrong but technically they broke the rules. Provide ideas about how to be a good member of the community.

Keep your emotions out of running the community. You are going to get insults from day one, and if you start making rash decisions that just serve you, it’ll come back to haunt you. Bounce stuff off other moderators. Guidelines should be a living document and tailor them to what your community finds acceptable.

Never surprise people with a new rule out of left field – causes outrage. Facebook’s update stream cause outrage. Understand what the community norms are and don’t do things just because you feel like doing it.

Balancing act between chaos and happiness. Some things can push you over the edge.

Ownership is an issue – the more people invest in your community tool, the more they feel that they own it, they love it so much it’s part of their daily life, and there’s grey area about whether it’s yours or the people who show up? Are you going to make decisions top down or bottom up with voting? Keep this in mind – it’s not always black and white.

Happiness on the part of users is fleeting. Having a day of downtime will kill goodwill. People will think of apps as unreliable if it goes down for a day, even if rarely. Twitter has its issues, Del.icio.us goes down for a day and everyone freaks.

Every community will eventually have a revolt, you’ll have a problem moment. You might have a few passionate users who say they will quite in a huff. Shouldn’t be unexpected, and it’s good that it happens. Site’s are run by humans and they make mistakes. Everyone has these problems, but take them as an opportunity to learn.

Customer service. Even if it’s free and everyone can do everything themselves, there will be customer service issues. You’ll spent more time on customer service than coding – this sucks for developers, but plan it from the beginning. Expect it. Even if it’s free, even if it’s a side-project, people will expect responsiveness. Soon as you can, hire people or take volunteers from your users. Best hires ever made because frees him up to do other stuff.

Metrics can ease the workload – if people can flag abuse then you aggregate that then you can go and look at problems, not trawl for problems. Or have a support forums, and if you get a lot more questions in one problem area pay attention to fixing it.

Averting the eventual disaster.

Be transparent. Do support in public forums so people can see every decision made. Be honest. This goes a long way – people will trust you and see you’re responsive. have a place to talk about the site or app. Starting to become more regular. If you don’t, people will complain about the site all over the place and will wonder why you didn’t see their comment on their blog. People assume you’re reading everything, everywhere, so have a dedicated place for it. Gives you a good venue for collaborating on new features – float mock-ups and discuss it with people. Wholesale redesigns cause revolts if you do them overnight.

Always over-explain changes. Make sure you’ve covered every base possible.

When things go really, really wrong. Take the high road and acknowledge you made a mistake. Don’t play the blame game – you’ll lose community goodwill. If you see your community turning, email people, IM people, even if they hate your guts. It takes the wind out of their sales, and gives them a chance to understand your mistakes. They forgive you, and appreciate the honesty.

Legal problems. Anything multi-user will have legal issues. Comes up more often that you think. You make a multi-user apps, and it’s used by the world, so try to understand which laws apply. Find a well-versed internet lawyer. Might take a while to find someone but worth finding someone who understands the internet. Set up a business to give protection to your own personal life. Terms of Service and Privacy Policies – be clear about what you are going to do with people’s contributions. Get a lawyer to help on language with that. Copyright law, e.g. DMCA in the US. If you’re accepting content from people you could put yourself in legal hot water if someone uploads copyrighted materials.

Lawsuit threats are many, but lawsuits are few. Usually gets one veiled threat a month, specially from companies that people are talking about negatively. Digg is probably getting them daily, but it rarely ends up being much.

What’s stopping your site/app from building out a community?
Have a social aspect so people can talk to each other. Good communities can please readers and creators.

Q: Do you see periods where the community dips, then has to restore itself again, almost like a two year cycle? Can a dying community revive itself?
There are ups and downs, and I’ve seen communities take a dive when the community admin doesn’t have time to nurture it.

Q: How do you keep the core community welcoming to new members, rather than getting defensive and closing in?
It’s a natural trait, it happens all the time. The old guard will fight the new, will mock them. Haven’t discovered the magic bullet for fixing that. Can tell people it’s not cool to shout down new members, but I can’t think of any quick tricks I’ve seen people do. Digg does something new by showing you recent joiners and people meet that way.

Q: More focussed your community is, harder it is to find people interested in joining. How do you find those people?
Once those communities get going, people get way into it, and it’s a good thing after the first six months to a year of rockiness. I would find similar, not to the point of spamming comments, but find similar user groups and maybe announce it in a mailing list about that subject, but without stepping on toes. Subtly promote it.

Q; When you are at that initial stage, prior to critical mass, how do you make it look like an attractive place to congregate.
I started out with good seed content, which is important. Started with friends, showed it to then, and half of them started posting, so 10 people started posting. It wasn’t phoney, it was honest, but their was a silent slog on my own for nine months, and eventually people showed up. Seed content is important. Highlight best bits.

Q: Is there a risk of over-nurturing your community?
At some point, yes. At some point I got frustrated and told everyone that the more I spent on the forums, the less time I can code. It got out of control because I wasn’t realising. When Blogger started, didn’t have a pay version because didn’t want to do support, but end up providing support anyway.

Q: Are you earning more money now than when you were a developer?
Eeer, yeah.

We’ve got this community. Now What?
Jewish creation myth, where an angel seeds the world with people. Angel has two sacks, geniuses and dunderheads, and there was an accident, and all the dunderheads spilled out of the sack into a valley and founded the town of Chelm, where they do stupid things.

If you’re running a community site, it can feel like you’re trying to run Chelm. Want to tell some Chelm stories to shed light on community.

User-Generated Discontent
Say you’re Yahoo, and you want to build some topic sites, and you decide to pull in some photos from Flickr tagged with Wii, and people feel unhappy about this, they start tagging non-Wii images with ‘Wii’. Yahoo were good when it became apparent that there was a problem, but people remained pissed off even when Yahoo played by the legal rules. Lesson is that you have to go beyond the legal rules. Give people copious opt-outs.

The way that Flickr’s built now, can role out new features without having to take the site down. When site has to be taken down its’ for database changes. Last summer, had to take the site down for something unexpected. Instead of serving usual “Flickr’s having a massage”, served a “Make Lemonade” page, with an impromptu competition to win a free Pro account. Had 2000 different entries, and people responded well. Crap is going to happen, internet is chaos and sometimes people push the wrong button, and it’s how you respond to that that counts. Realised that they couldn’t give away one free Pro account, but sixty, and gave everyone who entered a few free months,

It sucked that the site went down, but tried to make it not suck. Want to do ‘Connect the Dots” if it happens again.

So, when you’ve fucked up, say you’ve fucked up. Confess! Your living off the seat of your pants, which means you’re going to make mistakes, and you can earn credibility from the community if you just ‘fess up.

Stewart wrote a “Sometimes We Suck”, when Flickr growth was higher than anticipated. Mondays were a nightmare because that’s when people use Flickr most, and shit would rain down from the sky, and at this point they just wanted to say that they were really sorry that things weren’t as good as they wanted it to be.

Ryan Carson did similar last week, when a sponsor email went to the wrong list – the list of people who said they didn’t want sponsor emails. Ryan emailed everyone and apologised for the mistake.

Mistakes will happen, but you can benefit if you cop to it.

Don’t keep score. Scoreboards, leader boards, top things, winners – are an excellent way to motivate peopll when you are playing a game, but most web apps aren’t explicitly about playing a game, but doing other things. Pay close attention to score keeping, and using them when you want the result to be “let’s play a game”. When you don’t, it can work against a community.

Flickr’s ‘Interestingness’, and they ranked the photos and it drove people nuts. There’s nothing else in the Flickrverse where people are ranked. They self-organise, but they don’t rank. Interestingness was bad, it created aggravation where there was none before. Now it is a randomly loaded page so that there isn’t any ranking.

It wasn’t that ‘interestingness’ was bad, it was that the interface originally was ranked, so you could see how much stuff was above you. and people try to game that. Digg gets gamed, and if the gamers win, Digg uses.

Have an editorial layer on top of what you are doing. If people are bringing you stuff, and you have a lot of it, e.g. Flickr has 1.5+ million photos uploaded a day. So how do you put an editorial layer above that? There’s Flickr blog, there’s interestingness, and the 24 Hours of Flickr – asking people to take a photo representative of their day. 7,000 contributed the photo, half of them put geolocation on it, and so could add them to a map. Interesting way to look through a slice of Flickr and see common themes, e.g. birthdays, weddings, Cinco de Mayo, etc. That’s one way to bring people to the forefront and reward them in a way that was more collaborative rather than having a leader board.

Producing print stuff is seen as a money maker, but producing a physical thing is a great motivator to encourage peopel to participate in your universe. Having a physical artefact from a virtual community is a cultural signifier that ‘i am part of this’. JPG magazine was originally an invitation to photobloggers to submit to the magazine, only reward was getting to be published in the book, and that was enough for people. Did similar things for Fray, and Moo do this as well, and it’s about taking that stuff back home where we really live, offline.

Rip that band-aid. Aug 15 2005, decided to merge Flickr ID with Yahoo ID. Waited 18 months before finally said that “in six weeks you have to do this”. Learnt that if you need to make a significant change to how you are doing business with a community that is difficult for some people to understand why, don’t wait 18 months to do it. People don’t like change. Give them six weeks, be there, be engaged, make the change and hold firm. You are going to have to do things that are unpopular. But the longer you wait the more painful it is. If we’d done it at the beginning, it wouldn’t have been so painful. Community was so much bigger 18 months later.

Community, manage thyself. Give people the tools they need so that they can manage the community for you. Sign of a healthy community is when people rise up and say that they would like to manage bits of the community themselves. If you craft in small bits of functionality, it allows people to establish what is appropriate for themselves, so what comments will you allow on y our photographs. Some people don’t mind swearing, others do, so if people self-moderate they can work out their boundaries for themselves. Obviously working within a wider set of community guidelines.

Communicate expectations. Lawyers and risk in this world has meant that whenever we join anything, there are pages of ToS, and some paras are in all caps, and the expectations of what your role is in that community. But people don’t read ToS. Flickr didn’t have community guidelines when it began, it was easier to telegraph that info member to member when it is a small community. So needed to find a way to take that high water line and put that into human readable format. Favourite line “Don’t be creepy. You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.” It was important to put that down in succinct way – four or five bullet points, that help people understand the expectation.

If you’ve got the job for policing the community for appropriateness, as a member, you never want to get scolded or booted for something no one ever told you about. Idea is to communicate expectations around usage. Later, at least they can say “we told you so”

Don’t create supervillains. In most Web 2.0 world, we have sites with free memberships, meaning anyone can come and create an account. Once you do that, the first community moderation tool you build is the “boot member tool”, and the person you boot creates another free account and this time they’re pissed off. When you boot people, you’re going to create supervillains. Instead, minimise the damage they do, work with them directly, and build tools around minimising damage individual members can make, design community so one person can’t do too much damage.

One site, if you get on their bad list, the site just gets slower and slower and slower for you. Because we’re used to that, the problem member doesn’t create a new account, they just get bored and go away. Don’t just boot trolls.

These people will just keep coming back and it’s unfortunate because people, members of your community are passionate, both good and… not so good. Amazing how engaged people become, and how much they want to participate.

Know your audience. Chevy Tahoe campaign, to make ad for Chevy, so you could pick from their video, photos, sound, etc., and could add your own text. Made ads which protested against the Tahoe. Lots of ‘off message’, but created a lot of attention. People rebelled because you couldn’t take your ad with you, it only existed in the Chevy universe, you couldn’t upload your sound or photos or video, so the constraints caused rebellion. Also, know your audience, they made a site for the entire internet, rather than say just Tahoe users.

Embrace the chaos. Whenever you create something where people have a voice, they are going to say things that you didn’t expect. Things will happen on your site that you didn’t expect.

A small computer in Vancouver had four computers stolen. One laptop had Photobooth, which was set to automatically upload photos to Flickr. So the company saw this dude with no shirt on, uploading pics of his tattoos to their account. Ran over all the web, media, etc., and Flickr could see his IP address and his phone number on his website, and busted him. He’s known to the police, and his lawyer saw his picture on Flickr, and told him to turn himself in.

When they launched geotagging, they were worried people would create a “porn island”. But instead if you went to Greenland, and someone had taken pictures and spelt ‘FUCK’ in little pink dots across Greenland. How you deal with that creativity, but when you build something, people will take it in different directions, and it’s how you engage with that.

Pet profiles on Friendster, created dog profiles, and in one weekend, Friendster wiped them all out. So that created an opening for Dogster and Catster. Sometimes when people misuse your site, they are telling you that there is a market, a need, an idea that you are missing. Misuse can be the best sources of ideas.

Q: How do you deal with proclamations from the Yahoo mothership?
Design for selfishness – people can share in several places, so why would they pick yours? So always focus on the benefits that the user will see. Use that to push back against edicts from above.

Q: How to you balance community and commerce
There’s a fable that community and commerce have to be separate, but it’s not true. You talk to your friends about commercial items. The trick is to do it in a way that benefits everyone, and be clear about the rules. JPG Magazine was very clear about what they were going to do with people’s stuff, and said that if they wanted to do anything else they would ask.

Give people options, e.g. free Flickr account with ads, and a Pro account that doesn’t have ads. People can make that choice. Expensive to run big communities, feeling from ’93/94 that the web is free, works until you have massive amounts of hardware, so find a way to balance it.

Q: Cultural issues. How do you deal with cultural conflicts?
If you have a global community, want to ensure people can express themselves. When I get uncomfortable is when it gets member-on-member, looking at abuse in terms of that, when it gets to specific stuff, that’s when I step in and try and do things. Have to determine what you are willing to deal with. What’s acceptable in the community. Key is having a ‘report abuse’ link, make it easy to say that this is right. Can start in aggregate data, what are people saying is or isn’t appropriate. Come down too hard, people won’t be happy. And there are some people who join communities just to be trolls, they love seeing people explode, so finding ways to mute the trolls or discourage them. How can you focus that particular conversation on something that is positive. If something is happens in a forum that is inappropriate, create a space for it, e.g. Mac vs. PCs corner.