Category: social media

Models for defining a social network user experiences

As we’re making OpenSky more social I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at social networks and recently realized that social interactions on social networking sites can be reduced to verb-noun-verb definitions that: Outline a share-object-consume chain Have simple, well-defined verbs Here are some examples of those definitions: Twitter Tweet links to click Facebook… Continue reading Models for defining a social network user experiences

How to game KickStarter

KickStarter‘s cool but I feel like I see too many projects hit their funding numbers at the last minute of the pledge window. Call me a cynic, but after thinking about this on the train one morning, I devised this scheme for getting “free” money for your project. Start your project the old-fashioned way: gather… Continue reading How to game KickStarter

The problems with tweets/micrcommunications

As tweets/txts/social feeds and other microcommunications take a larger share of the new media landscape, it’s hitting a utility wall. Some issues to solve: How do you make big decisions from microdata? Right now, everyone seems focused on real-time search with some component of qualitative measures on individual tweets. How do you tie microdata to… Continue reading The problems with tweets/micrcommunications

Notes from NYTimes “Ambient awareness” article

A recent NYTimes Magazine article on microblogging provides a great definition of the value of Facebook statuses, tweets, and other online “status” communication tools: Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly… Continue reading Notes from NYTimes “Ambient awareness” article

Nodes, connections, and context

For a user, the Internet is just a dynamic application. All of the websites and apps and everything else add up to the same abstract features that are present in any desktop app:

  1. Store/read data
  2. Query for data
  3. Write/edit data

That’s a useful conceptual framework for planning a successful startup in today’s internet.

Why SEO matters for user-generated content

Lately I’ve been surprised to hear people say something to the effect of “when it comes to social networking and UGC, SEO doesn’t matter” in a number of different conversations. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, SEO is more important to a successful social networking and user-generated content than for editorial content.