(HBSN) How to Build a Social Network

While I’ve spent a good many years soaking in design, I’m not a trained designer and the following descriptions of your history and your craft will piss you off with their simplicity, imprecision, incompleteness, and engineering bias.

I do believe working prototypes with sample interaction and animation is a far richer place to have a debate than a whiteboard.

My experience with the HCI folk is that they are often brilliant researchers. If you want to understand every possible workflow your users are trying on your application, the elapsed time to complete these workflows, and the enumerated set of quantified emotional damage these workflows are inflicting on your users, find an HCI guy, give him 18 months, and you’ll be <pause> dazzled.

design of information and communication technologies to foster freedom, democracy, human rights, development, and effective governance

it is important to differentiate between what activists do before a movement and what they do during a movement. 

This critical organizing task is done by a small group of people that need to be able to maintain strong ties to one another in a secure and private fashion if they are to succeed.

Ambient overload doesn't involve needles in haystacks. It involves haystack-sized piles of needles. We experience ambient overload when we're surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the neverending pressure of trying to keep up with it all.

The cause of situational overload is too much noise. The cause of ambient overload is too much signal.

This week I had the pleasure to interview Thomas Knoll from Zappos who talks about building a community for your customers. Any company who cares about more than just selling to their customers and actually creating lasting relationships with them should give this a listen. If there is a brand who has written the rule book for customer service and engagement it has to be Zappos so I think we can all learn from what they are trying to build. Enjoy the interview and make sure to say hello to Thomas on Twitter here. He is definitely worth the follow.

German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies first investigated the difference between 'community' and 'society' (respectively, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft). Small groups can exist in a sense of organic community, not requiring formal rules because a sense of common mores or norms unite them. Personal relationships can be cultivated and are quite strong, and there is little need for external enforcement. John Allen's quaint description of early Usenet illustrates Tönnies' idea of community. Larger groups find community hard to sustain. Individual interest rules behavior rather than common mores. Society, as opposed to community, is based on explicit rules that require enforcement. Society possesses greater flexibility and potentially more capability, but individuals are subject to greater anomie and anti-social behavior. Internal factional conflicts occur more frequently, despite the greater modularity of individuals' function in society.

Society scales easily because users are interchangeable, community scales with difficulty because relationships and identity are not interchangeable.

we run into two opposing conceptions of identity: persistent identity and anonymity.