

Social Software and Simplicity - DaniFong
http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=398

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izaidi
"Maybe a partial explanation is that having a simple shared mental model makes
network effects much more powerful. When we think about social software as a
user, we don’t just think about the software, we also think about the network
of other users, and it’s important to be confident that we have a shared
understanding with those other users. If we’re not confident of that shared
understanding, we won’t connect, and the value of the software will diminish."

I really agree with this, and I think it's also true from a design
perspective. A few of the people who've tried my social microblogging site
(mostly people who'd come over from Tumblr, which I find to be pretty anti-
social), testing it in isolation without adding any friends, have complained
about the lack of control over the design -- you can change the color scheme,
but not your style sheet or layout. Meanwhile, users taking advantage of the
social features have noted how nice it feels to know that the friends with
which you're interacting are all immersed in the same basic interface: through
the awareness of shared experience, network effects end up multiplying the
value of the design, and the interaction becomes that much more satisfying. So
far, I've found it to be well worth the sacrifice in customizability.

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tonystubblebine
When Twitter launched a lot of the early commentary was about how that style
of application had already been done and done better, where better meant more
features. Upoch had groups. Dodgeball had a mini language for describing what
you were doing. But neither of those applications had the one feature that
mattered: people.

So, I think the author has it right when he says that simplicity makes it
easier to get at the network effects. In many cases the value of the network
effects dwarf any other feature you could imagine. However, that doesn't mean
that social software can't be complicated. MySpace is complicated. Facebook
only seems simple because it's compared to MySpace.

~~~
DaniFong
Twitter is complicated enough to explain with just _one_ feature. If they
launched with more I'm not sure the behavior for which it is now famous would
have come into existance.

We've had to change the feature we've had front and center once we discovered
friends were having trouble explaining it to one another. Part of it is just a
marketing problem -- you need something to be naturally expressed in a short
period of time.

