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Wednesday, January 28
When Web 2.0 concepts collide: The tribal problem with Digg
by
Chris Noble
on Wed 28 Jan 2009 14:49 GMT
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Web site with a large user-base must be in need of some social networking features. After-all turning a Web readership into a community, which can share knowledge and opinion, benefits the Web site and the user-base alike. And hey, social networks are hot, so if you can make your site into one of those, you’re bound to boost its value. Right?
Not always: in Digg.com, we have a site where social networking is positively toxic to its core model. Yet the company continues down the social road.
For those few who haven’t visited it, Digg is a user-driven news aggregator. That is users submit links to interesting news stories, which get voted up (dugg up) or down (buried) by the rest of the users. The ones that are most rapidly “dugg” make it to the site’s front page (that’s a simplification - the algorithm that dictates whether a story to make it to the front of the site is more complex and obfuscated than that). Digg’s selling point is that the content that makes it to the top of the pile is dictated entirely by the crowd and the algorithm. There are no editors, moderators or overseers deciding what hot and what’s not.
So Digg is a classic embodiment of the “wisdom of crowds”. It turns out that the model works well when your crowd is amorphous and disconnected. But what happens when it starts to get clumpy? What happens when connections occur between parts of the cloud, when things get tribal? Bad things, that’s what.
Over the last couple of years the Digg team has looked to capitalise on all the information generated by the army of diggers, aiming to improve the algorithm so that each user sees what they are interested in. One strategy adopted was to add social networking into the mix. The thinking is simple enough: if Alice spots that Bob tends to submit interesting stuff, give her an easy way of following Bob’s activities and give the two of them a way to tip each other off about interesting stuff. Consequently Digg introduced a way to build lists of ‘Friends’ - making it easy to follow what particular users are doing and what content they are digging. It also added the ability to send a message, or ‘Shout’ to Friends.
The result was twofold. Some users began digging stories based on who submitted it, rather than the intrinsic value of the content. Networks of friends have emerged that work to promote the submissions of particular users. Of course, such concerted teamwork could happen anyway through e-mail and IM. However with friends and shouts Digg has specifically created the tools that are detrimental to the site’s core mission.
“But hang on a second”, you may be thinking - “that sounds like a good idea, letting me follow someone smart and interesting improves my experience”. You’re right. But the problem with the Digg model is when a group mutually up-vote each other’s stories, the results are non-local to that group. In other words if a cluster of Bobs and Alices have a deep interest in moth-wrangling and digg each other’s stories, it doesn’t only effect the group’s results: Carol and Dave will also see the story rise through the ranks despite the fact that they are much more interested in the latest earwig-racing news.
The addition of a social element also exacerbates the “power user problem”. These are users who build large networks and therefore manage to drive large numbers of stories to the front page. The bête noir of many users are power users who spot stories submitted by someone else and re-submit it as their own - usually leaving the original submission in the dust. It’s leads to this kind of pitch-fork rattling story from December - and Digg’s response which you can read here.
So Digg clearly takes the issue seriously and has spent significant time tweaking its design to get around the problem. An early response was to removing the list of ‘top posters’ to reduce competition for the title of “number one Digger”. Breaking the site up into topic sections was another move designed to give users an easy way to filter content.
It has also spent a lot time tweaking its algorithms to reduce the unwanted network effects and to make it harder for network-dugg stories to hit the front page. But as the algorithm has become more sophisticated, so the conceptually simple link between number of diggs and the likelihood of hitting the front page has been lost. Users now puzzle over why some stories with large numbers of diggs never making it to the front page. The answer of course is that the stories may have been dugg, but not by the right kind of users.
Digg has tied itself in knots because of two fundamental problem with its model:
1. The number of diggs that a story receives is global - everyone sees the same number.
2. Everyone sees the same stories hit the front page (assuming they have all the sections turned on).
Unfortunately network effects mean that while everyone sees a story as having the same number of diggs, the value of each dig varies for each user: a digg from a Friend is more valuable to me than a digg by your Friend. An unprompted digg from someone is more valuable than someone who has been prompted by a friend. So the contents of my front page should be different to yours. This is a fact recognised by Digg’s recommendation engine.
So how can Digg get around this? It can’t easily. Giving everyone their own individual front page would lead to confusion, as would displaying an ‘adjusted’ digg number for each user next to each story.
Digg could simply remove the Friends and Shouts functionality and leave stories in the Upcoming voting queue anonymous until they had passed some threshold of popularity. But it won’t do that because it wants to increase its value and social networking is by far the easiest path when you have a large user-base.
Are there any major lessons here for other sites? Only this: In the vast majority of cases giving your user-base the tools to communicate is a Good Thing. The main exceptions are: (a) when your customer service and products are so bad that letting users converse will create a lynch-mob (b) when your core model requires a user to act without being biased by other users’ activity.
Before retrofitting sociality to existing site, pause for a moment. How will is the site's mechanics be affected if a sub-set of the users start acting as a coordinated mass, rather than informed individuals?
Tuesday, January 20
One to watch: Content Circles - a new collaboration tool
by
Chris Noble
on Tue 20 Jan 2009 23:58 GMT
Content Circles is an intriguing little company. A nine person outfit founded by a couple of Adobe/Xerox alumni, it has so far stayed under most peoples’ radars. There appear to be few if any blog entries about it and no mainstream news coverage. But the company does have a potentially nifty little tool for small and medium sized businesses to share files and collaborate on authoring them. It's just emerged from beta.
Content Circle’s basic concept is a familiar one. It lets you create multiple closed workspaces (it dubs them circles, of course), into which you can dump any kind of document. You can then invite contacts into the circle, so that they can view, contribute or edit the content depending on the role that you as circle creator assign them. Once in they can choose to be notified when content is added or changes, can add notes to documents, and use an in-circle IM system.
Yes, its another approach to doing away with the old e-mail attachment shuffle and there is no shortage of cheap and cheerful approaches; DropBox, Google Docs… or Sharepoint, if cheap doesn’t really appeal.
However Content Circles is unusual in it takes a peer-to-peer approach to the data and is written as a desktop Java application. So there is no central repository for the files, instead each member of the circle holds copy of the files locally in the application. Drag a file or folder into a circle window and the data is copied into the application and then synced across the network to the rest of the membership. If they are offline, then the data is synced as soon as they reappear, from whichever members are online. If everyone is offline, well it is possible to set up a machine as a dedicated store-and-forward server.
The application also hosts a real-time chat pane for circle participants as well as the ability to tag and add comments to files. Here's an annotated screen-shot from the company:
There are some nice touches - you’ll notice above that I said dragging a file on to the application copies it into the circle - so the existing file sits untouched on your machine. But what happens when the version held within CC is altered? First the application makes a new revision and keeps it with previous versions. Secondly it flags up that the version inside the application now differs from the original sitting on your machine and lets you update the original with a couple of mouse clicks.
Another nice touch is the application’s ability to link to Google Docs and Sharepoint servers, so that documents can be pulled in from those sources, edited collaboratively within Content Circles and the Synced back out.
Annoyances and questionsThe 1.0.1 release has a few niggles in it: The Google Docs function won’t work for anyone in the UK or Germany simply because the application automatically appends @gmail.com to the end of username credentials. Fine, except that in the UK and Germany, Google is forced to use googlemail, not gmail. Content Circles says that this bug would be fixed in the next release.
Will it work in a corporate enterprise environment? If Content Circles reminds me of anything at all, it is of a stripped down Groove. Groove was the brainchild of Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie and used a peer-to-peer approach to sync files, discussions, all kinds of data between clients. Now I haven’t used Groove since both it and Ozzie were snapped up by Microsoft in, so I don’t know how Microsoft Groove has evolved 2007 . But the original free app combined a lovely idea with a somewhat flawed implementation - it was bloated and syncing often worked, but sometimes didn’t, resulting in a lot of ‘could you re-sync at your end?’ IM conversations.
I wouldn’t want to paint CC with the Groove brush, but it naturally makes me cautious. Particularly since I haven’t tested it in a proper business environment so I don’t know how it copes with traversing firewalls or how it scales or how much network traffic a large installation dumps into the corporate LAN. These are all issues that can make peer-to-peer a pig in the enterprise and can cripple an apparently good idea. On the sync'ing side at least things look hopeful. Whereas the early Groove was purely peer-to-peer, Content Circle's firewall-traversing abilities are mediated by a "rendevous service" running on the company's own servers according to CEO Sri Chilukuri.
Another thing that will add confidence is the ability to see how others are fairing in the field. Content Circles doesn’t currently have a support forum for users to swap experiences, so you can't get an intuitive feel for how deployments are going. The company says that is set to change.
Subscription based pricing
Lastly, pricing. Content Circles is using a subscription model to sell its product. Passive “circle members” - users who merely want to partake in a circle - can use a free copy, but users who want the ability to set up new circles (be a “circle owner”) and use a few of the more sophisticated abilities such as Sharepoint integration will need to pay - $24.95 per month or $249.50 per year. New users get a 30 day trial period during which they can use all the facilites including circle creation.
Personally, I don’t mind the subscription model when I’m paying for a service, but here the subscription felt artificial when I first tested the app - my personal preference would have been for a standard software license. However Sri Chilukuri argues that there is a substantial service element, with the important directory service (for authentication and security), as well as firewall traversal being dependent on Content Circle's servers.
You may be wondering what happens if you set up some circles, use them and then let the owners' subscription lapse. The answer - the circles are frozen; the content may be accessed, but no new content, tags, notes etc. may be added. Renewing the subscription, 'defrosts' the owner's circles once more. It's an interesting model and one that at least means that, should something befall this small company your content is at least retrievable.
This is definitely a company and a product worth watching.
Monday, December 22
Google Friend Connect v Facebook Connect = chalk v cheese - at the moment
by
Chris Noble
on Mon 22 Dec 2008 16:24 GMT
I’ve been helping a couple of people sort out their customer-facing sites recent and the same question has popped up: Google Friend Connect or FaceBook Connect? When Myspace weighed in with MySpaceID and promised to interoperate with Google Friend Connect, the questions multiplied. So as Christmas approaches, let me lean back against this mahogany fireplace, place my sherry carefully upon it and and expound for a moment.
Most of the initial debates that I’ve seen on suggest that this is an immediate battle and that Google/Facebook are going head-to-head with comparable systems. Not so, in my opinion. While they both broadly aim to make Web sites more social, the offerings are in many respects very, very different. That may change in the future, but here’s the summary of where we are now:
Google Friend ConnectA Quick and dirty addition of social widgets to a Web site. Doesn’t really integrate into the existing site. Currently lacks an API, but expect that to change one day.
Pros
* Good for Non-coders with smaller sites who just want to cut and paste a widget in.
* Good for creating broad, loose networks.
* Expect to see wide availability of wide selection of apps (gadgets) as existing OpenSocial authors tweak their offerings.
* Open-ish - based upon OAuth, OpenSocial and OpenID.
* Support from Myspace, but limited details on integration at the moment.
Cons* No API, so very limited ability to integrate social information into the mainstream site.
* Log-in is not integrated into the main site at the moment. So expect dual log-ins if your site already has user accounts.
* Not all OpenSocial apps work unmodified.
Facebook ConnectA more powerful system that allows integrated log-on and integration into an existing site thanks to its API. Implementation is more complex than Google Friend Connect.
Pros
* Proper single-sign-in tying site and social aspects together.
* Activity on your site can show up in users’ Facebook feeds - a nice viral way to promote the site.
* A full API giving site designers flexibility.
* Facebook users have to use their real names on your site. (Added veracity)
Cons
* More complex to implement.
* Tightly tied to the fortunes of Facebook.
* Facebook users have to use their real names on your site. (They might not want to)
The main advantages of Google Friend Connect is that a quick cut’n paste of some code is all that’s needed to integrate an open OpenSocial application (Google calls them gadgets) into your site. At the moment only a subset of OpenSocial applications worth in the Friend Connect environment Users can interact with these widgets using their existing Google, Yahoo, AOL, or OpenID credentials.
The relative simplicity of using the Google offering is already garnering benefits for the company. Twitter’s recent announcement of support for Google Friend Connect (A user can log in to a GFC-enabled site using their Twitter credentials) was initially this was seen as rejection of Facebook. But “not so” says Twitter in its blog. It’s just that integration with Facebook Connect and MySpaceID are still works in progress that “will require some development effort on our part.”
In the future expect to see Google make its offering more powerful (I would expect an API) and Facebook to help make its more simple. Already it has added a directory of plug-ins that allow popular blog and Wiki packages to work with Connect.
And what of MySpaceID? To be honest it still appears something of a closed book to me since it really hasn’t launched properly yet. It is holding out the promise of synchronization of social activity back to a user’s Myspace page, but isn’t there yet. It's not even absolutely clear how the promised interaction between MySpaceID and Google Friend Connect will work in practice. I’d hold fire until more details emerge.
I'll be revisiting this topic in the future to look at exactly how much knowledge you lose about your userbase by implementing something like Facebook Connect.
In the meantime - have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Monday, November 3
Collaborative blogging tool Skribit readying new 'Pro' features.
by
Chris Noble
on Mon 03 Nov 2008 13:37 GMT
Writer's block is a perennial problem - the average corporate blogger has lots of interesting information tied up in their noggin. But how do they navigate the boundless seas of half-formed blog ideas and steer themselves towards the safe port of.... splosh... oops, my metaphor seems to have sunk. Never mind.
Anyway, Skribit is a handy, free widget that can be integrated into any blog with the minimum of fuss. It lets readers propose topics for the blogger to write about, and it lets other readers vote on these ideas.
At first glance, you might think "so what - topics are often suggested in post comments anyway?" This is true. However the typically blogging set-up reinforces an author-reader divide,. The blogger gets the big headline and large type-face text, the readers get the little comments tucked away. The use of something like Skribit helps break down the barrier and brings the blogger's desire for interaction front-and-centre. And of course the blog author can always 'fly a kite' or two - proposing their own topics and watching how the voting goes.
Currently, the widget is implemented as an IFrame, and as you can see with the sample to the right, the styling it allows is a little rough-and ready. Its Javascript is also rather on the chunky side, which can slow page loading. However some changes are in the works, first there is a new, lightweight version of the widget in development, which allows it to be styled using a blog's own CSS. Secondly there are moves afoot to try and put a business model for Skribit in place.
Skribit doesn't look like a company yet, it hasn't apparently taken any VC financing and comprises three people: Student-founder Paul Stamatiou, developer-founder Calvin Yu and Lance Weatherby who is "Venture Catalyst" at Georgia Tech. and who appears to have a mentoring role.
However, it will start beta-testing a Pro version of the tool next month, according to a posting on the Get Satisfaction support site. The team has even started canavassing opinion as to what features should appear in the paid-for version. So far, support for multiple blogs, suggestion moderation, analytics and increased customisation all appear to be likely candidates. That's good news since a decent revenue stream will increase the chances of a secure future for the the basic, free version.
Monday, October 6
Dabbleboard - online whiteboarding done right.
by
Chris Noble
on Mon 06 Oct 2008 13:33 BST
In a previous life I was ‘the diagram guy’, the chap who chatted to someone about an idea and had to convert a concept into an architectural diagram. I prided myself on my ability to talk to someone on the phone, grasp the idea, and turn a draft diagram around in a few minutes, saying "you mean something like this?".
Network diagrams, software architectures, market life-cycle graphs, you name it, they were all grist to my mill.
I still do that kind of thing now, on occasion. If you're in a similar position, Dabbleboard may prove a lifesaver.
It’s a shared collaborative white board. There are no shortage of those out there, but one that is designed in such a way to be effortlessly powerful. Using the UI, I think to myself - why didn’t anyone else think of doing it that way.
The usual problem with mouse-based whiteboarding is that the results usually look like those of a 3 year-old. While it is possible to get that niave look, by using the freehand mode, in the alternative mode Dabbleboard will try to guess the shape you’re drawing and clean it up. Something that looks vaguely squarish, rectangular or triangular all get instantly converted into a clean vector shapes that can be resized, repositioned and transformed. It keeps drawing very fluid… and fast. I am particularly fond of the duplication function. Click on a shape and various ‘handles’ with different functions appear around it. One of these, lets you copy a figure. simply by dragging on the handle. This is a nice example of how a tiny bit of usabilty work can give a piece of software an undefinable feeling of class. Copy and Paste isn’t hard, ctrl-drag to copy is nice, but this drag-to-copy method is lovely.
Other nice features? A simple API which lets you embed a whiteboard into any page and the ability to construct (and publicly share) libraries of shapes, such as UI widgets.
Here's a demo:
At this point I would normally indulge in a bit of constructive criticism, but there’s really not much to add. It’s fast, slick and nice to use. It’s also free. Developer Zohair Hyder says that there will be a paid version with corporate-friendly features SSL, access control, etc.) in the future. But the free version will remain, with at least the same feature-set as we see today.
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