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I am really starting to like the 4chan founder. He does a very good talk about the fact that neither facebook or g+ are doing a good job of handling online identities. In fact he praises Twitte...

I am really starting to like the 4chan founder. He does a very good talk about the fact that neither facebook or g+ are doing a good job of handling online identities. In fact he praises Twitter for allowing people to have multiple accounts and pseudonyms which allow people to identify and share as who they want to be rather than the name that their parents gave them.

I agree in some context pseudonyms are not the best option. In fact we do use LinkedIn as a resource to learn more about one's identity, but do services such as g+ and facebook have to insist on people maintaining real identities?

What are your thoughts on this?

I am really starting to like the 4chan founder. He does a very good talk about the fact that neither facebook or g+ are doing a good job of handling online identities. In fact he praises Twitte...

I am really starting to like the 4chan founder. He does a very good talk about the fact that neither facebook or g+ are doing a good job of handling online identities. In fact he praises Twitter for allowing people to have multiple accounts and pseudonyms which allow people to identify and share as who they want to be rather than the name that their parents gave them.

I agree in some context pseudonyms are not the best option. In fact we do use LinkedIn as a resource to learn more about one's identity, but do services such as g+ and facebook have to insist on people maintaining real identities?

What are your thoughts on this?

As I approach the completion of the front of the website and start to work on the content design and creation process for my project, I'm wondering at what point I should open the site to members. ...

As I approach the completion of the front of the website and start to work on the content design and creation process for my project, I'm wondering at what point I should open the site to members. I will be creating the core content while the members will be adding their experience to the content. I was planning on creating buzz around the project until the "inside" is the site is ready (some css and language tweeking needs to be done). I was wondering if I should have some of the project completed before I open it to memberships? What are your thoughts?

Traditionally when we built services that were used by one person at a time with no interactions with other people, there was a significant need to specifically label every link, title, and button....

Traditionally when we built services that were used by one person at a time with no interactions with other people, there was a significant need to specifically label every link, title, and button. Develop wizard workflows, provide help, support, ext.

Few examples are online invoicing or project management systems, etc. These services often did a specific task and didn't change as much over time. In fact every change is very costly in such systems and there is often a classical product development by design in place.

Social Web has differences. First of all it changes and evolves at a much more rapid pace. Any strategy or design that slows down that process is a bad business and architectural decision. A good example is when facebook experienced the twitter effect and since then their story feeds, profiles pages, etc. were becoming more and more generic, however their primary goal is still keeping friends and family members informed about each other and whatever that will come out of that ... ie. social search!

As for the average user goes, within a social web they rely on their leaders and influential people to learn how to use the service. Leaders are the people who GET what the technology is all about and constantly find new ways to use it, then this knowledge is passively passed to the average users who follow them. In a social web environment software has to stay as generic as possible in order to be able to change in as little time as possible. It is about the survival of the fittest in a system that is developed by evolution.

To give you another example: many concepts such as RT, @username, or #hashtag were invented by the influential twitter users, then their followers learned how to user those concepts, and then twitter developers built those as features into the system.

If you look at the early days of services such as flickr, facebook, twitter they all build their first several million users undermining all kinds of principals that every classical product designer would have disagreed with. They also lacked many features. The early adopters played the role of influential leaders on those social networks and as people improvised all kinds of new ways to use these generic systems, the developers picked on the most commonly used patterns and built them as features into the system. That is how they remained resourceful and did not invest in building features based on assumptions.

When you are building systems that are used by isolated users, it is very important to specifically label everything and provide all kinds of clues and cues to help the average user. On a social web, it is important to seed the community with the influential leaders first so the average users have a foundation to rely on. Even today many people still dont' understand what facebook or twitter are all about, but they still manage to use those services by following and learning from their friends and leaders.

Starting and seeding a social network with the average users is a bad idea, because there will be no leadership pulses in the community to help them self organize and adopt your services.