New Assumptions for Designing for the Social Web

I didn't get a chance to check out the WebVisions event that was going on but Jen posted a link to this slide deck from Chris Messina. It's a must-read, and IMHO, right on the money as to the directions things are heading wrt to social networks & applications.

New Assumptions for Designing for the Social Web

View more PDF documents from Chris Messina.

Areae Opens the Kimono

Of course, after the cryptic note in my last post, sure enough Areae has spilled the beans.

That's the 'Level 3' gaming platform I alluded to. I've seen it in action and it is going to *significantly* shake up the landscape.

Congrats to Raph, John, and the rest of the gang there. Now get to beta!

Facebook factoid

So I hooked up with some former Matrox co-workers last night in Toronto for dinner, and amongst other topics, the subject of Facebook came up. Some of that conversation became relevant to a thread over on Raph's blog, so I commented there and am reposting here.

I signed up for Facebook to check it out after several friends far more in-the-know about these things said that it was going to be dominant based on it’s prowess as an extensible platform (Marc Andreesen has a great blog post about this here).

Anyhow, I was surprised to see (a) how many people I knew were already on it, and (b) how they came out of the woodwork to find me, sans my searching for them. After perhaps 10 days of usage, it’s already my 3rd most useful SN service after linkedin and flickr. (I guess I have to add that Xbox Live is a SN service in many ways, and would come in #1 as most used, and perhaps #2 in most useful).

One trivial Facebook factoid that might skew the data: I’m a montrealer and have many friends in Toronto. Toronto has the largest population of facebook users of any city in the world, with over 700k users!

My own hypothesis on this is that it’s a combination of (a) higher BBand penetration in Canada than in US, (b) Facebook being relatively unknown in Europe/Asia (asserted by one of the dinner attendees, a Brit), and (c) Toronto being fairly affluent compared to the rest of Canada and certainly a bigger city than any other in Canada.

A fantastic ETech talk I wish I'd caught...

Raph has liveblogged Danah Boyd's Etech talk entited "Incantations for Muggles". Its awesome. Wish I'd been there for it, but Raph's thorough notetaking are a nice substitute. Really interesting stuff on changing social norms due to impact of technology, and on the use of technology by different people at different stages in life (and the costs of trying to make one size fit all).

Notable quotes:

"Expansion has costs. One of the costs is that you get people angry with you. The common response is lock-in: you have to stay even if you don’t want to, which goes against what people really value. Unhappy users do not make products stick, cf Friendster."

" Twitter is the most fascinating example of complete cognitive overload. Is it really building meaningful social realitions? Do we really gain anything? I know way too many details about Angelina Jolie. She won’t be there for me when I have a crisis. Will Twitter friends be there for you?"

One of the closing comments of the talk is particularly relevant in the context of my earlier post about Kathy Sierra.

"What does it mean to pay attention to the spells cast in both directions? The accidental spells? The Star Wars kid? The student who gets kicked out of college because of their Facebook? We think it’s all positive. Are we always happy with that? Do we even think about it, or do we forget that people’s lives are at stake."

Web 2.0 - The Machine is Us/ing Us

Everyone on the web will link to this, because it's the most concise explanation of Web 2.0 seen to date, and is entertaining and inspiring to boot.