I’d been look­ing for­ward to this panel, expect­ing it to be one of the high­lights of SXSW for me. It did not dis­ap­point, despite the last minute change (at 10pm the night before) of the pan­elists; Emily Chang and Max Kiesler of Idea­codes had to step out at the last minute because of an emer­gency. Todd Siel­ing of Mag­no­lia and Chris Messina rose to the occa­sion and more than filled their shoes. Judge for yourself:

(Note: this is almost a direct tran­script of the ses­sion, so please excuse the gram­mar and run on sentences).

Social Design Strate­gies

Daniel Burka   Cre­ative Dir,   Digg/Pownce

Chris Messina  Co-founder,   Cit­i­zen Agency

Todd Sieling   Prod­uct Manager,   Ma.gnolia.com

Joshua Porter   Founder,   Bokardo Design

“Now that social net­works are per­va­sive and quickly becom­ing a reg­u­lar fea­ture set, design­ers need to under­stand the dynam­ics of cre­at­ing expe­ri­ences that encour­age social behav­ior and pub­lic expres­sion, while giv­ing indi­vid­u­als a sense of pri­vacy, per­sonal gain, and own­er­ship. This ses­sion will take an in-depth look at the prin­ci­ples and prac­tices of social design. How do you cre­ate a sym­bi­otic rela­tion­ship between peo­ple and data that max­i­mizes dis­cov­ery, game-play, con­nec­tions, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion? We’ll exam­ine a breadth of exam­ples and explore their pros and cons. Then, we’ll take a look into the future of what’s pos­si­ble. You’ll hear first­hand from a group of design­ers who do this every day.

Joshua Porter on How to Encour­age Behavior

Here’s a con­densed his­tory of the last 15 years of the internet:

- 1st phase: build­ing sta­tic web­site for reading

- 2nd phase: web­sites with data­base on the back­end, started to be a two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tions: bank­ing, e-commerce sites

- 3rd phase: last few years, social appli­ca­tions that enable con­ver­sa­tions between peo­ple using the soft­ware. Object-based net­works and social networks.

So, we’re con­sid­er­ing the design issues that come over time as you see more and more social inter­ac­tion of peo­ple using your web­site. One of the big chal­lenges is, how do you encour­age good behav­ior? How do you get peo­ple doing the activ­ity your web­site is made for?

1. Tying behav­ior to iden­tity. If it isn’t, peo­ple can’t be held respon­si­ble for the things they do there. Using real name gives more author­ity. For exam­ple, on Ama­zon you have real names. Another exam­ple is eBay, a web ser­vice with greater rev­enues than the GDP of many coun­tries. eBay has a sophis­ti­cated behav­ior rat­ing sys­tem that defines the iden­tity and author­ity of the buyer / seller. This is a sys­tem iden­tity rather than a real-world iden­tity, since the name of the buyer / seller is not known until after the auc­tion is over.

Daniel Burka men­tions how they took out the top Dig­gers fea­ture because it became very com­pet­i­tive for a small set of users to the detri­ment of the rest.

Josh adds that recog­ni­tion is good, but on Digg it was cumu­la­tive, so it was eas­ier to stay on the top once you already were there, and made it harder for oth­ers to reach that spot. On Thread­less, for exam­ple, recog­ni­tion tapers rel­a­tively quickly after a designer has won a contest.

2. Show­ing cau­sa­tion. For exam­ple, Net­flix rat­ings. The more movies you rate, the bet­ter rec­om­men­da­tions you will receive. The feed­back is instant, too, since you rec­om­men­da­tions are refreshed based on your ratings.

3. Lever­age reci­procity. When some­one does some­thing of value to you, you feel inclined or oblig­ated to be rec­i­p­ro­cal. On LinkedIn, this hap­pens through rec­om­men­da­tions. When some­one gives another per­son a pro­fes­sional rec­om­men­da­tion, the prob­a­bil­ity is that you will say some­thing about the other per­son.

Daniel Burka on Pri­vacy and Com­mu­nity: What are the hot points for user regard­ing privacy?

1. Iden­tity. Their image, their name … Digg doesn’t require a real name, it’s very open. On the other hand, Pownce is about inter­per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tion between peo­ple. Unless you have a rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ship with some­one, you can only see their first name and ini­tial of last name.

2. Friends. Being able to see oth­ers’ friends, which is an unusual thing in gen­eral, because you don’t see friend rela­tion­ships offline.

3. Com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Com­mu­ni­ca­tions exist on a range of pri­vate to very pub­lic. For exam­ple, on Digg, there’s a shout fea­ture, because it is very pub­lic act.

4. Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of activ­ity. Peo­ple can see what you’ve Dugg, what com­ments you’ve made … On the other hand, Face­book Bea­con takes this too far, at least in their first imple­men­ta­tion. It’s impor­tant to have a “gradi­eted” site, where it’s sim­ple on the sur­face, but as you gather expe­ri­ence, you find new func­tion­al­ity and fea­tures that will keep you inter­ested and active.

5. Trans­parency. Prefer­ably you show and don’t have to tell. For exam­ple, when you make a post, tell the user whether it’s a pri­vate or a pub­lic post, so user can make an informed judge­ment. Pro­tect the user from unin­formed actions.

Todd Siel­ing on Ma.gnolia’s Adven­tures in Spam Control

Spam is a drag on social soft­ware: 75–80% of new accounts are spam! Besides bein a nui­sance for users, it’s costly for the ser­vice owner. The pri­mary meth­ods spam­mers use include:

- Cre­at­ing many accounts on a site, to game up their spam content.

- Appear­ing too legit to quit at first, and later hav­ing few legit-looking links.

- The “Joe SEO” with “help­ful” get rich quick advice. They feel they’re not spam­ming, but help­ing peo­ple by shar­ing infor­ma­tion; they don’t real­ize how they’re tax­ing people’s enjoy­ment of the site.

- You can’t fool me: spam­mers that are pro­file aware (some­times by copy and past­ing infor­ma­tion from oth­ers’ pro­files) and make it look like they’re legit­i­mate users.

- Had enough yet?: import­ing vol­ume links makes it very easy for spammers.

The impli­ca­tion is that spam will not go away because it is dif­fi­cult to con­trol against these meth­ods by machine. It’s not pos­si­ble to win the war, so strate­gies have to be devel­oped to mit­i­gate the spam.

The prin­ci­pal strate­gies that didn’t work include:

- No-follow: Mag­no­lia thought this would take away the incen­tive, but this doesn’t have an effect, partly because there are too many sites that don’t apply no-follow.

- Akismet: this is a “machine logic” method of deal­ing with spam that didn’t work; too much spam got through and false pos­i­tives got flagged.

- Weed on sight: too much vol­ume, not enough time.

- Recaptcha: again, a machine solution.

How­ever, some strate­gies did work:

- First of all, accept there’s no 100% solu­tion so you can focus your resources more wisely.

- Give an oppor­tu­nity for your mem­bers to become “gar­den­ers”: don’ just use tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion, but use human intel­li­gence. Enable trusted mem­bers of the com­mu­nity to flag abu­sive users, but don’t make it into a job, a con­test or a vendetta. Gar­den­ers will aslo iden­tify and develop new gar­den­ers. What’s the reward? Mostly, it’s that they’re con­tribut­ing to the com­mu­nity in an altru­is­tic way. For exam­ple, Alex Jones on Ma.gnolia.com has a gardener’s shovel next to his name. (Josh Porter men­tions there’s no pure altru­ism, and that peo­ple do things to help them­selves. Recog­ni­tion, author­ity, rank is a strong moti­va­tor). Well, Alex Jones is in the audi­ence and stood up to say that he dis­cov­ered Mag­no­lia very early on, set up some groups rel­e­vant to him and that his activ­ity on Mag­no­lia has helped him raise his own pro­file. So he feels indebted to help make Mag­no­lia a bet­ter place, both out of grat­i­tude and because a clean site helps him more.

- Cre­ate a whitelist (with a shade of gray)

Ques­tion on mon­e­ti­za­tion of social sites. Josh men­tions that it needs to be indi­rect. Build the cul­ture of the com­mu­nity and sup­port the cul­ture and the rev­enue will come indi­rectly, as a fall­out of their increased passion.