Peter Smith’s Posterous

Jakob Neilsen recently published research on usability evaluations of social networks and RSS feeds. Summary:

As the satisfaction ratings indicate, we have a long way to go to improve the usability of social network messaging and RSS feeds.

The problems start with something as simple as the choice of username. For example, the United States Department of Education's Twitter ID was "usedgov," which sounded to users like "used government" and was off-putting. Logos were often bad as well, particularly in the small rendering that some services offer. Users depend on the ability to scan down a stream to pick out logos and user names, but this basic need was often thwarted.

The shorter the message, the more important the writing. Don't simply repurpose the first N characters of a longer piece of content. Too many corporate feeds didn't bother writing for the medium and suffered accordingly, as users didn't know whether to click the links (and therefore didn't).

The good news is that we can only go up. Users do want these messages. In moderation. If they're good.

"Usedgov" - Ha ha, Love it. If the feed in question was simply about repurposing existing content without re-working it, then in one sense, it is "used govt." - Announcing our Twitter account: get yr slightly used govt content here folks!

Seriously though, looks like this study covers good practical issues to keep in mind when setting up our own social network presences.

On 29th April Professor John Naughton, the first of our ‘Big Thinkers’, presented his view on the growth of internet and its implications for comms. He made 7 key points:

1. We need to see the ongoing changes in our digital ecosystem in some kind of long-term perspective. In that sense, what happened with print is probably the best historical analogy we have.

2. Most people still don’t understand the Internet. Firstly they tend to regard the Web and the Internet as synonomous. They’re not. The Net is the infrastructure on what everything else runs and is much bigger and more important. Because of its open and permissive architecture, it’s an enabler of disruptive innovation. Disruption is a feature of the Net, not (as politicians, content industries and governments believe) a bug.

3. Ecology provides a better analytical framework than economics for thinking about what’s going on.

4.The emerging digital ecosystem is immeasurably more complex than the one it’s replacing. Only those who can handle that complexity will thrive in it.

5. The Web isn’t static. On the contrary, it’s constantly evolving before our eyes. Examples: the amount of javascript programs that now run inside a single web page; mash-ups; RSS.

6. The network — not the PC — is now the computer in many contexts.

7. We need paradigms (mindsets, mental frameworks) in order to operate effectively. But paradigms also blind-side us. Thus to broadcasters the idea of “user-generated content” is an oxymoron. It can’t happen in their paradigm. So they didn’t see YouTube, Flickr etc. until it was too late. Ditto for newspapers and blogging.”

Just stumbled across the UK government's Big Thinkers blog and this post caught my eye. Good summary of the big picture. i.e. what's going on with the shift to digital.

BTW John Naughton is a perfesser type in the UK with a fancy title - "Public Understanding of Technology." http://systems.open.ac.uk/page.cfm?pageid=JohnNhome

He blogs at http://memex.naughtons.org/

services like Facebook and Twitter are emerging as critical pieces of social infrastructure. It may be worth thinking of them as public goods. We know a lot of different ways to provision public goods – states maintain them using taxation, private entities build them and charge access fees, communities build them and rely on user support, NGOs provide services and use a hybrid of user fees, donations and foundation support. I don’t think it’s crazy to think that this might be how we choose to build social networks in the future… or perhaps if any of the tools we rely on becomes less reliable.

Fascinating concept. Back in the day, the postal service was a "critical piece of social infrastructure" also. So, are social networks the 21st century equivalent of the postal service? A public good that requires government attention. I'm obviously not saying that they should be run as an agency of government the way that the post office is. But government could underwrite social networks to ensure their ubiquity or availability?

When you're addicted to electronic communication, it doesn't matter the form.

The real story here is that Skype is restrained from innovating because they don’t own their own IP. In fact, they can’t even see the core IP.

Whoops.

But anyhow, another reason why Skype doesn't get the attention it deserves. They can't innovate. No cool new features, no ecosystem of third party developers a la Facebook, Twitter or the iPhone. There's nothing new under the sun, so nothing to announce, nothing for the real-time web types (read: twtterers) to obsess over.

The White House is collecting and storing comments and videos placed on its social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube without notifying or asking the consent of the site users, a failure that appears to run counter to President Obama's promise of a transparent government and his pledge to protect privacy on the Internet.

Cognitive dissonance on so many levels with this story. There's any number of other entities that crawl and store internet data - from archive.org to social media monitoring services to Google to...