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10:00AM: PANEL - Social Design Strategies. Daniel Burka (Creative Dir, Digg/Pownce), Max Kiesler (Co-founder, Ideacodes), Joshua Porter (Founder, Bokardo Design) talk about designing for communities.

Tie Behavior to Identify
Think Amazon or Ebay.

Give Recognition
Like ‘Top Diggers.’ Digg banned this feature because it became counter productive and over competitive. Recognition seems to work better when it comes from the group and isn’t permanent. On Digg, because the Top Diggers feature was cummulative, the top members of the community ended up at the top. Threadless: The recognition is over when the voting ends or the t-shit sells.

Show Causation
Netflix tells you many times that rating movies is related to getting better recommendations. Netflix doesn’t even tell you — they show you.

Leverage Reciprocity
Core to all the research of social psychology. When someone provides value to you, you feel compelled to provide value back. When someone gives you a recommendation on LinkedIn, the probability of getting a recommendation in return is huge. Interesting term: “Group Usability.”

Privacy and Community (begin Daniel Burka from Digg + Pownce)
Deleted his posts from the facebook Wall because he thought it was just a messaging system. Private: Basecamp, pownce, vimeo. Public: Metafilter, getsatisfaction, digg. Middle: facebook, flickr.

Privacy: Hot points in social networks
What are the things they really care about in terms of privacy? Which part of their identity is important? On pownce, they only show people’s friends as first name, last initial. Most social allow to see other people’s friends, mostly to grow community. Isn’t that weird? If you run into somebody on the street, you don’t get a snapshot into their social life.

Tracking people’s site activity.
For example, on Digg, you can see what comments you voted up and down. Fandango have ‘Rate this on Netflix.’ Isn’t that weird? From product to product? Took private information and made it public. Need to build in controls, but don’t put things in as disable-able features. Adds to feature bloat. Firefox versus Mozilla’s previous browser (SeeMonkey?). Mozilla reduced the browser to five core features. Hide complexity. Complex features should go “under the hood.”

Transparency
Show don’t tell. If you make a post, who the receiptents should see it, and it should be clear.

Summing Up…

• Clarity is at the public/private poles, otherwise prepare
• Be nuanced, be sensitive
• Give control, but not as a crunch
• Transparency, transparency, transparency

Weeding out Worms (Ma.gnolia’s experience)
Spam is a drag, spammers heart social software, our tools for good also are spammer’s tools for bad, ugly numbers: 75-80% of new accounts are spam.

Spammer Methods

• One site, many accounts and link to their Cialis site.
• Spammers trying to move content to the top of ranking mechanisms.
• Too legit to quit: few legit-looking links.
• Joe-SEO: getting rich quick. There are all sorts of dudes in their garages adding links to their bead shops.
• You can’t Fool Me: profile aware
• Had Enough Yet? - importing volume links

Magnolia realized they would never win the war, so they had to tame it. Here’s what didn’t work:

• No-follow with Google (robots.txt?). Google doesn’t go the referred URL.
• Akismet spam fighting system for WordPress. It flags accounts, and they ended up having to go through accounts.
• Weed-on-sight. If a person sees an account (an admin), they can click and hide a site immediately.

What did work:

• Accept that there’s no 100% win
• Gardeners
• Whitelist, with a shade of gray. Only whitelisted accounts show up on the site.

About Gardeners
Enabled trustd members to move accounts on and off of whitelist. Not a job, contest or vendetta. Eventually, gardeners will make new gardeners, using the network for good. Why garden? Altruism? Traffic and reputation incentive? People help themselves and the community. Ownership? What are creative ways for people to exercies ownership over the content produced?

Q&A:

• How are sites being monetized? Other than ads? Monetization of social sites needs to be indirect. Power members bring others into the fold and get recognition. Get the community excited and they’ll do marketing for you. Nobody has figured this out.
• Girl type furiously and publishing on her blog: threadnaught.net

11:30AM: PANEL - From Frustation to Elation, Getting Emotional by Design. Dan Rubin (Black Seagull), Eris Stassi (Interaction Designer, Awesome, Inc.), Didier Hilhorst (Interaction Designer, IDEO) talk about why people love and hate products.

First Impressions
Make the biggest impact. Maybe the first thing I shouldn’t do is to go through a 10-hour install. Or go back to the store to buy batteries. Once you’ve made a good first impression, you need to hang on to that. And you do that by communication. It’s key. It starts off a great relationship. Products that communicate well think about your interests, the same as a person who knows you prodicts our next steps and gets to know you. Some things are hot and some are not

Trust, Commitment, Forgiveness
What does committment mean in terms of software? A good product forgives you when you make a mistake. You’re not going to get everything right.

Respect
A user can tell when the designers of a product that respect the users. Products shouldn’t punish you for your mistakes. “…a product that can correct our mistakes as they happen gains our trust.” -Maeda. The product looks out for me.

When you’re creating a product, translate your experience with people: first kiss, great sex, being loved, being appreciated. These feels can be injected into our products. Flip side: being jumped, being ignored, frustration.

Examples:

• Negative. RealPlayer (taken advantage of), RIAA (used), phone touch tone menus (aggravated). All create conflict. Confict becomes escalation (you’re on the phone with tech support). Control — who’s in control? Things are taken over. Blame. Stubborn. Deception. Product jealousy: document formats (*.doc). I can’t take my files elsewhere.
• Positive. Hope and redemption: the Prius (saving the earth). Netflix (no fees, etc.), Flexcar (how people think about car ownership), method (the soap — no harm chemicals), TIVO (redeemed television),

Golden Rule: Create a Product You Would Want to Use
Experience of flow — storytelling. Building a scenario, engaging. Map that story out and tell it to somebody.

Memory Recall and Symbolic Meaning
Tastes, smells. Think of perfumes. Reminds you of a person and a place. Sale with songs. If you heard the fast forward sound from TIVO, you’d immediately know what it is. Sound and action. Very powerful.

Tactile Experience
How do things feel? iPhone is cold and glassy. How do we introduce tactile feedback into software? How do you do it in a digital environment? Companies add weight to products to make them feel more sexy.

Feels, Function, Form = design process. Slides at gettingemotional.com.

Q&A:

• Interesting product development going on in haptics and touch
• Designers like using textures to make things feel more human, makes things feel older, vitural weight
• Mental mapping = use metaphors that map to the real world (ie. Desktop, Folders, Trash Cans)
• Girl clothes have faux pockets — how weird is that? “The echo of an object is useful.” Another example: digital SLRs borrowing from old school photography — the audible click on a digital camera.

Mark Zuckerberg Keynote

Mark Zuckerburg interviewed by Sarah Lacy (Author/Journalist, BusinessWeek/Yahoo!) talks about his experience with Facebook and it’s future. It was a complete farce. Zuckerberg talked incessently about “helping people communicate” and “helping people to empathize.” Lacy twirled her hair, crossed her legs back and forth, and flirted with Zuckerberg. She cut him off, and tried to provoke him multiple times. The audience was tense, there were a couple uproars against Lacy. She actual said: “Can someone please send me a message about why I suck so much?” Zuckerberg’s verbiage felt contrived and Lacy was unprofessional and bimbo-ish. See the transcript, see it on cnet, or read another review.

I actually considered asking: “Are you two sleeping together?” during the Q&A.

3:30PM: PANEL - Content Boundaries: A 12-Step Program. Heather Armstrong (Dooce, CEO, Armstrong Media LLC), Margaret Mason (Mighty Girl and Mighty Goods, Founder & Publisher, Mighty Mighty Media) talk about their experience as bloggers.

Step 1: Admit that you are powerless over your users.
The Digg Revolt of May 2007. Happened around DVD codes. Digg faced a choice between editing their content, thus alienating their whole user base, or a lawsuit.

Step 2: Get frazzled and fat on your own terms.

Step 3: Know thyself.

• Are you a top down site, or a bottom up? NYTimes.com doesn’t need the audience, but threadless or metafilter does.
• What’s your comfort level? If you’re top down, how comfortable are you with putting yourself out there?
• Are you engaging? Use comments on your website, supplying an e-mail address, writing directly on your site.

Step 4: You get what you give.

• Shout: Superhero Designs Blog.
• Don’t make fun of public figures.

Step 5: Expain yourself. Be transparent.

Step 6: Avoid jargon.

Step 7: Find your sweet spot.
Set your goals: 43things.com. What is success for you? See how readers respond: Google Analytics and Mint.

Step 11: Publish for readers you want, not the ones you have.

Step 12: Follow the fun.
“The lack of authenticity is the kiss of death.”

Editorial Checklist

• Is this 100% accurate?
• Could I make this point another way?
• Will this be a unpleasant surprise?
• Could this damage a relationship?
• Do I have the resources to deal with any problmes that might arise?
• Will this anger animal rights or breast feeding advocates?

The best ways to apologize:

• I made a mistake.
• I am sorry.
• This won’t happen again.

5:00PM: PANEL - LOLWUT? Why Do I Keep Coming Back to This Website?
Ben Huh (CEO, I Can Has Cheezburge…) and Eric Nakagawa (CEO, FTW R&D) talk about their ridiculous site: ICanHasCheezburger.com.

They started off with an IM conversation with a funny image. It was Just for Fun, put ads on page, ugly blog, funny pictures (June 2007). All it has been are pictures that we thought were funny.By February of 2007, traffic doubles. The internet finds us. Our server dies every couple of days.

Nakagawa talks about his feedback loop: the burgers. Similar to netflix starts. Got exposure from boingboing.com (on home page). Started getting lots of e-mails. Added Google Analytics. March 2007: Donations and moved to cheezserver. Quota filled in 15 days. 2TB+?!? Watermarking the photos generated a lot of traffic. Bandwidth is still a concern, but now they’re sponsored by Woot!.

Eventually, Nakagawa made enough money with Adsense (after optimization) to quite his job. Wants fans that would want to print all the Happy Cat photos, print them out and post them in their cubicles. Eventually, he opted to polarize users.

Stage 2

Nakagawa sold the site to Ben. Didn’t want to change anything. They put process in place and traffic spiked: 1.5 million uniques a day. They have four developers, focus on super simple solutions.

Not every problem needs a solution.

They looked for contradictions. Some posts get millions of views, but never any comments. Why is that?

These guys are great. Totally hilarious. They speak to their investors in LOL speak. Ben: “I’m actually from the south… OF KOREA!”

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