“we want to be the myspace of financial traders” !!!
mikeindustries.com/myspace ? — his articles on the topic.
one-way web vs. two-way web. best way to describe what web 2.0 really is.
(why yes, I am still getting going.) where people interacting with each other improve the site. most examples will be from the news industry, because that’s where his interests are now.
one-way web example: NYT. great site, but the expert POV.
WaPo, with holovaty, is going more two-way.
the inverted pyramid: all the important stuff at the top. (goes back to the Civil War era?!)
how did it get started? in a panel he was on recently, 4 different people had 4 different people. now, in syndication, don’t know how much room will be available, so make it cut-able.
newsvine approach is the hourglass, as it tapers off, the comments take off and go into other directions. “hey, I shot a guy in the face there too.”
increasing loyalty by allowing comments.
“much more leveragable”? CNN (200 people) vs newsvine (6 people).
goals of sites. review sites want good reviews across genres. social bookmarking wants people who know what tags are. corked…started because owner wanted to know more about why. finding people who share similar interests.
more than just being social. friendster didn’t do anything but be social networking. in comparison to flickr: social network on top of a great photo service.
never lose site of what your product is separate from the social networking aspect.
active vs. passive users. pay attention to your passive user: everybody starts that way. (who are the passive users on OlyBlog? what do they want/need?) the 1%, 10% of users who create/mixup content need the audience of the 90%.
newsvine: a story that has a lot of votes and no comments is interesting, but non-controversial (or uncomfortable to comment on), or a story with a ton of comments but view votes. “bush acknowledges racism still exists…getting smarter [sotto voce]” best thing is a story with a lot of votes AND a lot of comments.
hmmmm…C might dig newsvine. he loves Google News, and it looks like a souped-version.
delicious hasn’t paid attention to the passive user, which may be creating a barrier to entry. (he asked if anybody had to explain it, and I popped up with my experience with C. took freaking FOREVER, but now he loves it.)
worst example: mark canter’s people aggregator. (hm, that’s baffling looking.) entertaining usability bashing. 🙂 video: “control all the people in your network”?! mmmm, buzzword-tastic. plus, randomly, his kids.
marc canter has his own category on valleywag.
dipping toes in the water, with customizing w/out registering. example: findory. (like the personal list feature on our directory. oh, hey, that gives me an idea.) and moderating.
make registration as light as possible. newsvine is reducing their already light registration form. ajax for checking what names are available. (oooh, try that for book exchange!)
give people something to do immediately after registration.
reputation building. three versions of identity: real identity, anonymity, pseudo-anonymity. real is mostly for stuff like banking. most of what you see in social sites is pseudo-anonymity. (MeFi, OlyBlog, etc., etc.)
how to create a system that rewards good long-time users w/out punishing new/untested users. (look at ebay rating system?) vineacity? get one rung for free. and a 2nd one is easy if you just hang around and don’t do anything.
adjust early & often.
quote from veen: on post “intellectual bargain shopping” — quote from nietzsche. in essence: users aren’t stupid, they’re mentally efficient.
questions….
noticed you added chat rooms, and nobody ever seems to use them? what’s up with that? like walking into a bar, don’t see anybody there, and leave. hasn’t done well, esp. in re: how good they thought it was going to be.
how is community interaction working out? newsvine “code of honor” — not anarchy! (cute graphic.)
business model? we are an advertising-based business. but with only 6 employees, they don’t need a lot of ads. also talking to some other news assets about licensing the technology.
technology? mostly open source. PHP, standards-compliant HTML/CSS. MS-SQL?