Reger.com Social Feature Concepting Session

It's late... about 2:45 in the morning. I just had a great concepting session with myself. Took about two hours and I took about five pages of bulleted notes. The theme of the session was social networking. I've had social networking in mind for reger.com for a long time. So many of the pieces are there from at the plumbing level, but not carried all the way to the user interface so that people can use them. In general I've had to prioritize social networking lower down because datablogging is the main differentiator of reger.com. But now with an initial showing for datablogging up and running (custom log fields, charts on that data, rss on that data, advanced search on that data, etc) I'm starting to believe that it's time to shift to the social side. Linking users based on this ability that they have to collect different types of data.

In many ways it's a refining process. The plumbing (data structures and java objects) were all built with more advanced forms of social networking in mind. Tonight I spent a lot of time thinking about the placement and appearance of the social networking. What's reger.com's take on social networking?

How obtrusive is it? For example, any file or image that you attach to a blog entry has smart tags attached to it. These are cool because within your site you can see other files/images with the same tag. Flickr.com is a social networking image site based on the notion that you can find other people with the same image tags. If I have a tag called "adidas dragons" I can find other people with the same tag and I can view pictures of their cool retro blue adi shoes. So back to the how obtrusive question. Flickr.com puts a link on every user's page to allow readers of that page to find other users with similar tags. Stay with me. In a sense, they're using a person's page to grow the network. With millions of people on flickr.com, clearly people don't mind with images. But how does that level of obtrusiveness translate to blogs? Blogs are much more personal. You change the template to look like your own. Your blog is an extension of you. And when somebody, like the technology itself, plants links on that extension of you, you may take it personally. Or maybe not. Being connected is important and the driving force behind most interactions in life and online.

My take on obtrusiveness has been what I call the "default-to-reger.com-control-to-user" approach. First, I write the plumbing so that users can control features like links to other sites with similar smart tags. This clearly puts the user of the technology in control. But every setting in a system must have a default value... a way that it is out of the box right after you sign up. In that situation I consider defaulting to a setting that benefits reger.com... note that I said I consider it... I don't always favor reger.com on the defaults. My point is that the user has to always be in control of their data and their site. My realm of discussion has to do with the default setting that they see.

I'm excited at the lists that I created tonight. Lots of "glue" features. Those little things that bring disparate user blog sites together into more of a community. It's no coincidence that last night I was reading The Tipping Point before bed.

All in all, I've probably outlined a month or two of work. And things will get in the way, prioritize higher. But I'll capture these things and work on them when I can. In fact, over the next few weeks they'll be the priority and hopefully I can make some major progress on them.

I don't want to put the list out there quite yet. Largely because I'm being selfish and want to surprise you with the actual feature. And in a small way, I'm worried about announcing a great big list and then feeling pressure to get the features out there too quickly. I'm not being completely Cluetrainish here. I should be. Sorry about that.

Good evening session. I'm beat now. I was tired when I began. I was in the zone for a little, which kept me awake and lucid. But now I'm fading.

Good night.

Update 3:19AM: I've decided to add this entry to the episode I have tracking my reading of The Tipping Point. The book's take on stickiness is what got me thinking about much of this.