Nishant Kothary wrote an excellent piece about the different types of signal on social media sites, and how some networks are designed to self-police dishonest signals to such an extent that it hurts the quality of the relationships. From Why Instagram Works:

Facebook requires that you craft an intricate online persona of yourself complete with demographic information, pictures, relationship status, political and religious affiliations, educational qualifications, and so on. Not only that, but Facebook broadcasts literally everything you do to everyone. And you are expected to snap to this image you’ve created. When you stray from it — that is, when you broadcast a perceived dishonest signal or one that is alien to your persona — the bluff is generally called in the form of dissenting comments and behaviors. In the long run, it means less, or worse, as we saw with MySpace, less meaningful engagement.

This ties in really well with that Google+ conversation I wrote about the other day, about how we haven’t quite figured out how to deal with hardship on social network sites.

(link via @ChrisFerdinandi)

I often see posts from people who return from Internet sabbaticals proclaiming that they made an unexpected discovery — they didn’t really miss anything because nothing important happened while they were away. I don’t think that is an honest assessment of the offline experience. A more accurate description is that whenever you spend a significant amount of time offline, you miss almost everything — but that’s ok.

I just spent about 10 days with very minimal online interaction because we had a newborn in the hospital. I caught up on some reading today and realised that I missed a lot of great stuff. It made me anxious for a while — until I realised that the “I didn’t miss anything” crowd might just be a little bit caught up in their own reality distortion fields.

The secret to a healthy and balanced online life that doesn’t give you FOMO when you’re offline is not to deny that you’re going to miss a bunch of great stuff while you’re gone. The secret is to take a deep breath and realise that it’s ok to let the vast majority of information pass you by, as long as you really take in the things that matter. Don’t just retweet. Internalise. Write. Think. Figure out how the words apply to you. Make the time count, and then surrender the rest:

Surrender is the realization that you do not have time for everything that would be worth the time you invested in it if you had the time, and that this fact doesn’t have to threaten your sense that you are well-read. It is the recognition that well-read is not a destination; there is nowhere to get to, and if you assume there is somewhere to get to, you’d have to live a thousand years to even think about getting there, and by the time you got there, there would be a thousand years to catch up on.

Or as Chris Bowler so eloquently puts it:

If the quality is there, I’m thrilled to be weaned down on my quantity.

This is the only way I know how to make peace with the fact that everything happens while I’m offline.

At first it’s hard to figure out what the title of Nicholas Carr’s A post on the occasion of Facebook’s billionth member has to do with Facebook. Especially since he hardly even mentions Facebook. It appears to be an essay about boredom and computer intelligence:

We’ll know that computers are really smart when computers start getting bored. If you assign a computer a profoundly tedious task like spotting potential house numbers in video images, and then you come back a couple of hours later and find that the computer is checking its Facebook feed or surfing porn, then you’ll know that artificial intelligence has truly arrived.

But stick with it. It all makes sense once you get to the end and reflect on the words for a couple of hours. Also, full marks to Parampreet Singh for a comment that references Sisyphus, and compares his plight (“to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this action forever”) with our tendency to check our Facebook feeds constantly.

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted in a few days. I just wanted to let you know that I have a very good reason — possibly the best reason. On Thursday evening at 9:15pm our second baby daughter was born! Things are a bit hectic right now because she is still recovering in NICU. I wrote down a few thoughts about the experience in case you’re interested. So please bear with me as we get back on our feet, and then I’ll start posting regularly again.

I do, however, want to share a post that has been on my mind constantly over the past few days. In A Brief Pause Ethan Kaplan talks about the role that Facebook plays in building stronger communities. At one point he said something that really resonated with me:

I missed seven years of people because I had no means of finding them. Finding them over the last seven years led me being there for a friend, however I could, in a time of the greatest need. I can fault Facebook for a lot, and scholars and critics can fault computer mediated communication for a lot, but I can never give enough credit to both for making that possible.

It’s true. We complain about Facebook a great deal, but I can attest first-hand to the strength of the community in time of need. But this brings up some other, more complicated thoughts. How comfortable are we with sharing our struggles on social networks? We’re having a good discussion about this on Google+ if you’d like to join in. At one point I said this:

I’m happy to post links, jokes, and sunset photos far and wide. But now that I need the community to support us, I’m a lot more hesitant. I traced the root cause of my reluctance to share more openly what’s going on in our lives to the fact that I don’t want to be a downer on people’s timelines. See, if the language of social networks is likes and hearts, doesn’t that guide us to only share the good and ignore the bad? Where is the room to say “Hey, I need help right now” when the nomenclature to respond to that doesn’t exist?

And with that, I’ll leave you with a photo of Emery, and a promise that we’ll get back to our regularly scheduled programming soon.

Most successful applications do a good job of onboarding users to teach them how the basics work. After that, good applications also make it easy to learn more advanced features simply through repeated use. You might make a wrong turn once, but if the application corrects your course, you never make that mistake again.

But sometimes there are features that fall between the cracks of onboarding and self-learning. It usually happens when there is some unique behavior in the app that is not only presumed to be commonly known by all users in the community, but is also small enough so that it’s not worth making a big deal out of during new user onboarding.

I recently thought of two such examples that I wanted to share, along with some suggestions for addressing the issue.

Twitter mentions

First, there is the issue of Twitter mentions. I still see people who I know have been on Twitter for years, who don’t know that if they start a tweet with ”@”, not all their followers will see it. This information is buried deep in Twitter’s Help section, where I’m guessing very few people venture to. From Types of Tweets and Where They Appear:

Users will see @replies in their Home timeline if they are following both the sender and recipient of the update. Otherwise, they won’t see the @reply unless they visit the sender’s Profile page. 

This is fairly clear, but if you don’t think about this as an issue, you won’t know to ask the question, so it’s not information you’re likely to seek out.

Instagram replies

Second, there is replying to comments in Instagram, which I’m sure trips up quite a few people. If you comment on one of my photos in Instagram, I will get a notification. But if I respond to your comment without including your @username, you won’t get a notification. This is not how it works on Facebook, where you get notified of five comments after the one you posted1. Instagram does have an easy way to reply to people with their usernames, but it’s a slide gesture I discovered by accident:

So the easiest way to reply to someone is to slide from left to right on their comment, then tap on the arrow. Or you can start the comment with an @, which will then autocomplete the name as you type. But it’s not something they tell you about explicitly. It’s also, again, not information most people will seek out actively, since they’re getting notifications for each comment on their own photos, so why worry?

A proposal

My proposed solution for this type of situation is fairly simple. In the case of features that don’t behave as people expect them to, show a lightbox-type message to explain how it works just one time — the first time they perform the action. For example, the first time a user sends a tweet that starts with an @, show a message to explain who will see it. And the first time a user comments on one of their own photos in Instagram, show a message that explains when people get app notifications.

These are small but important details, especially for social services where understanding exactly what happens when you hit “Post” is essential to the enjoyment of the app.

Related post from the Elezea archive: Best practices for user onboarding on mobile touchscreen applications.

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1. I think it’s five. But I’m not 100% sure. Come to think of it, it’s probably a good example of this type of confusing behavior as well. ↩

Naomi Canton’s Cell phone culture: How cultural differences affect mobile use is a fascinating article by itself, but the videos and photo slide show really drive home how ubiquitous mobile phones have become all over the world. For example, here are some interviews with cell phone users in Kenya:

Direct link to video on CNN

Kevin Kelleher in Facebook’s Growing Silent-Majority Problem:

This third group – the silent majority of Facebook users – hold the key to the company’s future. Facebook is never going to win over its harshest critics, and it’s unlikely to alienate the people who see it as part of the fabric of their everyday lives. If the company can persuade that silent majority to become more engaged in the site – interacting with bands, liking consumer brands, clicking on the ads targeted to their surfing habits – its future looks pretty bright.

I always find it useful to think about engagement metrics on the web in terms of the three A’s:

• Acquisition. Getting new users to sign up for a site/service.
• Activation. Getting those new users to make their first contribution/purchase.
• Activity. Getting the first-time contributors/purchasers to repeat that activity over and over.

Facebook certainly doesn’t have an acquisition problem (yet), and their ramp-up process is very good, so I also don’t think they have an activation problem. But I can definitely see the argument that they might have a serious activity problem on their hands. Kevin shares some interesting engagement stats, as well as how he thinks Facebook can solve this problem.

(link via @mobivangelist)

Joshua Gross’s post Nothing is Quite What it Seems struck quite a nerve for me:

In this world of constant communication, it’s easy to feel as though everyone else’s life is amazing, while you’re still sitting there eating cereal in your underwear.

Of your 2,000 Facebook friends and 300 people you follow on Twitter, it’s inevitable that some small percentage are doing something interesting at any given moment.

Looking at it the other way around, though, the vast majority of people are sitting around wondering why they seem boring, just like you.

As a father to a 3-year old, I feel particularly boring these days as the exotic photos fly by on Instagram. Joshua’s post reminds me of Sherry Turkle’s phrase “Who will hold a brief for the real?”, which I referenced in this post.

Craig Mod wrote a very interesting essay about community and content for Contents Magazine. In Our New Shrines he talks about building a community first, before deciding what you’re going to do with them. It’s a contentious topic, but it’s worth entertaining Craig’s argument:

There is a reality those of us long steeped in the web are reticent to admit: for many, Facebook is the internet. More than Tumblr. More than wordpress.com. More than Twitter. For a certain person, a very commonly found person, Facebook is a Yahoo! portal, personalized Google news, Gmail, Flickr, iPhoto, and Xbox. If you look closely, companies don’t post URLs to their home pages, they post URLs to their Facebook pages.

We facilitate lots of usability tests here at Flow. I’ve asked the question “So, what do you do when go online?” enough times to know exactly what the answer will be. It is always, without fail, a variation of “Well, I Facebook, of course… A little bit of email… Some Google… Umm, well, mostly Facebook.”

This might change, but I completely agree that for most people, Facebook is the Internet at the moment. I personally don’t like Craig’s proposal of building a community around something vapid before you decide what product/service you want to provide to them. I think it’s a dangerous game. But denying the short-term effectiveness of such a strategy would be naive. For better or worse, this is the attention economy we live in. For now.

Cap Watkins says goodbye to getting stuff for free — and celebrates a better way — in Death of the Free Web:

As a result, the web is becoming more localized, more niche. And what startups are beginning to realize is that they don’t need to be the next Facebook or Twitter or Google to achieve success and to grow a large, sustainable business. What they need to do is create products that connect with these small, but passionate groups of like-minded people. Instead of passionate users making up the minority of a product’s customers, the new goal is to make them the majority from the start. Because those passionate customers, it turns out, create even more passionate customers.

Cap gives some good examples as well. His post argues for a similar approach to what I discussed in Imagining a future without traditional marketing.

(link via @bokardo)