Designing Social Interfaces

Chapter 1. Mommy, What’s a Social User Experience Pattern?

I have a dream for the Web...and it has two parts. In the first part, the Web becomes a much more powerful means for collaboration between people. I have always imagined the information space as something to which everyone has immediate and intuitive access, and not just to browse, but to create. Furthermore, the dream of people-to-people communication through shared knowledge must be possible for groups of all sizes, interacting electronically with as much ease as they do now in person.

—Tim Berners-Lee Weaving the Web, p 157, 1999

A Little Social Backstory...

Social design for interactive digital spaces has been around since the earliest bulletin board systems. The most famous being The Well (1985), which was described by Wired magazine in 1997^[1] as “the world’s most influential online community” and predated the World Wide Web and browser interfaces by several years.

The Well

The Well started in 1985 on a VAX system and a series of modems. Conceived by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant, Brand had a simple idea to “take a group of interesting people, give them the means to stay in continuous communication with one another, stand back, and see what happens.” He also had the idea that community created online through written dialog could be strengthened through offline, face-to-face meetings, and he set out to combine the two quite successfully.

From the 1997 Wired article: “But probably the most important of Brand’s early convictions ...