Designing Social Interfaces

Chapter 4. Where’s the Rest of Me?

We all perform. It’s what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintentionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we’d like to be.

—Richard Avedon

The core around which social sites revolve is people—who they are, how you know them, what they are contributing. People and their presentations of self and their contributions make for a rich and intertwined community. Without understanding who you are, your friends won’t know you. Potential connections won’t trust what you say or be encouraged to connect to you. You won’t be able to recognize your friends in the crowd of participants, and you won’t necessarily trust new people if you don’t have someway of formulating a picture of who they are.

The work that goes into defining themselves, and into building connections, is often a significant hurdle for users who want to try a new site. And having a well-established identity and network on one site is a huge deterrent for switching to other sites. Help your users by automating as much as possible; aggregating activity like comments or reviews, and presenting user status streams of connections, creates a rich and interesting default without requiring much work from your users.

There is a growing belief that a person’s identity belongs to him and not to the software or service in which the data has been created. The proliferation of socially enabled sites that do not interoperate means people must recreate ...