Designing Social Interfaces

Chapter 9. The Megalophone

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

—Charlotte Brontë

Keeping up with friends is the viral part of what keeps the social web growing, but it is the sites with intense activity around a topic that keep people coming back over and over again, and this activity often provides the core around which these communities are built. It’s the there, there.

Destinations where people are contributing and conversing about something are often harder to define and design, because the structure and the content are defined and created by the users. This is the place where people stand on their soap boxes and inspire dialogues and arguments, and it is the place where private conversations, secrets, and intense debates can happen around subjects people are intensely passionate about.

The key is to design flexible frameworks and spaces for people to define their own sense of place. Blogs have been successful over the years because the tools out there allowed users to customize everything—the look, how often to publish, how long or short a post, how many authors or categories—while still displaying a standard suite of meta information. Pretty much everything is open, and because of that the variety of blogs and uses of blogging software are as varied as the number of people out there.

There are some emergent display patterns for blogs, forums, email, chat, and instant messages, ...