Designing Social Interfaces

Part III. Objects of My Desire

People congregate and participate on social sites for reasons that are as varied and wide as the interests of all the people participating. Most people are drawn to a site based on their particular interests, in hopes of learning more or meeting others like themselves. They may be looking for information, or they may have information to share. They have a passion—such as making handcrafted jewelry or taking landscape photographs—and at some point, they will want to share that with other people.

As a social site designer, you should begin by defining the type of activity that you want to encourage in your space. Do you want people to collect or share? Are you interested in user contributions, such as comments or reviews, or curated information that you control? Or do you want to create a framework around a specialized type of user-generated object that will then be the center of a social ecosystem, such as photos, or items for sale, or PowerPoint presentations?

Some of the earliest social networking sites to gain traction (SixDegrees, Friendster) ran into a “now what?” wall. After a user had signed up, filled out a profile, found friends, and made connections, there wasn’t really much of anything to do there. The sites lacked a model of a social object, without which there are no activities besides trying to create a scale model of one’s own real-life social graph.

Once you have a handle on the type of activity you want to foster and its associated subactivities, ...