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Social design learnings

I just read, for the second or third time, Joshua Porter's advise about "Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web Applications and How to Avoid Them". And I think his thoughts are spot on. I could comment on many of the points that he makes, but especially the one about focusing on too many things and the Delicious lesson resonates with me.

The Delicious lesson states that personal value precedes any social value. The social benefits of an application are just network externalities of people's interactions. To get the first people using the application, you must have something of value to them. So always create applications with the personal benefit in mind first - what problem can you solve for the individual user - then sprinkle some social features that add value to the users.

Focusing on too many things is easy in the beginning when everything is just an idea and anything is possible in your imagination. I've found myself doing this over several early Second Brain iterations. But I think we have been pretty good at canceling features and ideas as soon as we see that they don't work well enough. The biggest problems is that developing, testing and canceling is very expensive and it takes too much time. Another is that the "too many" of the things you focus on, takes away resources and attention to the things that you should really work on - the core of your value proposition.

The past months, as we went from early alpha to the preview release, and then to the upcoming Second Brain Reloaded release, I found myself removing many features. And as soon as I take away something that was not thought to be valuable for our users, I can focus on the core, and improve on the features that actually creates the most value at the lowest development cost. That's the kind of priorities a start-up should do.

Another priority that I have made was to talk to Josh about giving us some input on our social design in Second Brain.

The Change Function

I just skimmed through one of the many business books I have ordered the past weeks. I tend to order almost every book I get recommended on some of the blogs that i follow - and several of these have stacked up on my desk.

But, let's get to the point. The Change Function: Why Some Technologies Take Off and Others Crash and Burn has a few simple ideas that one should get from it. It preaches the user oriented view of product development and marketing that is so popular now. He proposes that technologist have been focusing too much on delivering revolutionary technologies (Grove's law) and expecting the resulting products to be adopted as soon as the price is low enough (Moore's law). This view has justified several expensive and failed product launches according to the author, Pip Coburn.

His advice is to focus on the Change Function. It suggests that customers change habits and adopt new technology only if the pain of their current situation is greater than their total perceived pain of making the switch to the proposed solution for their pain. Following this, the advice is to make products that solve customers' pains (of course), don't try to revolutionize everything, give customers familiar reference points that compares the new stuff to what they're already familiar with. This should increase the adoption rate of the technology and hopefully get it over the 12,5% market share where social pressures kick in. Another good advise is to never do major releases, instead involve your users, and make frequent iterations with smaller, evolutionary improvements.

Creating a social layer

I just found an outstanding presentation that Tom Coates (who writes plasticbag.org) gave last week at the Future of Web Apps conference at Brad Feld's blog. It explains some of the considerations one needs to make when trying to put sociability into a web applications. Recommended not so much for its details, but for its short and sweet overview of the big issues.

Combining AJAX, Flash and internetness

One of the first challenges we faced in Second Brain was how to build an application that have all the rich functionality that we needed, but still had the necessary opacity to support the ideal of internet as an open and connected architecture. We didn't want to compromise on functionality, we wanted to forget about the old page paradigm, and we wanted it to have the look and feel of a desktop application, while still taking advantage of the benefits of the internet platform. Quite a challenge for the architects.

The coming RIA wars: A roundup of the Web's new face by ZDNet's Dion Hinchcliffe gives a great review of all the choices that exist when deciding on rich internet applications:

A host of powerful new methods for rapidly creating compelling browser-based software (aka Rich Internet Applications) have recently come to market, or are rapidly heading there. While the technique getting the most press by far these days is still Ajax, there are a number of new approaches that are intent on dislocating this often finicky and hard to work with -- though very powerful -- browser software model. The goal? To help us more easily develop the next generation of Web applications that are every bit as good as or better than desktop PC applications.

Of course, one of the first choices that we considered was to just do everything on the Flash platform, its has always been the first choice for RIA, but it has big trade offs with regards to "internetness". AJAX has some great promises, but it is very difficult, and there are few standardized libraries and development platforms that we could use in our .NET based architecture. We are still waiting for Atlas.

We have a lot of experience with Flash, a lot of experience with .NET, but no experience with AJAX. After a lot of deliberation, our choice was to combine all three into the Second Brain application. But we couldn't do everything from the start. So while we are designing the application for this combined architecture, we are not able to develop it with AJAX functionality. We design for new school development, but develop old school. As we progress into the pBETA stage, we will AJAXify the app. and make it smooth, well flowing without all the page-backs and browser blinking.

I'll explain more on the specifics of the architecture when we are ready to show Second Brain to the world (at least an exclusive selection of that) sometime in November.

New Design, But No More Details

Check out our new and revamped design - especially the new logo.

It is based on the same concept that I made a year ago, but our graphic designers made it look a lot more professional. And they added a new color, some kind of purple. Not exactly a traditional corporate color, but I like it. It is distinct and powerful.

We are now moving into another phase of the project. The development of the first version of Second Brain is progressing, and we know where we are going with this. But we need to be careful with our secrets.

We've got a new logo

Any half-decent company needs a real logo. We've had one for a few weeks, but I just gave it a simple upgrade for our participation in the Seed Forum International Event in Oslo. Sorry I haven't posted anything on that yet. It's quite exiting as we will present the Second Brain business concept to invited investors in Norway.