Web Social Architecture

Tweeting about the Weather Isn't Lame

I can't remember where I read this, but someone (with some time on their hands?) figured out that some higher-than-you'd-expect percentage of posts to Twitter are about the weather. Seriously, the weather!

I myself have done this. And the past month in Seattle, with the crazy snow and now rain we've had, my PNW-centric personal Twittersphere has been all abuzz about sledding, traffic, holiday travel hassles, snow, snow, snow, and now the road-salting controversy in the City Council. (Salting! What is this, Wisconsin? It snows like twice a year here.)

I have to say, the volume of weather-related tweets this holiday season has been marked. And this has made me wonder what's going on. Why would anyone go to the trouble to broadcast a stray water cooler comment out to the world?

On the one hand, this sudden flood (ahem) of banal weather tweets might seem to confirm once and for all the uselessness of Twitter. I see it a little differently, though. What I think is actually happening is that people are creating a layer of light conversation around a synchronous shared experience. It's the equivalent of a water-cooler chat, yes--but I've started to think there's something important about the shared aspect of that experience. If there's one thing we have in common, after all, it's the weather.

Though other smart folks (including, most vehemently, my psychotherapist / wife) disagree, I'm starting to think experiences don't have to be meaningful to be important, as long as they're shared, and especially when the sharing is synchronous with the experience.

So no, tweeting about the weather isn't lame at all. I'd rather think of it as a social gesture acknowledging commonality, strengthening bonds, and maintaining connectedness.

But do all our random followers on Twitter, or even our followers who (are lucky enough to) live in other climates care about this kind of stuff? In many cases, clearly not. For me, this points to Twitter's shortcoming as a social network. Twitter, I'd even say, is not an appropriate tool for relationship-building. It's not, in other words, a social network in its own right.

I see Twitter, instead, as a powerful feature of social networks. Standing alone, it's a feature of existing distributed social networks--and a great reminder that social networks are made of people, not web pages. Fed into Facebook, Twitter becomes a more-powerful status communicator, a feature of Facebook. And with Twitter's open API, endless possibilities exist for layering meaningful triviality into social network-driven web experiences.

A Simple Recipe for Great Mobile Application Design

As you can probably tell, I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek with the title of this post, just for the sake of provocation. But I actually do have a theory about how to design great mobile apps. I've been floating the idea with colleagues lately, and it's been producing great results: Strongly opinionated responses, for and against!

Here it is: There are two things about mobile that are fundamentally different from web designed for the desktop / laptop, two things that are really cool about mobile. They are location awareness and constant access to your relationships. Where those two factors intersect is the sweet spot of great mobile design.

Your mobile device knows where you are. As our creative director said to me in one of his wild rants (yes you, Tim), good mobile is all about "information about your surroundings." I agree, but I'd add that your mobile device also knows who you know. It knows how to contact the people you know, it knows what they're saying, and it gives them a way to contact you. It's a portal into all your relationship channels--good mobile is also all about portable access to your people.

Good mobile design, says me, taps into one of those two unique attributes of mobile. And great mobile design taps into them both.

I also say no manifesto worth its salt lacks a Venn diagram. Therefore:

 

                     

 

Some smart people have voiced objections to this idea, including that there are some really cool games out there for mobile that have nothing to do with location awareness or sociability. I've even been called on my recent defense of triviality in light of this argument. Fair enough. But I'm sticking to my guns.

I'm not saying everything for mobile has to fall into this framework to be worthwhile. I'm just saying great mobile design--game-changing, market-defining, indispensable design--takes full advantage of the unique benefits of mobile. Ms. Pac-Man might be pretty fun controlled by the iPhone's accelerometer, but just because it's kind of cool doesn't mean it's great design.

Here's an example that I think illustrates what I'm talking about.

Helio's "buddy beacon" feature takes advantage of both location awareness and access to the contacts list. (Disclosure: Helio is a client.) Buddy beacons represent people in your contact list, and it displays their locations on a map. You can see where your people are, and you can also see their status: Are they busy, available, on the phone, etc.

Helio has taken the instant messaging metaphors of presence and status, and extended them into a location context.

Pretty nice. There are some limitations, though: Only other Helio customers show up, and there's no seamless way to contact buddies directly through the map. In the era of open standards and touchscreen interfaces, this doesn't quite cut the mustard.

There are plenty of other easy examples. Finding nearby restaurants is cool, and seeing customers' ratings and reviews of those restaurants is even cooler. But cooler yet would be to show restaurants visited by people you know--a shared restaurant landscape of opinions, experiences, and preferences. It's not hard to imagine all kinds of extensions of relatively simple ideas: Just ask, how do we add geographic and social context to create value?

Poof! Mobile design made easy. What do you think?

Mining the Business Value of the Social Web: Behavioral Metadata

As an information architect, I work with metadata a lot. I help define interfaces based on information about the content. For example, an object on a home page might be the "newest" object in a system, or it might be a rotating series of "newest" objects by each "author" with "home page" authority. See my other posts on quality and self-organization in the presentation layer if you want more on that.

I work at a company with a strong focus on performance-driven design, and so I work constantly with web analysts, who specialize in understanding behavior on web sites and using that behavioral data to drive business decisions, and I work constantly with designers, researchers, and information architects whose focus is creating innovative, valuable stuff people want to use.

I'm working where I work partly because I think there's tremendous potential in the intersection of information architecture and web analytics, in particular on the social web.

While some companies have been implementing sophisticated web analytics programs for years, many are just starting to measure behavior on their sites. Very frequently, there's lots of data collected but no real plan for taking action based on it.

At the same time, many companies are just beginning to experiment with social media marketing. They're getting out there and participating, and their customers are creating content, but that content is hard to present meaningfully, and partly because of that most social media marketing efforts fail to realize their full promise.

And naturally, the new focus on measurement and data raises the question of how the success of those social media marketing efforts should be measured. I've posted in the past about measuring communities, and there are a lot of people out there contributing to that discussion. What I think is frequently overlooked, though, is behavioral data helping to create value in social systems. Not data about value, but data creating value.

I made this handy chart to help explain what I mean. Click the image for a more-legible view:

 

When users interact with web sites, information about their behavior accumulates--information attached both to the user as object and content as object. That information about people and the things they do--what's called behavioral or tacit metadata--tells a lot about people and content. And in complex, emergent and self-organizing systems, behavioral metadata is especially powerful, because in those kinds of systems it's a challenge on the one hand to present content in meaningful ways and on the other hand to generate business intelligence to drive smart decisions.

As content and people increasingly cross freely between domains in the emerging standards-based social universe, I think we'll see a shift in business models from today's focus on owning content to a new focus on owning the metadata about the content and the people interacting with the content. I'll risk a prediction: In a short time, behavioral metadata, the information about what people do with content, will be more valuable than the content itself.

What do you think?

A Conceptual Map: The Mobile Web as a Social Space

Following last month's release of the iPhone 3G, along with the launch of the App Store, and what Brian Fling called the "first true Mobile 2.0," everyone around here is talking about the emergence of the mobile device as a critical facet of web strategy. My colleague Anders Rosenquist, who is seriously deep on mobile, presented a first take on the company point of view on mobile strategy at a recent meeting; another colleague, Justin Marshall, is knee-deep in an iPhone app; and in general things are just all abuzz about mobile.

And Brian has pretty much convinced me that mobile is, in fact, a huge deal. But I don't think it's a huge deal in quite the obvious way. The initial reaction to everyone's sudden attention to mobile seems to be along the lines of, "We need to make our web site accessible on mobile!"

Not so fast.

I got  a lot of help on this diagram from Anders and Justin. It's meant to be a framework for thinking about the mobile experience, in particular about how the mobile web experience is different from the web experience in general. There's quite a bit to debate in that question, and we could talk about it for hours. And of course, this kind of diagram certainly oversimplifies a very complex system in a complex space. It doesn't show all the elements, and it doesn't show all the relationships between the elements. What I hope it does do is provide a framework for thinking about the mobile space that makes it easier to uncover opportunities to create real value for real people.

I do think there are some issues unique to mobile that go beyond form factor, device compatibility, and the challenges of adapting content. Let's get this one out of the way: It's not enough to just take your web site, add some new CSS, and deliver it to the mobile device. If that doesn't strike you as self-apparent, bear with me.

In the longer term, the mobile device will become the hub of our social worlds, an indispensable tool for navigating our physical, cultural, and relational landscapes. Does that sound like an overstatement? I don't think it is.

Let's take a closer look at the major elements of the diagram above. Taken together they illustrate what I think is interesting about the human-centric view of mobile computing sketched above:

The mobile context is fundamentally different:

• A contact is the combination of 1) a person you know and 2) the ways you communicate with them. Because it goes with you everywhere and it directly enables communication with people, the mobile device is the logical primary home for contacts.
• Task orientation is the focus on a single primary task at any given moment. The mobile device lends itself to neither multitasking nor complex tasks. Unless you're waiting through a flight delay or sitting on a train somewhere, your focus on the mobile web is probably singular, with a specific goal and a discrete activity. And as mobile evolves to support more kinds of tasks, a self-reinforcing cycle will emerge, where the mobile device becomes the device of preference for an increasing number of activities.
• Location awareness is a critical differentiator between the mobile and, um, non-mobile web experience. Whether or not the device itself includes location awareness per se, the context of use is, well, mobile--away from the desk, network-independent, and out in the analog world we'll always call home. And the more things you can accomplish untethered from your desk chair, the more time you'll spend that way.

And the mobile device has a different relationship to content:

• Regardless of the advances in the browsing experienced introduced by the iPhone, the mobile device will not soon become the preferred medium for web surfing. Mobile content will be increasingly targeted, driven by subscription, syndication, filtering. It will adapting dynamically to the context of use: Locations, tasks, and relationships.
• Web sites have a different relationship with content consumed on the mobile device. The New York Times site will still be the New York Times site, of course--web sites per se aren't going anywhere. But the mobile context creates demand for different uses of the site: The site will increasingly function as a container we interact with through services like syndication. My friend Chris uploads baby photos to Flickr, I subscribe to Chris, and his photos are delivered to my device. The site is a holder of content, syndication is the delivery mechanism, and the device is the receiver; and, APIs deliver content to the site from, you guessed it, the mobile device:
• Artifacts are the things we create on our mobile devices, like pictures and videos. Part of the reason I think mobile really lends itself to social applications is that it is both a producer and consumer of content: A two-way channel between you and the world. And not just any world or the world at large, but the world of your choosing, your place and time, your relationships.

So the most important difference between the mobile web experience and the computer-based web experience is that the mobile web has a context of use that features place and activity: What I've labeled on this diagram Task Orientation and Location Awareness. Also, the mobile device, unlike desktop and even laptop computers, is essentially a communication device. Its heritage remains the cell phone, and its core use, despite its profound evolution the past several years, is to enable communication between people. It's the context that's different for mobile.

Developing web sites and services for mobile requires a keen sense of this different context. Users of your mobile site are out and about--and they're less likely to be reading the New York Times or researching a health care topic than they are to be trying to get directions to a restaurant where someone is waiting for them, maybe take a quick look at the menu, and send their friend a quick SMS apology and ETA.

None of this is to minimize the challenges of designing and developing for mobile. There are still a bunch of screen sizes to deal with, hundreds of devices with different functionality, and no fully-effective standard for adapting content to the variety of requirements. And as important as the iPhone is, it's still only a small slice of the overall market. These are all real challenges you still have to address.

Nonetheless, the opportunity is huge, and soon you might not be able to afford to ignore mobile. Look to Asia and northern Europe for a sense of mobile's future importance in the US.

So what does your business have to offer your customers via mobile? And maybe even more importantly, what do your customers have to offer each other?

Nancy White on Slow Community

Nancy White spoke at ZAAZ last week at our social media event. Her talk, titled Slow Community, was wonderfully ironic coming from the most prolific online participant in THE ENTIRE WORLD. And as usual, Nancy has her finger on an important pulse. Her (she credits others as well) notion of slow community is an exploratory gesture toward solving an emeging crisis in our online lives: social overload, or if you like, information overload 2.0. Ha!

Who doesn't have trouble these days, tracking professional, avocational, personal, and informational relationships across sites, services, and devices? Social network fatigue is here today--and tomorrow promises a truly overwhelming inundation of social and relational input across many channels.

Here's Nancy's 15-minute talk:

Here are the slides:

| View | Upload your own

Nancy wrote a follow-up post here. There are some great comments on her post--check them out.

For more on Slow Community, start here, then go here.

 

Brian Fling on Mobile 2.0 and the iPhone

Brian Fling spoke at ZAAZ last week at an event we hosted on social media. His talk, titled Mobile 2.0: Design and Develop for the iPhone and Beyond, was a rapid-fire tour of the ins and outs for mobile design, with special attention to the game-changing impacts of the iPhone--which Brian calls "the first truly 2.0 mobile device."

There's a tremendous amount of information here. Poor Brian thought he had an hour for his talk--but the five talks that evening were supposed to be only 15 minutes each!

Here's the video. It's about 30 minutes long (he was on a roll, I couldn't interrupt):

Brian's on the road and so hasn't yet posted his slides, but he'll do so soon, and I'll update this post to include them. Meantime you can see Brian's other presentations on his site.

A Conceptual Map of the Social Web

Here's a take on the idea of the social web and how it differs from page-based and broadcast conceptions of web space. The fundamental difference here is that where broadcast thinking envisions a web of HTML pages connected by hyperlinks, social thinking envisions a web of people, relationships, and content created by people.

The individual is at the center of the social web experience.

There are a lot of ways, obviously, you might draw this picture, and a lot of things you might include on it. For example, you could group the social web into communities, contacts, and content. But I've done it this way partly to offer a typology of social web sites.

Here's a take on six important types:

 

Social networks are about individuals.

Social networks are sites primarily structured to support pages about individuals. Those pages become collectors of relationships. For example, on my Facebook profile, you can see links to the people I know, and I can interact with those people through a variety of tools.

Communities are about groups.

Communities are different than social networks in that they are built primarily around groups of people, rather than individuals. Another way of saying it is that the group is the point in communities, whereas the individual is the point in social networks.

Blogs are about a singular perspective or subject.

Blogs are structured around individual posts that typically have in common either that are are written by a single person or that they are focused around a single subject. The content is the point, and individual pages on blogs reflect that focus--they are structured around individual blogs posts and meaningful collections of blog posts (e.g. category pages, time-based archive pages, and, on group blogs, author pages).

Social media services store, edit, and share content.

"Social media" is a term that gets used to mean all media through which people interact--as a stand-in for the equally vague "Web 2.0," for the blogosphere, or for online communities. Here I mean it in the more specific sense of socially-enabled web sites used primarily to share personal content, such as photos, videos, or slideshows. Flickr, Vimeo, and SlideShare are good examples. Of course, you could argue that these sites have aspects of social networking or community, and you'd be right. But I say if the primary purpose is media sharing, it's a social media site.

News sources are about timely or topical content.

Much has been made of the demise of traditional media the past couple years. Flava says, "Don't believe the hype!" Traditional media isn't going anywhere, but it is adapting to emerging complementary sources of news, information, and commentary. News sources are diversifying--many more people are publishing content, and content is now both participatory and socially vetted.

Popularity engines capture a collective sense of their users' preferences among resources, usually web links, and they present those resources in ranked lists that are normally designed to be dynamic, reflecting an up-to-date view into web content people find to be of interest.

There are two main types of popularity engine: Social bookmarking applications and collaborative filters. Social bookmarking applications, such as del.icio.us, value resources on the basis of individuals "saving" links to them. Users have individual collections of links, and those links acquire value when many individuals save them. Collaborative filters, such as Digg, are a little different: Users submit links for collective review, and the links acquire value based on a voting system of some kind.

The difference is important, because the types of content collected tend to be different. Social bookmarking sites tend to value resources of lasting value that users want to be able to find again, and collaborative filters tend to favor resources of short-term interest, such as timely news, and one-time interest, such as funny videos.

Marketplaces are about the exchange of goods and services, and information about good and services, among people.

The emerging marketplace is not about e-commerce web sites per se. We work on plenty of e-com sites, and I love them. But what we learn over and over again in the usability lab is that real people, especially making a purchase decision that involves more than a few bucks, use many web sites to gather information. There's a complex web ecosystem that supports purchase decisions, and strategists for individual web sites need to understand those ecosystems to plan effectively.

The new marketplace is about more than the site, more than the message, more than the differentiating feature. The marketplace is a cluster of interrelated sites, and the seller is regarded with what can only be described as a healthy suspicion. Caveat emptor is the online rule, but the news is that the emptor has some serious caveats to pay attention to. Customer reviews on sellers' sites are a new norm, and expert reviews from third-party sites play a critical role, especially for complex or technical products. And beyond expertise, trusted relationships are key information sources.

So transactional sites matter, but in a new way: The seller / manufacturer is regarded as having authoritative factual information about the product, but the expert or the existing customer is regarded as having the authoritative opinion or valuation about the product. And the closer the relationship, the more trusted the opinion. Get used to it.

But don't just get used to it, learn to facilitate it: If you've got a great product, you want people to know. If you don't, find a new job.

 

There's plenty of gray area between these types I'm putting forward. In fact, you might even say social space on the web is mostly gray area--and the overlap among types seems to be increasing rather than decreasing as the large sites add features. It's more and more common for social media sites to include communities (e.g., groups on Flickr), for social networks to include media hosting, (e.g. MySpace videos), and even for popularity engines to include blogs (e.g. Newsvine's "greenhouse").  People instant message links to product views, solicit advice from their contact lists, and so on.

You might even say the gray areas between sites and between types of sites hold the real opportunities for marketers to develop services that matter, create value, and drive engagement.

But I think it's still useful to think about think about these sites in terms of types, mostly as a way of focusing attention on the features you care about. Because while these things are not necessarily strictly distinct as types of site, they are distinct in terms of their uses.

Marketers wanting to engage with the social web need to know the differences in order to engage in ways that meet goals. To me, this is the essence of strategy: Know precisely what you want to accomplish, and craft approaches that rigorously focus on accomplishing it.

How to Give Customers a Say in Community Policy and Moderation

Here's an anonymized approach from some recent client work, in which we're developing a global branded community. Questions around policy and moderation have raised a bunch of interesting issues around how to manage brand in a large-scale user-generated content environment, where there's significant variation among "local" or micro- communities within the community at large.

The approach we're recommending hinges on top-down / bottom-up approaches to both policy and moderation. Let me explain.

When you define a community policy, there are three broad concerns you need to address: appropriateness of behavior, brand-relevance of content, and legality. Legality is something your lawyers need to work out, and in my experience there's a great deal of variety in terms of corporate comfort levels with legal risk. All I can say is, get Legal involved early. But appropriateness and brand-relevance are less clear-cut. A number of parties within the organization need to weigh in--and so does the community itself. Here's a picture from a recent presentation that illustrates the concept:

 

 

Here's some of what's going on in the diagram: The idea of social contract has to do with the appropriateness dimension of community policy. You can think of it this way: The policy makes explicit the unspoken agreement between you and your customers, and among your customers, about how it's ok to behave in the community. The social contract gets communicated implicitly by example and through social feedback and captured explicitly--defined--in the community policy. Legality and brand-appropriateness are likewise defined at a corporate level. And those three elements taken together are the policy. The policy is defined, in other words, centrally.

But policies need to be interpreted in actual practice and scrutinized as they are applied. Moderators need to apply it as a guide for their work, community managers apply it as they engage with the community, and individuals within the community apply the policy through self-moderation--moreover, the community itself responds and reacts to the applications of the policy.

So how does this work in practice? Here's one way.

 

 

The key here is that the site includes two separate content domains. Think of them as sets of pages that hold content related to local areas only, and pages that hold content of global relevance. Individual content objects might belong to one or both of those domains, but  they're managed, in effect, separately.

The way this works, basically, is that there are two sets of moderators--global moderators, who manage content on pages relevant across all areas, and local moderators, who manage content on pages relevant only to a local community. These sets of moderators include both corporate staff and individuals within the community.

At the local level, local judgements trump global judgements. So content that's inappropriate for the broader audience on the global level might still be appropriate at the local level. And the opposite holds true as well. In each case, the policy defined at the corporate level is interpreted and applied at the local level, enabling the community to hold together within the structure of a common policy while accommodating a degree of difference within local contexts.

This is just one approach, but I think it's pretty interesting. The real challenge, I believe, arises inevitably as businesses engage users in interpretation and enforcement of brand-appropriateness as expressed through on-topicness. Is it ok to talk about snowmobile apparel on a site about cross-country skiing? In some communities, probably. But, but! What are the ramifications for the brand?

Yes, engaging users exposes the brand identity itself to scrutiny by its customers. What a challenge! But who better to have that conversation? I'm fascinated--but it's a topic for another post.

Have you had experience with defining, interpreting, or enforcing a community policy, online or off? I'd love to hear what you learned.

What Is a Blog?

It's a perplexing question, when you think about it, and it gets more perplexing all the time. From a technical perspective, a blog is just a web site. Blogs tend to have certain features, but those features aren't unique to blogs, and not all blogs have them. Blogs are usually, but not always, published by individuals, but not all web sites published by individuals are blogs. Blogs are frequently-updated, but not all frequently-updated web sites are blogs. These days, blogs are not always even web sites per se--they are integrated with instant messaging, social media API's, mobile devices, and so on. Is your IM-driven Twitter stream, transmitted through your blog via RSS actually a blog when I view it on my cell phone?

The seemingly easy question of what exactly is a blog turns out to actually be pretty interesting.

And Lee and Sachi at Commoncraft have busted out a nice, basic answer. What I really like here is the focus away from technology and toward authorship, utility, and relationships. This is great stuff for a person who's unfamiliar with blogs and needs to grasp the basics:

 

 

What a great introduction to blogs! Give those two a hand.

Of course, for those familiar with blogs, it's not hard to see that there's much more to the story than Lee and Sachi included in this video. (They understand the complexities as well as anyone.)

You can see blogs as a set of conventions or features:

• Posts appear in reverse-chronological order (newest at the top of the page). Except when there's a persistent initial post or welcome page.
• People can comment on posts. Except when comments are disabled.
• Incoming links are displayed along with comments. Except when they aren't.
• There's a persistent link to an "About" page that introduces the blog and / or author(s). Except when there isn't.
• Posts are archived either by category or date. Except when they are organized by tags, or not archived at all.
• You can subscribe by RSS and / or email. Except when not.
• Blogs link to each other. Most of the time, but not always.
• A list of links to other blogs (the blogroll) is included in the margin. Usually, that is.
• Blogs are standalone sites. Unless they're integrated into a bigger site, excerpted, or aggregated.

These conventions have too many exceptions to meaningfully differentiate blogs from other kinds of web sites and services. So here's another way to look at it:

From a social architecture perspective, blogs are structured around a singular voice, even when that "voice" is multivocal and multifaceted. The voice is the container. Within that container, the individual post is the primary content object, and the secondary (comment) objects that attach to posts are important mainly as attributes of post objects.

Likewise the author or authors of a blog are secondary objects, experientially subordinate to individual posts and important mainly as attributes of posts. In other words, in the context of a blog, what you say is more important than who you are.

You can contrast that structure with the structure of social networks (Lee and Sachi have a video about this topic too), where the individual profile (or "about page") is the primary content object, and blog posts by the author are secondary content objects that are important mainly as attributes of their author. Here identity is primary, and blog posts, along with other types of secondary objects, are important mainly as attributes of identity. In other words, who you are is the thing--what you say is how you construct and transmit who you are.

For me, most of all, blogs are social. They include commenting, subscription, and trackback. You can contact the author. They are human, authentic, a little rough around the edges. If none of the above, then it ain't a blog. Architectural considerations aside, you know it when you see it. A blog is, ultimately, an aesthetic.

What do you think?

The Shared Value of Online Shoppers: Amazon's Presentation of User Reviews

When it comes to user-generated content, Amazon was among the very first to recognize the value of smart, contextual presentation and emergent display. Waaaaaaaaay back in the '90's, they were pioneering use of customer ratings and reviews in e-commerce.

Naturally, they had a business reason for this early focus: Books are hard to sell online, because you can't pick them up, flip through them, and read the back cover (well, you couldn't in the '90's anyway). The opinions and recommendations of fellow consumers will always be important, but in the early days of e-commerce they mattered more, because other kinds of input supporting the purchase decision were less accessible.

Amazon has mastered presenting consumer opinions:

 

Here's a breakdown in the words of Justin Marshall, one of my respected colleagues at ZAAZ:

First, they give the landscape: all decisions by stars (top-left corner). Then, they pit pro vs. con to convey the spectrum of opinion. (I'd like to think they stole that from The New Social Etiquette's "Most Controversial.") And, finally, they present the rest by "Most Helpful."

Amazon has architected a conversation out of the bits and pieces of content provided by its customers, and in doing so has created an additional value within the shopping experience: A dynamic, informative, multivocal, and authentic source of peer opinion, understandable at a glance and rewarding of deeper inquiry.

One might even call this a community. Obviously unconventional, it nonetheless meets all the usual criteria I can think of, and above all, it provides value to customers--value that also drives sales.

One of the real puzzles here is the source of users' motivation, None of the architectural elegance of Amazon's system would be meaningful without users' participation.

Why do people participate, providing, at the low end, product reviews (mind you, book reviews are mostly happening on a different visit than the purchase visit, so the threshold is not trivial) and at the high end, detailed and thoughtful reviews. Why do they bother, when the conventional wisdom suggests shopping is the most task-oriented of online behaviors? Why do they return and provide feedback?

Naturally, I'll venture a guess: The Amazon customer community is a community of shared values, In fact, it's a community of a single shared value: Value.

What I'm suggesting is that users are motivated to participate in Amazon's customer community by their shared interest in getting good value for their dollars. Helping others make good purchase decisions, and receiving a (designed) measure of socially-driven feedback for their help, is motivating. Customers are on the same side, and in e-commerce community, where the social value surrounds purchase choices, everybody wins.

Have you rated an item on Amazon? Written a review? Created a list? I'd love to hear about it.