I promised myself I wouldn't rant, but I will admit to being frustrated. I finally have to admit that "this social networking stuff" is not so easy to use.
While I try to justify and design social networks for myself and clients, I find myself explaining almost daily the advantages of blogging and SNing to my friends and associates. And as I explain it to them I'm forced to confront the fact that lost between nonstandard functionality and the sheer newness of concepts like 'tweets' and 'trackbacks' lies the still unrealized promise of the social web. I'm not the only one, even Charlene and Josh have noticed it.
Why do I call these ancient (in web years) concepts new? Because in my general social media evangelism, client work and social network building I am committed to finding ways to bring the rest of the population into productive uses of this technology, uses that facilitate their day jobs instead of eating up their sleep time. In my very unscientific analysis, this means the 83% of the "mostly mature" population with whom the social web has yet to entrench itself. And to these people, who I think of as the "Unsocialized Web," tweets, trackbacks, friends lists, tags, RSS readers and ganks really are new.
In calling out the Unsocialized Web population I'm referring to the 35+ year olds who currently run the majority of our society. Though unscientific, my identification of this market segment is based on both personal experience in my real world business and social circles cross referenced with a liberal interpretation of Groundswell Technographics Profile data. According to Groundswell, only 17% of the 35-44 year old U.S. population are considered Creators. In the social web context - especially if applied to their productive work life - I would argue that becoming a Creator indicates an individual's true adoption of the social web (I accept that this argument is open for debate and am happy to elaborate if people are interested). Even fewer individuals in the 45+ age bracket fall into the Creator adoption category. At best, then, this age bracket of my 35+ year old peers* has just begun to move out of the 15% Innovator and Early Adopter population, which is the percentage of people who need to have adopted a new technology in order for that technology to start to ramp up to general adoption levels (i.e., Early Majority).
In other words, when us old folks buy into it, the social web goes mainstream.
I have sympathy for these Unsocialized Webbies and soon-to-be Early Majority people. It's not unusual for them to be flummoxed by the typical social network dashboard screen with apparently random (and thus chaotic) information on it and who don't have the time, patience or knowledge of what the social network application they're logged into is supposed to do to guide them in poking around until they can find the conversational threads and social connectively buried within. For these stressed out and already overwhelmed individuals, the social web ain't easy. I consider the primary issue usability, but there are some more fundamental issues buried beneath even that explanation.
What do I mean when I say it's a usability problem? Let's take the ever-so-important "friends list." A fundamental principal of usability is that expectations are met when an action is taken. For example, when I click on a hyperlink, I get a new page displaying something new and generally foreshadowed by the words or graphic I clicked on in the first place. Thus, I expect hyperlinks to give me new stuff I anticipated and for the most part on the web today my hyperlink usability expectations are rewarded. When links don't look like links, or take me to places I didn't expect to go, the usability of that site is violated. Calling the same thing by different names (or different things the same name) is also a violation of usability because it confuses the users' expectations. This naming convention principal is commonly violated on social network sites, as demonstrated by the friends list functionality.
What are my usability expectations when I join a social network and find a friends list? First of all, it's not always called "friends". Facebook, MySpace, Live Journal and other socially focused sites call them friends. LinkedIn calls them contacts list and connections. My ASAE profile calls them my network of contacts. Are these naming conventions different because the model is different? The former emphasizing informal connections (i.e., friends) more while the latter has a more formal directory orientation of business contacts? Maybe, though Plaxo, also a directory-oriented tool uses the terms friends, which it wants to import from my Google contacts list. But wait, Google also has a friends list. Google allows me to share articles I like in Google Reader with my friends. But who are my friends on Google if they're not my contacts list? After a little digging on my Google Reader settings page I learn that the folks I have in my Gmail chat list (which, by the way was imported from my AIM friend's list) are considered my friends on Google. Hm. But I have a Google Talk account also, so is it just my Gmail chat list or a consolidated Chat+Talk list I'm sharing articles with through my Google friends' list? And, wow, how do my Google friends "see" me vs. the way my Facebook friends see me? The former can see my favorite articles, online status and goodness knows what else (I haven't taken the time to figure it out). My Facebook friends can see that I'm drinking coffee yet again (if I've updated my status truthfully), who I've friended, who I've hugged, who's thrown a sheep at me lately and a host of other silly stuff. Oh. And they can see some of my blog posts, but not all (at least as far as I can tell now that I've gone and fiddled with all my privacy settings).
As you can tell (I hope), I'm a reasonably sophisticated user of all this stuff, and I find myself usability challenged when it comes to fully understanding what it means to have a social network friend. I've shied away from becoming a Twitter for this very reason. I know I'll be able to figure it out and probably have a blast when I get around to goofing off in the Twitter world for a while, but in the year-plus I've been toying with the idea I haven't found the time to dive in and roll around in the usability of it until I figure it out well enough to decide how I want to Twit myself out on the web. Nor have I wallowed around in Digg, del.icio.us, Newsvine or scads more. Is it any surprise that the Early Majority population gets stymied by even the most user friendly social networking application?
Beyond even usability issues of using the new verb, friend, having a friend in a social networking context implies things that you either understand through experience or you don't. Once the average person experiences being able to keep up with acquaintances' activities on an asynchronous feed, viewing activity that is both consciously published and automatically monitored, they begin to understand the friend concept, but the kind of relationship you can have with your "friends" on these different communities can vary really widely. My Ning community is a good example. I have friends there, but they are just listed on a page; unlike my other networks, I can't subscribe to a consolidated feed of their activity or posts (at least I haven't figured out how to yet). As a result, I hardly ever interact with my Ning friends and when I do I don't go to Ning, I do the modern equivalent of picking up the phone - I send them an email. When there is a certain amount of standard "friend" functionality out there on the social web and more people have used it once or twice and understand how it can connect them to new networks in new and interesting ways, I think we'll see some momentum build. Until then, I'm not so sure.
Much of this stutter-start to social web usage among the Unsocialized Web is not the fault of social network developers. Let's remember another factor in the usage of social networks which is a very human one. When you go to a party and don't know anyone, don't meet anyone you click with and feel like a wallflower, you leave feeling very unconnected. Similarly, if you join a social network and don't find people you care to interact with a lot, all the functionality in the world won't help you feel connected.
Ok, maybe I ranted just a little bit, but getting this out of my system has left me even more committed to building social networks "for the rest of us" where there is some level of utility for even the most unconnected individual and which eases them into connections easily and by providing clear value right from the get go. People are social creatures and when pulled by real value that helps them meaningfully in their real life, and which really connects them to others (real world and virtual world) in a genuinely fulfilling way, they will overcome the awkward usability quirks of our fine feathered technologists and bring the social web to its full fruition.
In the meantime, I'm going to see the opening of Indiana Jones tonight, and according to Rotten Tomatoes, that means I can stop angsting about all this, sit back and enjoy an old fashioned one-way, noninteractive entertainment experience while physically surrounded by my most important social network of youngsters and other folks who are young at heart.
*Ok, I'm a little older than 35-44, but only barely and certainly only physically.
I hope everyone (in the States) has a wonderful holiday weekend.
