One of my jobs here at Chat Ventures has been to make sure that the features of the upcoming Qwidget release will provide some kind of real value to the people who use it.  I have thought a lot about what is necessary when starting a fulfilling dialogue.  And what features would be extraneous and confusing.  In this process, I’ve relied a lot on my team.  But I have also spent a ton of time scouring blogs, books, papers, and magazines for guidance.

In this time of research, no other writer has been as helpful as Joshua Porter who writes the fantastic blog Bokardo about social web design.  His writing is crisp and his thinking on how people interact with social software and social web apps is dead on.  While I think I’ve read just about every post he’s made to bokardo.com, I recently purchased his fantastic book “Designing for the Social Web.”  As I read it, I would like to post some of its more interesting ideas with occasional commentary on how it aligns with some of our thinking with the Qwidget.  I’ll also link back to some of his blog posts that talk about similar concepts.

Chapter 1

In chapter one, Josh outlines the growth of the social web.  He makes the compelling, if familiar, case that we are living in an attention economy due to the constant bombardment of information that we all receive on a daily basis.  Being the social creatures that we are, we pay what limited attention we have to our friends and to other similar and interesting people we find online.  Social software enables us to do more and more tasks in a social environment.  Jost points out that many of the leading web properties are social by nature and that this trend will continue as more and more people come online.  (Read his thinking on why social web sites are passing adult sites in traffic here.)

Josh and I share a belief that people’s innate sociability is determining how they spend their time on the web to ever increasing degrees.  His main argument is that the tasks we perform online - everything from shopping to consulting encyclopedias - become easier and more fulfilling the more social they get.  I agree.  In fact, the Qwidget seeks to make consuming content more social.

When we were releasing Hometown Baghdad, it became evident that only a small percentage of our audience was using the social aspects of our site - the comments and our short-lived forum.  We realized that these social tools were not built for the every day person.  My mom would never leave a comment on our blog, but she would always talk to just about anyone she met in person about the series and about the war.  So obviously, in that example, she had the desire to be social but the obstacles to talking in person were way lower for her than the obstacles to conversing online.  The Qwidget aims to address that problem.  I can’t wait until we release the beta/alpha version in a few weeks to see if it does.

Favorite quote from “Designing for the Social Web” so far: “If the interface is too confining, people won’t use it. If the interface is too flexible, people won’t know how to use it.”