social networking
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Note that it’s not always wise to set a global publishing schedule, as each service has its own peak times-of-day for usage, but I’m only sharing a smattering of links that are interspersed with “direct” posts I manually do all day, so it’s not a concern for me. ↩
You don't have to tweet for Twitter to consider you an active user
You don’t have to tweet for Twitter to consider you an active user
Yoree Koh reporting at The Wall Street Journal:
Twitter said it has 241 million monthly active users the last three months of 2013. Twitter defines a monthly active user as an account that logs in at least once a month. By Twitter’s standards, a person does not have to tweet to be considered a monthly active user.
I would think active users tweet and passive users only read. If I was considered an active user of every platform I sign into in a month, I would be considered far more active than I really am.
The Perfect Empty Vessel
This is a good piece on how hard Facebook tries to keep the social juices flowing. Alexis Madrigal, commenting on Facebook’s designer-hiring spree:
As all these designers vanish into the bowels of the company, so, too, does their work. Facebook wants to create design that both allows and guides behavior without calling attention to itself. And what works in the Deep South must also work in southern India and South America. It must work for 16-year-olds and 86-year-olds.
I think this is the primary reason Facebook makes me uncomfortable: it’s too generic. Sometimes I want a service to be just a little in my way. I realize that you can’t generalize my preferences to hundreds of millions of people, but that just means I’ll never really feel awesome about using Facebook.
It feels like it’s been crafted as simply the most efficient way for me to send targeting data to advertisers…
…because it has.
Path is still spamming your contacts
Path is still spamming your contacts
If you’re a Path user, consider, er, reconsidering. This is apparently the best they can do in response.
CNET’s Jennifer Van Grove was told that the #1 request from users is to find friends on Path, hence the aggressive “new-user flow.”
Why does “find my friends on Path” translate to the app’s creators as “invite everyone in my phone’s address book to use Path, without explaining that the message is automated and being sent because I opted in” ?
I would be happy to advise Path on acceptable, reasonable on-boarding and invitation flows for a modest fee. I can be reached at JoeHelpsPath ( @ ) joeross ( . ) me.
What Bad Customer Service Costs Your Business
What Bad Customer Service Costs Your Business
Buffer, the service that will schedule your social network posts to go live throughout the day, also happens to have a wonderful blog. They focus on productivity and customer service.
Buffer’s customer service is excellent: I emailed them asking why I have to select publishing times for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other services individually instead of setting a global schedule for all services, and they replied within the hour.1 The infographic they posted was created by HelpScout, the folks who do Buffer’s customer service, so know where to find this data.
The takeaway? Customer service is absolutely as important as feature development and marketing, and not enough companies know that.
Facebook "Graph Search" mines your network in response to plain-language queries
Facebook “Graph Search” mines your network in response to plain-language queries
I predict it will be panned because it’s not “sexy” enough for the expectations Facebook raised, but that it will also be widely-used. It looks to me like one of those things people don’t know they want until a company offers it to them. I’m excited to give it a try later on and I’ll probably write up more thoughts on it later.
So.cl: Microsoft's social network, or search experiment, or kind ofboth, sort of
Users log in to the network with their Facebook or Windows Live accounts.
There are two reasons I can’t help but be cynical about So.cl, Microsoft’s latest social search experiment. I have no “official” user experience training, but both of my reasons might be considered UX critiques:
First, Facebook login suggests an interest in reducing friction, but my experience was anything but smooth. The So.cl page offers to let you sign in, so I tried to sign in with my personal email address but was told that address wasn’t connected to a registered Windows Live account. So I tried to register the same email address with Windows Live. Then, I was told it was already connected to a Windows Live account. I registered a different email address as a new Windows Live account and then got a landing page saying they’d send me an invitation ASAP. So much for signing in.
Facebook has its claws in Microsoft’s little social experiment, and it’s probably profoundly easier to use than Microsoft’s own sign-up/in process. Unfortunately, anyone who doesn’t have a Facebook account must brave Microsoft’s abysmal Windows Live process. No third way. This is a classic case of fail, and Danny Sullivan’s experience, which he wrote about at his Marketing Land website, suggests the problems I had trying to get into the damn thing only continue as you dig deeper.
Second, Microsoft did stuff it didn’t need to waste time doing: creating a stand-alone site and allowing users to: make “rich” posts (read: blog), “riff” on other posts (read: reblog, a la Tumblr), and conduct “video parties” (read: Google Hangouts, but with less features).
As usual, I have some unsolicited advice for a massive technology corporation:
First, let users sign up with an email address. If you want to make that email address automatically a new Windows Live account, fine, but don’t ask for ZIP code and gender while you do it. Don’t use multiple redirects to sign-up stages, either. Make it simple.
Second, just integrate the experiment into Bing.com itself, which looks better every time I visit it. Show users a very prominent one-time explanation and allow interested folks to opt into the experiment. Then, make the So.cl bits a minimal but eye-catching and useful sub-component of each search result or something. Anything but a distinct site. If it feels like a new feature, it’s not as off-putting as a stand-alone site, which can feel like a new hungry content monster users are expected to feed.
Microsoft has impressed many people with their design direction on Bing, as well as Windows 8 and Windows Phone (aside from the unfortunate fact that we’re still calling the last two things “Windows” at all). Simple user experience stuff like this though shows they still have much room for improvement.
For the record, one of my favorite user experience designs is ifttt. Show us what you can help us do and how to do it in the same step. That, to me, is an epic UX win.