Building Social Web Applications

I am referring to the book "Building Social Web Applications a lot in the past few days.

The book gives a good mental framework for designing social web applications. I have jotted down some key points that caught my eye.

Chapter 9

• Every social application has a simple core. A profile, a social network and some form of group communication tool.

Chapter 12 : Talks about community structures.

• There are 3 types of communities. Publisher led, interest led and product led. In an enterprise setting, I think there will be publisher led and interest led communities. Publisher led communities are people who gather around a published artifact. Interested led communities are people who gather around a topic.

Chapter 13 : Organizing Your Site for Navigation, Search and Activity

• Tags can be used as a filter. Tags can be used as a search term. For example, clicking on a tag can narrow the focus to topics tagged with a particular tag. Clicking on a tag can also broaden the conversation by pulling up all the people and artifacts tagged with a particular team. 
• Tags Create Navigation: Tags create a people generated taxonomy without any over classification. Meaning emerges from the frequency of usage. People apply tags largely for their own benefit to allow them to retrieve content later. Tagging might look messy. But tags solve a lot of problems. They provide labels for content. They offer new means of navigation and search. They devolve the classification issue to the person best suited to do it - the person who created it or the person who is consuming it.
• Connecting Content Through People: Profile pages can act as connectors to other content. Content can take a viewer to a person's profile page.
• Search :Search by Person on your application should present an interface for activity based on the relationship between the searcher and the person returned in the search results. Show the relationship between people and offer a means to create a relationship.

Post American World by Fareed Zakaria

Started listening to The Post American World by Fareed Zakaria.

The Post American World is not a book about the fall of America. It is about the rise of the rest. An important book for managers of multi-national corporations. Today, that is almost every manager.

Awareness - Conversation - Contacts - Career Development

I spoke to a net generation professional today and asked him what he does to advance his career. In about 10 minutes, he gave me a very clear response.

He summed it up in four words: Awareness, Conversation, Contacts and Career. Awareness leads to meaningful conversation with people you meet. Meaningful conversation leads to valuable contacts. Valuable contacts are almost alway the best way to move your career forward.

Awareness
He said that awareness is the most important thing. He strives to be aware of what is going on around him and what is happening in the world. He does this by attending a couple of industry conferences each year and visiting social media sites including Twitter and Facebook multiple times as week. He treats social media visits as micro-conferences. Such awareness leads to meaningful conversations both online and offline. He applies what he learns in routine jobs that he does every day. In other words, he does small experiments and innovates on the job.

Conversations
He said that conferences are places where you can learn things that did now know that you need to know. Conferences are places where you run into people you did not know you need to meet. Meaningful conversations, both in-person and online, lead to valuable contacts.

Contacts
Valuable contacts are important for tactical work that he does every day. Contacts are also important for strategic decisions and actions that he needs to take in the long term.

1. Tactical contacts : He said that he tags these contacts in his head with specific terms. For example, he tags certain contacts as go to people for solving technical issues. Certain people help him solve procedural issues and certain others help him solve policy issues. He could tell me 10 such tactical contacts and how they help him at work. All tactical contacts were in the same location or in the same time zone. He said that tactical contacts help him do his work efficiently.
2. Strategic contacts are people outside his organization who can give him a clear, unbiased opinion about decisions and actions. He relies on strategic contacts for guidance on his career and development. He has 3 strategic contacts.

Career Development
Good contacts are the best way to move your career forward he said. He also said that when a trusted contact recommends a job for you, you know it is time to move.

One more thing. He said that he is always nice to people. The most important career and development strategy.

Tools and Services I use in 2010 for Product Research, Design and Development

Axure $ 500 $Company Provided
For HTML Prototyping. For design, communication and making to think

Vimeo $Free $60 per year for professional use such as password protection
What for? For making videos of demos for sharing with colleagues and training sales colleagues.
Why? Video spreads virally. People like to watch.

ZnetIndia $10 for domain $3 per month for hosting
What for? For domains and hosting microsites.
Why? I use this for effortless sharing and viral campaigning of ideas.

Atlassian Confluence $Company Provided
What for? For writing use cases and stories.
Why: There are only two buttons. Save and Edit. Not many can over-engineer it. Version Control.

SAPStreamwork $9 per month $Company provided
What for? For collaborative scrap booking. I put everything in Streamwork Automatic updates
Why? My colleagues automatically know the quality, timing and quantity of my work.

PBWiki $Free
What for? For hosting my eating places wiki and writing my book collaboratively.
Why? Collaborative content creation. Automatic Updates.

BlackBerry Camera $Company Provided
What for? For taking pictures of white-board drawing and sharing immediately with others.
Why? I always have my BlackBerry with me. Easy to document than writing it down. Easy to share. Rich rapid communication.

Sony Harddisk Video camera $750
For HD Videos. I bought it in 2007. You can get good ones for $350 now
Why? Videos are rich and viral

iPad
What for? For showing web and mobile prototypes
Why? You can show a prototype while sitting on a couch or coffee shop without making it look like work You can also show touch interaction, which is a good test of usability.

Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

I am almost done reading Cognitive Surplus
by Clay Shirky.

In the book Clay Shirky says that people have a lot of free time. He also says that technology influences how they spend that free time. Although the book is about society in general, a lot of what he says will apply to workplace culture, behavior and change.

If you are involved in designing or deploying social media tools, this book will help you develop a good understanding of why things turn out that way they do in social media projects.

I tweeted about some things that caught my attention.
Communal Value Vs Civic Value : Communal value is what the participants get out of collaborative work. Civic value is what society gets out of the collaborative work of certain people.

Designing to utilize cognitive surplus : There are a trillion hours a month of cognitive surplus is available for use. Today we have the technologies to take advantage of this cognitive surplus for civic value.

Here is Clay Shirky talking about Cognitive Surplus and how it is changing the world.