Social Design Best Practices

Posted by Anton on Aug 23, 2010 in Social Media

While reading and researching on how to optimize and enhance the micro blogging community (My Chatbox) I am busy creating, I came across and interesting page on the Open Social Wiki titled Social Design Best Practices.

If you are in the process of creating or extending a social media (Web 2.0) application, this guide is an excellent resource on the best practices regarding it. Find an excerpt below.

If you’re new to developing social applications, it can be difficult to immediately grasp how good applications facilitate fun and meaningful social experiences. To accelerate your learning, we’ve come up with a list of a few light-hearted recommendations around building good social applications. Not all of these “best practices” are necessary in every case, but they might spark thoughts about finding new users, keeping old ones, and leveraging the social graph for fresh content and viral spread.

In basic form it comes down to 9 recommendations around building good social applications.

• Engage quickly (provide value within 30 seconds)
• Mimic look and feel (make your widget look like the page it is in)
• Enable self expression (let people personalize their widgets)
• Make it dynamic (keep showing new stuff)
• Expose friend activity (show what friends are doing)
• Browse the graph (let people explore their friends and friends of friends)
• Drive communication (provide commenting features)
• Build communities (expose different axes of similarity)
• Solve real world tasks (leverage people’s social connections to solve real problems)

This is an excellent guide to anyone developing and extending Web 2.0 applications as it gives you the principles to build a good solid foundation for your application or tool. Find the information here: Social Design Best Practices.