According to Businessweek, Facebook may soon be changing its new Beacon feature, which shares personal information (if not identifying you personally) with 3rd party sites outside of Facebook. I wrote about the feature in Facebook’s Brilliant but Evil Design Interestingly, most people, including the group MoveOn.org, seem worried about a different symptom of the problem than [...]

Just in time for the holidays, I’m releasing a much requested feature here at Bokardo: Social Design Reading List Over the past few months, lots of folks have asked me for a social design reading list. I started putting one together a while back, but it’s a lot more work than I originally anticipated. It’s hard [...]

I have rarely received as much feedback about a piece as I did for Do Canonical Web Designs Exist? In that piece, I argued that Armin Vit’s Landmark Web Sites, Where Art Thou? was wrongheaded because he was judging web design from a graphic design standpoint. In my experience people aren’t very good judges of [...]

Note: the other day I mentioned how exciting I thought the world of social design was…turns out it might be a little too exciting… Seth Godin writes how 8 billion dollars worth of gift cards seeps through the cracks each year. Astounding number. He rightly points out the reason we buy so many gift cards: it [...]

Armin Vit at Speak Up asks: Where are the canonical web designs? “Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster. Paul Rand’s IBM logo. Paula Scher’s Public Theater posters. Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map. Kyle Cooper’s Seven opening titles. These are only a few landmark projects of our profession. Design solutions that, in their consistent use as exemplary [...]

Fellow North Shorer and superstah designer Dan Cederholm has released Foamee, a social web application that tracks who you owe beer to and who owes you a beer. Dan has a nice writeup on his motivation for building it. Foamee is an interesting app, and not just because it involves drinking more. I find it fascinating [...]

I gave a talk yesterday at User Interface 12 called “Theory and Practice of Social Design”. It’s an ever-evolving collection of social psychology theory and actual design practice. Here’s one of my favorite slides from the talk…I think it’s a good illustration of how we can use theory to inform our practice, and perhaps vice-versa. [...]

A quick thought regarding Facebook’s new Social Ads platform. A recommendation is something you get from someone who knows something about you. They have seen an item of interest and thought that you might gain some use by it. They give their recommendation freely, knowing that it may do you some good, expecting nothing in [...]

Fred Stutzman on a crucial difference between ego and object-centric social networks: “A great photo-hosting service like Flickr (object-centric social network) stands alone without the network, making it less susceptible to (network) migration. An ego-centric network, on the other hand, has limited core-value - it’s value is largely in the network - making it highly susceptible [...]

Tucked away as part of the new Open Social initiative launched last week, Google engineers offered an interesting best practices document that outlines several social design dos and don’ts. Social Design Best Practices Note that these best practices are concerned with this particular technology. The Open Social initiative is a set of programming APIs that allows [...]

Chris Anderson, editor in chief at Wired, has published a list of 329 email addresses that have been used to send him PR SPAM in the last month. He says he’s fed up: “I’ve had it. I get more than 300 emails a day and my problem isn’t spam, it’s PR people. Lazy flacks send [...]

On Tuesday I had the good fortune to attend an excellent presentation on community design by Christina Wodtke at the DocTrain East Conference in Lowell, MA. Unfortunately, it was the only session I attended (lots of sessions looked good, like Steve Mulder’s talk on Personas), as I got sick Tuesday night and wasn’t able to [...]

Is it possible to read 7 books in a day…every day? That’s apparently what Harriet Klausner is doing. The famed #1 book reviewer on Amazon.com (who does claim to be a speed-reader) posts, on average, 7 book reviews a day. So not only does Harriet have time for reading all these books, she can also [...]

Clay Shirky, who has made a name for himself by turning conventional wisdom on its head, has a provocative piece in this week’s A Brief Message: “Arrogance without humility is a recipe for high-concept irrelevance; humility without arrogance guarantees unending mediocrity. Figuring out how to be arrogant and humble at once, figuring out when to watch [...]

Seth Godin says that people are going to hate his post How to create a good enough website. I don’t hate it, but I do have a word of caution for what Seth is advocating. Seth says: “I’m going to go out on a limb and beg you not to create an original design. There are [...]

Jason Fried on editing interfaces. He says:

"What matters is the editing. Software needs an editor like a writer needs an editor or a museum needs a curator. Someone with a critical eye and the ability to say “No, that doesn’t belong” or “There’s a better way to say this.” Physical constraints create natural limits for books and museums. Books have pages and museums have wall space. Software, on the other hand, is virtual, boundless."

I completely agree with Jason on this. You need someone pushing back as much as you need someone pushing forward. You need, not necessarily a critical eye, but a concerned eye that isn't colored with the effort of creation. A creator is almost never equipped to be objective about their creation. (nor should they be)

Anne Truitt Zelenka has a nice post: Weak Ties for Social Problem Solving in Enterprise 2.0, touching on a subject being discussed more and more these days: weak ties. She suggests that one of the next challenges for social software is distributed problem solving: how to leverage your social network when you have a tough [...]

Company CEO Marie Toulantis on Barnes & Noble’s new web site redesign: (via RWW) “We wanted our site to have more motion, more content and more interactivity, and to have more of a sense of community” Granted this is only a single sentence, but it happened to be the one they’re getting press with. And what a [...]

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer: (via) ““There can’t be any more deep technology in Facebook than what dozens of people could write in a couple of years. That’s for sure,” Robert Scoble, in Steve Ballmer still doesn’t understand social networking: “When I worked at Microsoft I heard this over and over and over again from various engineers and program managers [...]

Over time, the primary pivot of social software has changed from the topic thread to the person. Chowhound.com is one of the most successful sites for foodies on the Web. When you visit the home page, you’re given a list of topics that any food lover, at first glance, would be happy to read. Here’s what [...]

An oldie but goodie (from a 1998 interview) “In the online world, businesses have the opportunity to develop very deep relationships with customers, both through accepting preferences of customers and then observing their purchase behavior over time, so that you can get that individualized knowledge of the customer and use that individualized knowledge of the customer [...]