Should your redesign include a social network?
On the surface – an easy answer is yes. You can always make your site more useful to an individual by providing them a login and giving them personalized information. Extrapolate out from that – you can almost always figure out a way to make your site useful to a group of users by allowing them to share their preferences with each other, and building a community from there is a logical extension.
But what exactly should your network consist of? In-depth user profiles like Facebook? Or cursory ‘following you, we’re not friends’ á la Twitter?
Confronted with this question in my own redesign process, I took a step back and created a series of framework questions.
1. What value can you provide to the individual by giving them user preferences?
2. What value can users gain from each other – on a one-to-one level?
3. What can value can an individual gain from a social organism?
Thinking through these questions, keeping your content and your audience in mind – determine what kind of social network is best suited for your site.
[This article was originally published on web.aan.org, a publication of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies]
I saw your profile on WiredJournalists and have to say, I am really digging your site.
When thinking about social networking, you really have to ask yourself how much of an effort will you put in the upkeep and conversation generation. You can’t just assume “if you build it they will come,” because many users DON’T want yet another thing to log into. You have to make sure your site has a compelling reason to draw people back time and time again.