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]