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Got Lists?

I recently did a great interview with Efe Cakarel, founder of The Auteurs, and wanted to share an insight he had.
“As we near the end of the 2000s, people are creating more and more “Best of the Decade” lists. It really came home to us how important keeping track of and ranking your favorite films [...]

Listen to your users: they know what they want.

In the next several weeks, Twitter users will discover two new features, Lists and Retweets, that had the same user-generated beginnings.
via Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Users – NYTimes.com.
Brilliant way of letting users define the tools and features they want. Users will often hack your existing features and use them in new and interesting [...]

Foursquare’s Virtual Rewards

foursquare, a location-based social network, gives away so many points and “badges” to users that their personal pages can start to look like Boy Scout sashes.
It may seem over the top at first, but it’’s a powerful way to encourage certain behaviors. In the Online Community Research Network’s recent report Key Factors Establishing an Online [...]

Voyeurism, narcissism, and vanity — in a good way.

Good post on building social networks that talks about voyeurism, narcissism, and vanity as drivers of user behavior. Add to this the fact that people love to evaluate, criticize, and pass judgment on others, and you have the High School Model of social networking.
That’s not a criticism, by the way. It’s crucial to understand these [...]

How to build a stong community…

Ben Huh from I Can Has Cheeseburger gives 15 tips on how to build a stong community…
My favourite:
5. Stop Engineering and Start Thinking About the Market
People who work in the technology industry tend to over engineer things. Don’t complicate your problems, simplify them. If you need to add a commenting system to your site don’t [...]

The Dangers of Ignoring Your Audience

Clive Thompson has a great piece on Wired called Social Networks and the Wrath of Moms, which outlines what happened when UrbanBaby.com, which was purchased by CNET in 2006, launched a redesign that didn’t take into account how their users actually used the site…

Establishing a Community’s Culture – Online Community Report

The Online Community Research Network just released high-level results from its latest report: Key Factors Establishing an Online Community’s Culture
It reaffirms that features and tools aren’t as important as content, a clear value statement, and a well moderated community…
One key area we wanted to understand was the short list of factors that community managers thought [...]

Great advice on how to start a social networking website

Jeff Jarvis (via Ad Sales Blog) shares a great anecdote that makes a crucial point about creating social networking sites:
…a powerful newspaper publisher beseeched Mark Zuckerberg, the young founder of the hugely successful social network Facebook, for advice on how he could build and own his community.
The famously laconic Zuckerberg replied “You can’t.”
Zuckerberg went on [...]

Eight Ways to Get Users to Fill Out Their Profiles

Great post on encouraging members to fill out their profiles and post pictures, both of which are crucial steps in making our social network site come alive.

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