Interesting piece from The Nieman Journalism Lab on Gawker’s success in curating comments to improve the quality of discussion on their sites. In essence, Gawker’s “class system” means unknown commenters get stuck behind a “show all discussions” link few users will click. What most readers will see are only the musings of trusted commenters and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]