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Understand the Value of a Feature

I recently posted a link to a NYTimes article about how Twitter was launching two features its users had already hacked, including retweeting.
Sadly, the “official” version of the feature misses the point. As @dbarefoot and others point out, Twitter just made retweets less useful.
While is always a great to listen to your users, you [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Social Networking for Social Change

Change.org is a great example of a social network that harnesses — or focuses — people’s passion. So many “me too” social networking sites lack this key ingredient.
If your social network is going to take off, it will need to tap into a passion or need powerful enough to get people signed up and engaged [...]

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Nielsen Report: New Moms Heavy Socializers

More parents are turning to social networking sites for advice and support, especially new mothers. According to a new report released in April 2009 by The Nielsen Company, “Becoming a mother is a dramatic inflection point and drives women to the Web in search of advice and a desire to connect with others in their [...]

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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 [...]

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Facebook Trips Again

Facebook recenlty updated its terms, deleting a section that said users could remove their content at any time, at which time the license would expire. At the same time, they added new language that said Facebook would retain users’ content and licenses even after an account was terminated.
The company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, moved to [...]

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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 [...]

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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…

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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 [...]

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