Robert Scoble has a nice piece on “passionates”, people who are early adopters of technology. He says that companies need to focus on passionates in order to drive their business forward, as non-passionates just don’t care enough to share and promote you.

He makes a really good point: it’s better to have 100,000 passionate users than 1,000,000 non-passionate users. This allows you to actually sell a product to those 100,000 people and make some profit at the end of the day. If you have a ton of users, most of which aren’t passionate, then you have a much harder time actually convincing them to give you money for the thing they’re not passionate about.

However, I think Robert misses something crucial in the dichotomy he sets up between “passionate” people and “non-passionate” people. This is the same complaint that I have with Forrester’s research, that they bucket people into being either “this” or “that”…with the implicit assumption that it doesn’t change: you’re either use technology at a certain level or you don’t.

The reality is that people are passionate about some things, and not at all about others. They love some activities and don’t care about others. The activity is what they’re passionate about (not the technology) and when they’re passionate enough they’ll learn the necessary technology as they find appropriate. Passion depends upon the activity in question.

Take knitters, for example. Most knitters are non-passionate technology-wise. They are not early adopters of the latest new gadget, and they’re not scrambling to sign up for the latest social network. Some are, undoubtedly, but most aren’t. They probably don’t care about Twitter, or Friendfeed, or Seesmic.

But they’re passionate about knitting, so when ravelry.com comes along and offers a place for knitters to gather online, suddenly they start to consider actually using a social network because it might be of value to them. They sign up and suddenly appear to be one of the early-adopter passionate people that Robert talks about, when in reality they rarely do this sort of thing but, well, this is knitting and that’s what they’re passionate about.

This doesn’t mean that people using ravelry.com are suddenly early adopters of all technology. It simply means that technology came along to help them practice their passion better, and so they adopted it because the value proposition made sense to them. The way this would normally happen is if some other knitter says “hey, you should check this out”.

This happens to me all the time. I’ll talk to web designers about some new software and I’ll get really excited, talking about in-depth details of how it works. Then I’ll get into a conversation with a photographer about the latest lens they bought and my eyes will glaze over. I just want a no-brainer camera that I don’t have to think about. I’m not passionate about cameras…but I am passionate about other things.

The activity is the thing to focus on, not the technology. Technology enables the activity, and people will get excited about the technology if they’re excited about the activity first and the benefits of the technology has been explained to them. But you don’t make passionate photographers by showing them lenses, you make passionate photographers by showing them pictures that rip your heart out.

That said, I understand the point Robert is making. There are some people (early adopters) who will try out anything simply because it’s new and interesting. But those are technology early adopters…a very small population of people who get a large amount of attention because of their predilection to try new things. A much larger population (although much more fractured) are those people who are already passionate about some activity or other, and can become passionate about new technology as it relates to that activity, but they just haven’t been introduced properly.

Introducing people to a new product properly is the biggest challenge facing companies today. We all rejoiced when the Web came along because it meant that you could sell something to anybody, anywhere, and at any time. I could write my simple blog from Newburyport, MA and have readers anywhere in the world. But the reality is that everyone else can too, and with everybody trying to do the same thing at the same time the cacophony of products and pitches and blog posts is simply deafening.

In other words, the task is not always to make people passionate about something, it’s to show them how technology (or your product, etc) can make them even better at what they’re passionate about. Robert isn’t mentioning FriendFeed every 2 seconds because he’s passionate about activity streams. He’s mentioning it because he’s passionate about reading, spreading, and talking about the latest technology news. That’s the activity he cares about most, I dare say. Technology is merely the enabler of that activity.

So while yes, you should take advantage of early adopters, learning from them and focusing some of your effort on them, you can’t assume that just because people aren’t early adopters they’re not passionate. Passion is more about doing an activity well than it is about using the latest technology to do it.

In On the Internet, people know if you’re a dog, my friend John Eckman details an interesting situation which underscores the importance of identity and revealing who you are in appropriate places on the Internet.

John wrote a great post the other day comparing some newly released features from the travel startup Dopplr with those of another travel startup, Tripit. Both services have become very well known in the last year and are converging in the same space: they’re increasingly becoming competitors in what might be called the social travel space. I actually use both services as examples in my talks…they are both doing some very innovative design. I even put Tripit screenshots in my book on social design.

Well, someone by the name of “Thomas” left a comment on John’s post that was pretty disparaging of Dopplr. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal, as every service has its detractors.

Except it appears that Thomas might actually work for Tripit. Just before he was going to publish the comment, John noticed that the machine Thomas commented from was called wall.tripitinc.com. While it is possible that this is an amazing coincidence, or that Thomas simply forgot to mention who he was, it’s unlikely. The comment is written from the voice of a customer trying out both services. (John’s post contains the full comment)

John tried to contact Thomas, but hasn’t heard back.

So, it appears that someone from Tripit is making negative comments about their competitor Dopplr without disclosing who they are. That is bad behavior, in the same way as if someone from Dopplr had come and made positive comments without disclosing who they are.

Yesterday I wrote an unthoughtful post about an email I received from Slideshare. I analyzed the email as an interface and ended up calling it evil, pointing out that I wanted to find out more about something but had to commit to the invitation in order to do so. At the time, this frustrated the hell out of me. But it was a dumb post, because I know Jon and Rashmi of Slideshare and I know that they’re definitely not evil. (Of course, I was basically calling them evil in public…for which I apologized in an update to the post)

At the same time, on Twitter we were having a discussion about the Loopt debacle, in which the service sent out invitations to someone’s friends without their knowledge. We were asking…is this evil design or merely bad design?

Update: Loopt has changed their app in response to the concerns of their users. This is a great example of how to evolve products with users by listening to their feedback. Good on Loopt for acknowledging and fixing the issue.

Evil design would be when the designers intentionally deceived users by design. In other words, evil design is when designers(in this case the people making design decisions, not necessarily the coders or visual designers) know they aren’t being straight-up with users, and created the interface in order to keep it that way. There are many examples of this…one of which being the Facebook Beacon platform.

(as an aside, I’m sure I’ve made evil designs before, too…this isn’t evil as in Satan evil…it’s more like deception that creeps into an interface over time…and the designers know better but do it anyway)

Bad design would be when something unintentionally happens as a result of the design. This is very different. The designers simply didn’t know what would happen in all cases. I would suggest that most user frustration is caused by bad design…there are so many unintended consequences in the interfaces we make.

Nevertheless, I think there are a couple interesting points about the whole Slideshare affair.

1. I was genuinely frustrated at the interface. I was as frustrated as I can be with people. I assumed that the interface was designed intentionally, and that the designers had made an explicit decision to put only one link there with the hope that people would be more likely to click on it. The frustration I had grew to a feeling of being manipulated…which is an even worse feeling. These feelings, of course, were silly.
2. Most negative effects from interfaces are unintentional. The designers do not mean to frustrate you…they simply didn’t know it was happening. Always give them the benefit of the doubt. In this case, the feature is a *very* minor one, an invitation to join a group.
3. People’s actions are completely colored by their current experiences. I would never have written the same post today, after the fact. In fact, this is the post I’m writing today, after the fact. So when people complain, they’re probably only complaining because they’re still in the moment. When the moment passes, they’ll think more clearly.

Update #2: Jon from Slideshare responds in the comments with excellent help. And in reflecting on this post…I realized it’s silly to call the design (or Slideshare) evil. This isn’t evil…it’s an interface.

Update #1: There is indeed a group on Slideshare called Presentation Design Tennis. So the following email is true…

I received an email that was supposedly from Slideshare. I don’t know if it really is from Slideshare, but it feels like a devious email either way.

Here is a screenshot:

As you can see, there is a single link in the email. It is a confirmation link, meaning that if you click on it then you are confirming your acceptance of the invitation.

The problem is, I don’t know if I want to accept the invitation yet. There is no way for me to find out more about “Presentation Design Tennis”, which sounds interesting but bears no credibility at all since I’ve never heard of it. What I really want is the ability to find out more about it. If there had been a “find out more” link, I would have clicked it.

In this case, though, the design is somewhat evil careless, in that it tempts you by telling you of an invitation (social influence) but doesn’t allow you to find out anything before you accept. (Classmates.com is currently killing the respect of their users in this same way.)

This also reminds me of the subtleness of Facebook’s Beacon platform, which was designed in a similar manner…where the default action would get you involved in something that maybe you didn’t want to be involved in.

The takeaway is that this is really about respecting users. The best experience for users in this case would be to be able to find out more at their leisure, without committing to anything they don’t want to. A good solution might be “Accept Invitation” or “Learn more” links. The “Sign Up or Learn More” patterns seems to be in wide use these days, and for good reason. Yes, you might have lower numbers of people actually doing the thing (in this case joining the group), but you’ll know that the people who did end up joining really want to be there.

This Thursday we’re holding the next North Shore Web Geeks Meetup, our monthly meeting for web geeks who live up in the Northeastern Mass/Southern New Hampshire area.

This month we’re changing to a new format. So far we’ve been completely unformatted…everyone simply showing up and talking for a while. This has worked out well, but it occurred to us that most of us specialize in some topic or another. For example, we have John Eckman who specializes in open source enterprise software, Will Bond who is writing his own PHP frameworks, and Tom Summit who, as a talent recruiter looks at LinkedIn in a completely different way than I ever would. In other words, we learn a lot from each other. (And these are only three of the folks out of the 100+ or so who have attended the meetings) We’ve had SEO experts, entrepreneurs of many stripes, an IP lawyer, programmers, marketers, front-end wizards, and all sorts of folks that I honestly had no idea lived in the area.

So this week I’m going to be giving a short talk…the first of what I hope to be ongoing short talks at the meetup. I’ll start it off by giving a talk on Designing for Sign-Up, the ins and outs of getting people to sign up for your web application/software. This will be a first draft of the talk I’m giving at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York in September. So I’ll get practice giving the talk, hopefully improving it by listening intently to the valuable discussion that follows. It will also be a fun way to help folks who are dealing with the problem and to have a point of discussion to go forward with.

Back in the spring I gave a short talk (along with Ethan, Dan, and Scott) at the Markup and Style Society meetup, and it went really well. Folks seemed to like the focus of discussion. At the North Shore meetup we’re going to try something similar, but have only one talk instead of 4.

Also, I wanted to give a shout out to the Build Guild, a meetup that just had their first gathering last week in Salem. It was started by two guys who had previously come to a North Shore web meetup, Marc Amos and Angelo Simeoni. I think it’s awesome to see more folks get meetups started in their towns…it sounds like they had a really good turnout. So if you live in the Salem/Peabody area and are looking for a local meetup, check it out.

For more details on Thursday’s North Shore meetup, please see one of the following places:

• North Shore Web Geeks web site
• Facebook Group (61 members and counting)
• Upcoming page: Upcoming.org Event page

See you on Thursday!

Boston.com has a nice story on the growing trend of companies keeping real-time tabs on what their customers say on the Web:

Hurry up, the customer has a complaint

By using services like Twitter and Google blogsearch, companies can quickly respond to people who vent their frustrations. In some cases, they can actually provide real customer service.

I would point out that these technologies aren’t just for finding out what’s wrong, but they can also help companies know what they’re doing right, what is resonating with their audience.

For example, in the last two weeks on my twitterstream I’ve heard probably 20-25 people say that they enjoyed the movie Wall-E. In the same time period not one person complained…that signals to me that the movie is definitely worth watching. Some people even used the term “classic”. By following real-time trends you can see what is gaining word-of-mouth and what isn’t.

I’m also happy that the article serves as a tidy follow-up to Chapter 3 in my book Designing for the Social Web, a chapter I called Authentic Conversations. When I wrote that chapter back in the winter time it wasn’t clear if the big companies (Dell, Comcast, etc) were going to come around to this approach of monitoring in real-time what their customers say…and more importantly responding and having authentic conversations. As much as I’m used to being treated poorly by big companies, I’m somewhat optimistic about the stories in this article being signs that perhaps there is real change going on.

And the article makes another point that I made in the book, which is that having authentic conversations in this way isn’t just about customer service….it’s also about innovation and product evolution…that by listening to customers over time we can actually build better products by reacting to what is happening on the ground.

I heard a term the other day that I really liked: co-evolve. It was said in the context of humans and technology…humans and technology co-evolve together.

In other words, we change technology by creating it, and then it changes us as we use it. And we both change in response to each other. Many times when we talk about technology we talk only as creators…should we create it…should it have been created? But by the time we have created technology it’s too late to ask that question…it’s already changed us in some way. We can’t go back, at least not this generation. Maybe the next generation will forget.

The gun-rights activists like to assume the first frame…that we are sovereign over the technology we create and it doesn’t change us. Guns don’t kill humans, humans kill humans. On CNN the other day was a photo of a protester holding up a sign: “if guns kill humans, do pencils write books?”.

But thoughtful people know it’s not that simple. Technology isn’t neutral…the mere presence of it changes our behavior. I’ve read about a study in which the mere presence of a gun in the room (a randomly placed gun…nobody mentions it during the study) made people uneasy and tense. The people in the study thought they were there for something else…but of course everyone notices the gun and it has a direct affect on their behavior. They act more hostile, more angry. When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. When you have a gun everything looks like a target.

Of course, if guns didn’t kill people our army wouldn’t need them to kill people.

Ahh!!!…there’s the key. Guns make it easier to kill people…they enable a behavior, and by enabling the behavior, by making it easier to do, it is done more often. And as guns get easier to use and more deadly, they make it even easier. This is the grey area…the area that people who see the world in black and white can’t see…

Anyway, this piece wasn’t supposed to be about guns. It was supposed to be about technology. Lately I’ve been using several tools that enable me to perform actions easier, and as those actions become easier it changes the way I work. So while they don’t do anything new, per se, the fact that they make an activity so easy and fast changes the way I do the activity. I think this is a sign of me co-evolving with the technology I use.

Here are a few:

• Wordpress when I installed Wordpress many years ago the ease of publishing allowed me to publish more. Tumblr is another recent tool that makes it even easier to post.
• Skitch Skitch is a screen-capture program that makes it incredibly easy to grab screenshots, annotate them, and throw them up on the web. Because it allows uploading in one-click, I’m now using my Flickr account to store screen grabs that I think are interesting.
• LaterLoop I’ve just begun using LaterLoop, but it’s a great way to save things you want to read later…to “loop back on”. This happens to me a lot, when I have 80 tabs open and simply want to remember them, but don’t necessarily want to bookmark them permanently (although it does that too)
• Time Machine Time Machine is the backup program in Apple’s latest OS Leopard. It makes backups super easy to do, which results in the happy outcome that you backup more often. The addition of a wireless base station (which I don’t have) will make this even easier.

It’s interesting to note that these technologies are late-comers by a long-shot. Many, many solutions had already existed in the marketplace supporting the exact same activities for a long time before they showed up. But this software is designed so smoothly that it actually pushes the state-of-the-art forward…changing the way we do those activities.

That seems to me to be the hallmark of good design…when the person and the technology co-evolve…changing each other as time goes on.

This is just too juicy to not share with everyone.

Here’s a 2003 email from Bill Gates in which he vents his frustration with the Windows interface…in quite excruciating detail.

Epic Bill Gates email rant

Throughout the email Gates continually voices his frustration in trying to perform what he thinks should be straightforward tasks.

My favorite bit:

“This time I get dialogs saying things like “Open” or “Save”. No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.”

Lesson: No matter how expert you are…you still appreciate clear instructions. Nobody, not even Bill Gates, likes feeling they have no clue.

In part I of my interview with Yahoo’s Bryce Glass, Bryce explains the basics of Reputation Systems. In the following part II, Bryce digs deeper into the strategic decisions around patterns, like how to determine which pattern to use and who is using reputation patterns best.

6) So let’s say I’m building a site with social networking features. How do I figure out which reputation pattern to use?

My advice would be: start small. Definitely think of which one or maybe two patterns to employ. Consider the spirit and intent of the community that you’re trying to build. What exactly do you hope people will do there? Write reviews? Post videos? Form connections with each other? Consider all of these things, and others, and then try to place your intended community somewhere along that Competitive Spectrum.

And be honest with yourself! I’d posit that the vast majority of consumer-focused social sites are somewhere at or below the ‘Cordial’ level. If you still insist on placing a ‘Top Hunks’ leaderboard on your dating site after all of that? Well… that’s fine, but at least now you’ve made that decision consciously and clearly. (It’s probably still the wrong decision, but…) And, not to re-plug my earlier talk, but more guidance is given there as well on this very question of ‘which pattern?’

7) What is the biggest mistake that designers make when implementing reputation patterns?

I’d say 2 related things: one is employing those more empirical patterns— Points, and Levels, ranked and tracked on Leaderboards— in situations where they’re not appropriate. I feel like I’m belaboring the point, but… if your community values fun, and easy-going interactions with each other and helpfulness? Then don’t destroy that fantastic dynamic by comparing members, one to another. Don’t elevate certain members’ status at the expense of everyone else in the community—’cause resentment, factions and gaming are soon to follow.

And related to this is the mistake of rewarding the wrong types of behavior. Specifically, there’s a tendency to want to reward activity (how many times have I contributed, or how frequently) instead of the quality of those contributions. (Do people like this video? Have they watched it? Responded? Linked to it, or embedded it on their blog? Voted for it, or assigned a rating?) Of course, both are important: you want people who are actively engaged and prolific contributors: but you want those contributions to be quality ones: thoughtfully prepared, formatted along community norms, and above all useful or interesting to the community.

A relevant, and recent, example I could cite is Plurk. Now, I absolutely don’t mean to hate on Plurk. It looks like a fine product (it’s kind of a Twitter-like microblogging platform.) But they’re tracking and displaying some very “official-looking” Karma metrics, and even feature a Leaderboard of Interesting Plurkers. My response to this is two-fold: first is… “why”? What community goals does it further? My guess would be that it’s a desire to promote active, high-use Plurkers to the community, that others might find them and opt to follow them as well.

But the prominent Karma score, and a surface appraisal of how it’s generated, might lead one to believe that Plurk is a competition. And, specifically, a competition won by the amount of stuff you do! (Number of Plurks, number of friends, etc.) Most people can see how badly this could end: if someone really wants to make it onto that leaderboard? They’ll probably try mass-friending and spam-blasts first. (Even if Plurk’s system is smart enough to counter this, the overall effect is still negative.) There is a nod to quality—’Quality Plurking’, however that’s defined—but the emphasis appears to be on Activity. And I’d posit that a karma system for an app like this is somewhat extraneous. It kinda smacks of “wouldn’t it be cool if we…”

I also feel compelled to point out that the particular label they use—’Interesting’—is a loaded one: while very complimentary to those who receive it, it’s can also feel derogatory to those who’re left out. There’s a reason why Flickr has only ever applied the descriptor of interestingness to photos, and not the people that take them—and that reason is that the community folks over there have a wonderful awareness of community spirit, and are sensitive to the effects that labels can have.

8) What is the best example that you know of of a site that implements reputation patterns?

I don’t know if it’s the absolute best, but a site that I’ve praised in the past is Yelp. They’re a review site and they feature a nice variety of reputation indicators. What I like about Yelp is that they seem to have payed close attention to their community, and what motivates people to write reviews, and their reputation system leverages that nicely. It doesn’t work against it.

A really simple example: some of our own research, at Yahoo, indicates that one reason some people may write reviews is just this desire to ‘fill a void’ or provide a review for a product or venue that has none. (I’ve wondered if this isn’t somehow psychologically related to those guys that like to type ‘first!’ into comment fields.) Now of course this isn’t the only thing that motivates someone to write reviews, but it can be a small motivator for some folks.

Yelp must be aware of this tendency, cause they give users a small boon for being the first person to contribute a review for a business. The first review for any establishment will display a ‘first to review’ badge for ever-after. So it’s not a huge thing. They don’t place a lot of importance on it, but there it is: a small and very natural show of appreciation for those users that like to help get the conversation started.

And Yelp does this in a dozen other ways as well. They have specific reputation types that reward funny Yelpers, or helpful ones. They have a special designation (the Yelp Elite — you’ve written about them before, in fact.) So Yelp encourages a wide range of expression from their review-writers: basically, you can be any kind of ‘Yelper’ you want to be, and—as long as the community finds value in your contributions—Yelp has a way of rewarding you. (And Yelp doesn’t ‘rank’ users against each other, or display a leaderboard anywhere on the site.)

And, of course, I’ve already mentioned XBox Live. I think they do a fantastic job. I believe that they employ just about every pattern from the set that we’ve published, and probably a couple others besides. And all for great effect, for a very specific purpose. BUT… they’re a fairly competitive context, so I think they get a lot of leeway to do things that a lot of social community sites should probably not be doing.

9) What is Yahoo’s strategy in getting these out to the community? Are you simply being altruistic? Wouldn’t these help your competitors?

There are a couple of dimensions to my answer here. First, I’d say that the Pattern Library, in general (which has been open since February of 2006, btw) is a good fit for Yahoo!s stated goals of openness and transparency.

Secondly, there’s nothing especially proprietary about the information or opinions embedded in the patterns. Christian, who I’ve mentioned, actually vets all of our public patterns with our Legal team, so if there actually were some sooper-sekrit game-changing reputation business logic in there…? Well, that probably wouldn’t make it outside the firewall.

But, also, these patterns are in large part drawn from examples and experiences of competitors, as well as products that we’ve shipped at Yahoo! So in a way, it’s not so much ‘getting them out’ to the community as giving them back to the community. There is some work involved in these patterns (compiling, researching, refining and writing them out) but the benefits for us are innumerable: the ability to positively influence the community, be seen as thought-leaders in social software. Heck, just taking part in a smarter dialog about the place of reputation systems… it’s all good.

Thanks for the interview, Bryce!

Resources:

• Yahoo’s Social Design Patterns for Reputation
• Bryce’s Designing your Reputation System slide deck
• Bryce’s personal blog

Of all the social software built on the web in the last two decades, none are as important yet as little talked about as reputation systems. Reputation systems have driven the entire business at eBay.com, much of the business at Amazon.com, drives activity at Digg.com, powers the moderation system at Slashdot, etc…and yet for all the millions of words written about web design very few of them have been dedicated to this type of software.

Well, the relatively little talk about reputation systems is beginning to change as designers look closely at successful systems in search of wisdom for their own projects, as it becomes clear early on that small design decisions can have a big impact on how the community evolves. Part of the problem, however, is that each system is very different from others, and to design a robust reputation system you need to tailor it to your specific needs.

That’s why I’m really excited about the recent release of Yahoo’s social design patterns for reputation systems. The following graphic from the pattern library illustrates what Yahoo calls the “competitive spectrum”, which is a way to classify the activity on your site and helps you to choose which reputation pattern might work best for your community.

My first introduction to the patterns happened by accident. I needed a room for this year’s IASummit and I twittered about not having one. I received a tweet back from Bryce Glass, whom I knew of but didn’t know personally. He was gracious enough to let me share a room with him and over the couple of days I was there Bryce told me about some of the fascinating work he’s doing which will benefit many other designers going forward. I was glad to talk to someone who could bring the weight of super-large systems into the discussion, as Yahoo has some of the largest sites around. What Bryce has learned as the Reputation Guy at Yahoo is very valuable for everyone building social software.

In the talk he gave at the summit, Designing your reputation system, Bryce outlined a framework for designing reputation systems that is probably the best starting point for figuring out how to build your own. In the following interview, he starts from ground zero and explains what reputation is, what a design pattern is, and how to start applying them to your own work.

First, a little about Bryce:

Bryce Glass is an interaction designer at Yahoo! He currently works in the user experience group supporting the recently-announced Yahoo! Open Strategy. But in the past year, Bryce was the user experience lead for a Reputation Platform that powers the rep systems for many of Yahoo!s properties. In that time, he had opportunity to work with several different community-oriented sites on Yahoo! on improving their reputation systems, increasing user engagement and generally creating friendlier, more-active communities.

1) So, Bryce, what is your definition of reputation?

I generally use a fairly coarse-grained definition of ‘reputation’ when discussing these patterns or other work we’ve done with reputation at Yahoo! By my simple definition: one’s reputation in a community is both a history of one’s past actions within that community, and a value judgment about the worth of those actions.

Who makes that value judgment? Ideally, the community itself. So contributions that the community values are good, and those it finds objectionable (or simply has no interest in) are bad. And you, as the author or originator of that content, can be judged according to these same values. Quite simply: contribute to the community and—if the community likes it—your reputation rises.

Obviously, it’s a little more nuanced than that, but…

2) So what is a reputation design pattern?

This family of patterns are a small subset of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, which has been out ‘in the wild’ for a couple of years now. I’d suspect that many of your readers are at least passingly familiar with that effort (and, if not, my fellow Yahoo Christian Crumlish has a good video update up on our Developer Network.)

These patterns are notable, however, in that they’re the first social design patterns that we’ve included. I know that this is a direction that Christian wants to take the library in, so expect to see more and more of these in coming months. (Identity representation, participation, more reputation, etc.) But… going back to your question… this family of reputation patterns can be thought of a couple of different ways.

First, and foremost, it’s just an attempt to catalog and describe a number of common ways to represent some one’s status within a community. They are patterns that recur across websites, games or other interactive communities and we’ve made some attempt to be as complete as possible in this release. (Tho, for the sake of finally shipping the patterns, we did omit several—I’m hoping to sneak those out over the next several months.) For the designer of a community, these patterns might he helpful in just identifying and naming a reputation feature which they’ve been considering. And providing some very lightweight guidance on where and when to employ the pattern. So you could almost think of these patterns as a ‘Chinese menu’ of options for showing some one’s reputation on your site.

But this was a concern to us as well: through working with Yahoo! property-owners internally (the folks who make decisions about things like our Finance site, or Yahoo! Local, Maps, Answers, etc.) we understand that sometimes a long list of options is actually less helpful than no guidance at all. So we pushed hard to include at least one meta-pattern, The Competitive Spectrum, that attempts to provide guidance about which of the other patterns to employ. It attempts to provide a selection rationale.

In truth, there’s so much more guidance we could have included (the Spectrum is but one of 15 questions that I covered in a presentation on reputation systems earlier this year at the IA Summit.) But this one central question is an important one for anyone attempting to influence the community spirit of any ‘place’ they’re building online: what type of community will this be? A friendly place, where people cooperate? Or a competitive, cut-throat one with winners and losers?

3) Although reputation is sometimes bestowed on an individual by a community, what steps can an individual take to improve their reputation?

Tho’ it may sound… un-profound (is that a word?)… my advice here is simple. To improve your reputation in a community, become valuable to that community! There are a number of simpler ways to state this as well: Don’t be a jerk! Play nice with others! Do unto others as you’d have done unto you. It was all good advice when our mothers gave it to us in our youth, and is still good now.

But it gets tricky. I’d mentioned how reputation is very contextual. So you have to keep in mind the relative values of that specific community. Maybe your idea of ‘being a jerk’ is, in fact, not at all in agreement with the majority opinion of the community. Some communities on the web are built on ‘jerks’ and they’re fine with that reputation. Perhaps they value being a funny jerk, and you just don’t want to be boring in that community.

So I would say… hang out in a community before you start participating and try to learn its values. Then become an active participant, and try to figure out a way to become a valued participant. And, you know what? If it ends up that the communities values simply don’t agree with yours, then maybe that’s a sign you should find a community to frequent that’s better aligned to your values.

4) What are the biggest hurdles in designing for reputation?

I think it’s probably the number and variety of unintended consequences that little design decisions can have further down the line. I’m fond of the article—so I cite it a lot—but Ben Brown, who founded the dating site Consumating, has a great blog-post about the ‘ill-fated points system’ that they used for that site, and the variety of… um… less-than-ideal behaviors that those incentives gave rise to. Early on, Slashdot struggled with many of these same issues, and they’ve re-jiggered their comment karma system several times through the years.

A lot of these learnings are, in some small way, encoded into these patterns that we’ve released, as well as research that we’ve done at Yahoo!, and products that we’ve released, tweaked, tinkered and learned from.

A big hurdle—and if you can solve this, you’re halfway there to having a well-designed and effective reputation system—is appropriately marrying the incentives that you offer your users to the appropriate set of goals that you have for your community. You want to be sure that you’re rewarding folks for behaving like good citizens, and not just rewarding them for no good reason. (Or for vague and misguided reasons like “to keep them engaged” or “so we can have a leaderboard.”)

5) What is the biggest misconception?

My own belief is that community designers today are a little too enamored of the “allure” of these types of systems. They are, indeed, quite powerful patterns. Microsoft, for instance—I think it’s fair to say that they’ve been quite pleasantly surprised with the success of their XBox Live Achievements program: it’s a huge revenue driver (gamers will actually buy or rent games they have little or no interest in strictly to unlock that game’s achievements!) and a fan-pleaser (witness the dozens of community sites dedicated to tips and tricks about unlocking achievements.)

BUT… and this is a big ‘but’… XBox Live is a very specific context. I would place (parts of) that service to the extreme far-end of the Competitive Spectrum. And it should be pointed out that not everyone who plays on XBox Live universally buys into this ‘competitive’ mindset. (Read the comments here for a nice overview of contra-Achievement viewpoints.)

So, it’s a powerful feature and a real showcase example for the pattern that we’ve labeled Collectible Achievements but you should really think twice before employing it on your own community site. Ask yourself: will it inculcate a certain competitive mindset in the community? Do I want that? Who will be motivated by collecting achievements? Will they be too motivated, and act out in anti-social ways to get them? Who will be turned off by them, and leave the community? Am I okay with that?

So a big misconception, currently, I think is “we should be doing this.” We should have an explicit reputation system, with badges, points, voting, thumbing up and down. All the bells and whistles. I hope that sites will soon start to employ a more measured, more intelligent approach to designing these systems.

To be continued…(thus ends part I of the interview. I’ll publish the rest in an upcoming post here on Bokardo)