mypipeline

Social media fatigue. Technophiles all are aware of its insidiousness. You want to distribute your content and your attention as widely as possibly using as few tools as possible. But you’ve signed up with so many social networks and services that updating all of them is a drag. Andrew Shuttleworth’s mapped out his social media world in a quite extraordinary flow chart that Josh Catone picked up on at RWW. It’s similar to the Web 2.0 map that the How anyone can seriously expect to maintain sanity with all those registered presences out there, I have no idea, but I like how he’s mapped out his online output to these categories: events, text content, videos, photos, microblog content, bookmarks, web sites viewed, software used, lifecasting, location, comments, and blogroll. I will be returning to that list when I am thinking about “the proposition” for my upcoming web projects for the simple reason that if you aren’t trying to satisfy your users’ needs around each of those areas (where appropriate), you’re missing a trick.

But of course, this would be designing a service for a tiny proportion of your likely audience, as Danah Boyd points out in this speech that she gave to the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference last year. I simply love this essay, because it brings any technologist down to earth, and reminds us of the millions of ‘muggles’ out there who don’t give two blinks about the magic of our technology - just that their basic social needs are facilitated by it. And Danah sets out clearly where social needs change throughout our lives (or at least Western lives):

Life stages:
1) Identity formation and role-seeking (aka youth)
2) Integration and coupling (aka 20somethings)
3) Societal contribution (aka “adults”)
4) Reflection and storytelling (aka retirees)

And here’s the list of priorities for each of the life stages (in order of most to least important):

In other words how we use social media sites and the rewards that we get from them continually changes throughout our lives, but all too often social services online are designed and built with only a general ‘user’ in mind, without taking into account their life stage and their expectations.

Often usability is only determined by whether a site or service is usable by ‘anyone’ in other words, ignoring their audience’s priorities completely by appealing to the widest possible user base. A bad strategy in the modern online world, where niche markets are often the strongest, and the Big Co’s which have already captured the widest audiences continue to innovate.

In: Digital Life, Inspirations, Social Media | tags: attention economy, lifecasting. | #