Joshua Porter › Comments

I just gave my last talk this Sunday morning at the DrupalCampLA conference. The talk brushed on elements that contribute to effective designs for social networking websites. It's heavily inspired by Joshua Porter's new book Designing for the Social Web, and includes insight on which Drupal modules help support user participation. I also cover my own personal Drupal case study, P=MD, a social networking site made for my friends; with that experience, I learned that recruiting and retaining users is a huge challenge and requires an additional marketing/publicity mindset (beyond design and development) and I learned that all these modules in Drupal provide amazing functionality but it takes additional effort to make them all work together into a coherent, usable website. - Joshua Porter

Our own years of testing have conclusively shown that when speed of a feature or product improves, usage, quite simply, goes up. - Joshua Porter

But the privacy fiasco of the past few days has left me feeling that I really can’t entirely trust Facebook, even with the limited amount of things I’ve said and done on the site since I got an account several years ago. Maybe I’m over-reacting — and I continue to admire the company’s accomplishments in many other ways — but that’s just the way it is. - Joshua Porter

8K videos, 10 video studios, goal of 50K by end of 2010. - Joshua Porter

Focus on core goals. For Facebook the primary goal has been growth. Growth team focused on optimizing the site to get new users Example: looked at deactivation page and adjusted it convince people to stay by adding pictures of friends. Had a big impact, kept 1 million people a year on the site. - Joshua Porter

thanx a lot for sharing that - Anton Noginov х

This post started rattling around my head a couple of weeks ago while I was on the elliptical at the gym. I was reading Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi while I was trying to sweat off the pounds accumulating while I read my RSS feeds. I had begun this book previously, but left it bookmarked on the shelf for quite a awhile, until a tweet by @bokardo (his blog) that eventually led me to his Amazon list of must read books. Linked was listed and I pulled it off the shelf and stared anew. - Joshua Porter

A fundamental weakness of current sociological theory is that it does not relate micro-level interactions to macro-level patterns in any convincing way. Large-scale statistical, as well as qualitative, studies offer a good deal of insight into such macro phenomena as social mobility, community organization, and political structure. At the micro level, a large and increasing body of data and theory offers useful and illuminating ideas about what transpires within the confines of the small group. But how interaction in small groups aggregates to form large-scale patterns eludes us in most cases. I will argue, in this paper, that the analysis of processes in interpersonal networks provides the most fruitful micro-macro bridge. In one way or another, it is through these networks that small-scale interaction becomes translated into large-scale patterns, and that these, in turn, feed back into small groups. - Joshua Porter

But by the beginning of 2008, things began to sour. Facebook, a rival social network that was simpler and easier to use, was gaining momentum and starting to grow more quickly than MySpace. Murdoch confidently told the world that MySpace would make $1bn in advertising revenues in 2008 – but the company missed its target. Users began to desert the site, which had become cluttered with unappealing ads for teeth straightening and weight-loss products - Joshua Porter

Cool examples of how kids beat technology to communicate/learn/have fun. - Joshua Porter

Consistently, participants represented by an avatar in a dark cloak or a KKK-like uniform demonstrated negative or anti-social behavior in team situations and in individual writing assignments. - Joshua Porter

Thus, the direct person-to-person connection Kiva offered was in fact an illusion. Kiva’s lenders were actually backstopping microfinance institutions, and since Kiva and other online giving and lending models pride themselves on their transparency, Mr. Roodman and others suggested it might better explain what its lenders’ money — about $100 million over four years — was really doing. - Joshua Porter

Interesting model that actually defines things like "expert" and "master" - Joshua Porter

As a designer, I can't help but be disappointed by the lack of imagination that is driving this emphasis on data displays and graphing tools. Is a blinking meter really the best that we can come up with as a means of influence? For the sake of our future I hope not. To be fair these solutions have demonstrated positive impacts on personal energy consumption. But so have smiley faces on electric bills. Here is my interpretation - a quick mockup I threw together for my talk at IxDA (special credit goes to Minjung Sohn from Dept. of Industrial Design, KAIST as I hacked this out of one of the renderings they submitted to CHI). - Joshua Porter

Service that creates a favicon from a source file or twitter avatar. - Joshua Porter

Weird post. - Joshua Porter

data on an app store failure (huge opportunity for someone to figure this out) - Joshua Porter

We’ve processed the messaging habits of over a million people and are about to basically prove that, despite what you might’ve heard from the Obama campaign and organic cereal commercials, racism is alive and well. - Joshua Porter

Interview by Liz with Barry Schwartz, includes a stat about defaults. - Joshua Porter

a few nice ones in here... - Joshua Porter

Information visualization gets sued...interesting from a design POV. - Joshua Porter

had no idea this existed... - Joshua Porter

I do credit Berkeley's MBA program for my success with Dilbert. It trained me to think more like a business person than an artist. For example, an artist listens to his inner calling and hopes the public agrees. A business person listens to the audience and gives them what they want; that's the approach I took. In 1993 I opened a direct line to Dilbert readers through e-mail, and adjusted the content according to their feedback. That was one of maybe a dozen key business decisions that helped Dilbert break through a crowded field. I joke about getting an MBA so I could become a cartoonist, but business school was literally the competitive advantage that made Dilbert a success. - Joshua Porter

nice piece suggesting wave isn't a social media tool, but a corporate get work done tool - Joshua Porter

Suggests that initial impression is held even as usability suffers during use. (not tested with actual users during actual tasks) - Joshua Porter

I design Web sites, its not like I'm Angelina Jolie. I think you need to tune that stuff out, otherwise you're never going to be able to build stuff, be an entrepreneur, take risks, fail. That's part of entrepreneurialism, being able to launch a stupid IM client. The hardest part about Flickr being successful is wanting to do it again. I think there's a benefit to being one of six people that no one knew. No VCs would return our calls and we were broke and bootstrapping it and operating under the radar so we could focus on the most important things: the product, the users, what we were building. There's all this noise, the tech-crunch, which you have to tune out if you want to build good product. None of that stuff is additive; it all takes away from building a product. You try a lot of things and you don't know what the hell you're doing. If you're actually inventing something you shouldn't know what you're doing. - Joshua Porter

Interesting study on fold awareness. - Joshua Porter

Cool video of touch interface paradigm. - Joshua Porter

Once user has tweeted once, 65% chance he will tweet again. After 2nd tweet, chance of 3rd goes up to 81%. - Joshua Porter

Results from a Firefox A/B testing campaign. - Joshua Porter

nice screenshots of the Firefox test. - Joshua Porter