Short Takes: April 15, 2009

By SD Times Editorial Board

April 15, 2009 —

Secrets of social site success
You’ve got to trust your community to do the right thing, but also make it easy to clean up after people if they misbehave.

That’s a major point that I took away from the opening keynote from EclipseCon, held in Santa Clara last week. The speakers were Jeff Atwood, famous for his Coding Horror blog, and Clay Shirky, author of the insightful book "Here Comes Everybody," about the power of social groups in public life.

The topic was “The Social Mind: Designing like groups matter,” and Jeff and Clay found patterns in the success from their creation of StackOverflow, a user community for developers, and from successful communities like SlashDot and Wikipedia.

You should read Clay’s book, subscribe to Jeff’s blog and visit StackOverflow. But before you do that, here are four best practices that Jeff and Clay offered regarding creating a successful community site (the headings are theirs, but the descriptions are mine):

1. Radically lower the bar for participation. Don’t make prospective community members jump through hoops to participate or make them demonstrate specific expertise. Look at what makes Wikipedia successful: It has contributions from the small number of experts who really care about a specific subject, and also smaller contributions from the huge number of people who have a smaller commitment. Anyone can start a Wikipedia page; anyone can change a page; anyone can add to a topic or correct a mistake. Make everyone welcome and let everyone participate, as much as you can.

2. Trust (some of) your users. While you want a lot of participation, not all participants are equal. Some folks contribute more, some are more dedicated, some add a huge amount of value. Other folks contribute less. How do you decide who is more valuable and more trustworthy? Find ways to let the community decide, whether it’s through rankings, karma points or whatever. Then provide the means for those with more trust to lead the community.

3. Life is the world’s biggest MMORPG. Successful massively multiplayer online role-playing games mimic real life. People work hard if they can see that they’re making progress… and if they have goals to achieve. Those goals might be to slay dragons, win karma points, accumulate gold pieces, or whatever. Build those mechanisms into your system to encourage and reward behavior that you’d like to see in your community.

4. Bad stuff happens. Some people paint beautiful murals, others spray obnoxious graffiti. That happens in the real world and online too, as you can see by the abusive comments left on many online communities. The more general the community, the more people just like to go by and spray graffiti. Accept that this will happen, but also make sure you have ways to quickly delete community-destroying activity. Look at how easily Wikipedia contributors can "revert" malicious content. In the virtual world, you can make it easier to delete graffiti than to create it.

Jeff and Clay suggest starting small and getting really good at what you do, then letting the community grow in a scalable, sustainable way. Think about how Google, eBay or Facebook started. That’s the recipe for success in a community, both in the real world and online.            — Alan Zeichick

Watch what you save on your phone
I've heard some ugly stories recently about people's mobile phones or other handheld devices causing a great deal of trouble due to thieves.

In one particular story, a woman had her handbag stolen. The thief texted her husband from her cell phone asking for their PIN number. The husband unwittingly supplied it, and the thief withdrew all their money.

Also, a study conducted by an endpoint data protection company Credant Technologies found that 80% of mobile phone users store very sensitive information on their phones. According to the study, 16% have bank account details saved to their phones, and 24% save PIN numbers and passwords. This goes without saying, but be very careful with what you store on those mobile devices of yours; it can end up in the wrong hands.            — Jeff Feinman

A patented mess
Now TomTom is suing Microsoft back, alleging that the software giant violated some of its patents as well. The legal battle between those two companies reflects the suit/countersuit mentality that exploits the patent system. These lawsuits clog up the courts and stifle innovation.

The bar needs to be raised on patent quality, and while the courts are making some important decisions, Congress must also act to reform patent laws. Though the legislative process takes time, one thing is for certain: the sooner these laws are reformed, the better            — David Worthington

Leveraging a down economy
Leveraged development: another term for describing picking up pieces and parts where you can and rolling them into software projects. This is what Mike Munger, manager of component development at InfoPrint (a joint IBM-Ricoh venture), described to me when discussing how his team works.

With the economy forcing companies to essentially do more with less, Munger’s team uses agile techniques, open-source software and integration to gain efficiencies. “We have five major operating system platforms we support. If we tried to [build everything necessary] ourselves, we’d need a much larger workforce.”

The leveraged development model “comes under pressure when the economy goes down,” he said. “You want to use it even more.” But when you do component development, or leveraged development, a key piece is having confidence that the developers have revealed everything in the code. With offices in Colorado, and offshore locations in Europe and Japan, where the cultures and legal systems are different, it’s critical to maintain confidence that what you’re delivering to customers meets service-level agreements and won’t violate some software license.

Without an automation tool to do that, researching the components being used can take months, Munger said. With tools—Munger said his company uses Black Duck software to find components and check licenses—the process is easier and time is saved.

“It has a subtle effect on the marketplace,” he said, “by creating an informal way to achieve standardization” for component reuse.            — David Rubinstein

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