Over the past decade, the Web has become an increasingly social place. Social activity has moved beyond message boards to become a wider part of the Internet. Most people have heard of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter; indeed, many people now have a profile on a social network. The term social media is part of our lives for better or for worse, and expressions such as citizen journalism are commonplace. Facebook alone has more than 200 million registered people.[1] What is different in this new world? People will come to you with a prior existence; they are on the Web already.
You need to recognize and incorporate this change into your design and development processes. Your website needs to offer something genuinely useful and become a home away from home for your community; the people coming to your site need to feel comfortable talking to other people there and keen to come back for more.
This book is about making applications in this new Web, frequently referred to as Web 2.0. Much heat and light (and a lot of hot air) have been spent on defining exactly what Web 2.0 is, but this book will focus on the social web. Over these 18 chapters, we’ll look at designing systems that support social human behaviors. I’ll be using terms such as social software and community to describe what we are building and to reinforce the idea that there are people out there, beyond the servers.
This is primarily a “design is how it works” book, based on my experience as an interaction designer and product manager. The hardest part of creating a social application happens before any code is written. Understanding human behavior and creating something that fits in and perhaps changes current behavior is a tough nut to crack. There will be plenty of technical discussion later in the book, too. This book will show you how the Web is changing, as well as some emerging patterns for widespread social interaction, where individuals act as a composite person across dozens of sites on the social web.
The book is aimed primarily at developers and designers (of all kinds: product, interaction, and visual), as well as project managers and editorial staff members. These are the people who will be implementing and running the actual product. If you are already running a web community, perhaps as a community manager or a developer evangelist, this book will help you figure out how to extend the functionality of your site to make the most of your community. If you have one of the many other roles involved in making a web company tick—business owner, web producer, marketing, or editorial—this book will help you understand the issues involved in bringing people to your website.
I hope this book has something to offer most people who are considering building a social web application. However, I should give you an idea of what you will not find in these pages. If you are looking for detailed code examples of how to implement the various features in social web applications, this book is not for you; it is deliberately light on code samples. Languages and frameworks rise and fall in popularity, and I’m not a regular software developer. So, rather than include a load of code I didn’t write, I spoke to a range of active software developers and included their thoughts throughout the book.
There are dozens of decisions you will need to make before you can launch your new feature or site. This book aims to help with the ones that fall between project management, design, and development. These are the decisions that derive the essence of the product you are making, but there is no single group of people that makes them.
The title of this book deliberately focuses on the application side of building things for the Web. Websites are gaining application programming interfaces (APIs) and a means of data exchange, so they are becoming more application-like and less a collection of pages.
The Web is important, but it is not all-encompassing (for most people). You need to see your website in the context of people’s lives, not the other way around. Building social software focuses mainly on human behavior and expectations and less on technical issues, so there is not a lot of code in this book. Reading this book will challenge you with a wide range of questions about the site that you have or are planning. Answering these questions will enable you to build an appropriate product that fits well into people’s lives. This book will help you articulate and quantify some critical things:
How to go about creating the product—the vital initial planning phase
How to figure out what to make first and what you are actually making
How to model the relationships between yourself and the people on your site, as well as their independent relationships to one another
How to represent these relationships in ways that feel right for your audience
Understanding how your website interacts with the rest of the Web, how to make these connections stronger, and why this is a good idea
How to implement these ideas in code, and the issues you will need to deal with when iterating your site after launch
Why having an API is important for your site
Why simple feature-for-feature copying of another site often fails
You must know how to do the following things in order to encourage a devoted community:
Build something that people will use
Make them feel at home
Give them ownership
Track them
Let them follow what is happening on the site
Know what to build next
I can’t guarantee that reading this book will allow you to create the next Flickr or Facebook, but you will understand what made those sites a success, as well as how to apply those ideas and nuances to your own area.
Chapters 1 through 8 set out a series of questions for you to answer so that you can plan and build a good website. Chapters 9 through 18 are more practical, exploring how social software works and how to create and manage your own social application.
The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
- Italic
Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, and directories
Constant widthIndicates code, text output from executing scripts, XML tags, HTML tags, and the contents of files
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This book came into being thanks to Simon St.Laurent. He approached me after I spoke at the O’Reilly Tools of Change 2007 conference in San Jose, California. The following weekend at Foo Camp ’07, over a couple of glasses of wine, we decided that the presentation should grow into a proper book. From there through the book proposal and on into the writing, he has been a great help. There were lots of books that described the technology side of creating products for the Web, but a lack of books on making social products. I hope this book goes some way toward addressing that need.
I worked in many places while I wrote this book: The British Library, my home, on the London Underground, on various Virgin Atlantic flights, in hotel rooms in San Francisco, Austin, Boston, and New York, and in a number of London cafés.
There is a lot of Gavin Bell in this book. This book is about social applications, which includes personal profiles and information. Rather than impinge on my friends, I’ve used a lot of examples from my own usage of social applications. I hope you’ll understand.
Thanks to all the speakers whose talks I’ve sat in on and the authors whose books I’ve read. I’m sure you will find some of your ideas in here. Forgive me if I’ve not credited you directly.
Thanks to the many people with whom I discussed the ideas in this book. You all influenced the shape and scope of this book in many ways: Matt Biddulph, Matt Jones, Tom Coates, Ben Cerveny, Matt Webb, Simon Willison, Tom Armitage, Chris Heathcote, Adam Greenfield, Tim O’Reilly, Dan Saffer, Meg Pickard, Jeremy Keith, Gavin Starks, Edd Dumbill, Kevin Anderson, Leah Culver, Steve Ganz, Adrian Holovaty, Larry Halff, Simon Wardley, Leslie Chicoine, James Governer, Lane Becker, Kevin Marks, Paul Hammond, Artur Bergman, David Recordon, Chris Thorpe, Kathy Sierra, Blaine Cook, rabble, Kellan Elliot-McCrea, Chris Messina, Jyri Engeström, and James Duncan Davidson.
Thanks also to Derek Powazek, Matt Haughey, Leisa Reichelt, danah boyd and Clay Shirky, Mark Earls, Steve Souders, Toby Segaran, Jesse James Garrett, Micheal Lopp, Tim Berners-Lee, and Steven Pemberton for helpful presentations. I’d also like to thank the authors of the books I’ve referenced; there is a bibliography on my website.
Additional thanks go to Timo Hannay and my colleagues at Nature: Louise Morton, Mat Miehle, Ian Mulvany, Euan Adie, and Alf Eaton. Matt Jankowski from ThoughtBot has been an excellent development partner. Timo let me take time off one day a week to work on the early part of the book; the book is much better for it. Thanks also to Timo for giving me freedom to explore my ideas at Nature.
Thanks to the many people who commented on the public chapter outlines on my blog, http://takeoneonion.org, and via Twitter—in particular, Terry Jones, Paul Mison, and Brendan Quinn. I’d also like to thank Simon Batistoni, Joshua Porter, and Elizabeth Churchill in particular for excellent feedback on drafts.
I’d like to thank my editor, Simon St.Laurent; my development editor, Robyn Thomas; and my technical editor, Matthew Rothenberg. They have caught and corrected many errors and stray thoughts. Any that remain are my own responsibility.
My production team: Audrey Doyle, copyeditor, and Loranah Dimant, production editor and proofreader; Karen Montgomery, who designed the cover; David Futato, the interior designer; Robert Romano, the illustrator; and Lucie Haskins, who created the index. They all deserve my thanks; there is a lot of work that goes into making a book, as I’ve learned.
My parents, Arthur and Doreen, gave me the support and encouragement to explore what I’ve wanted to do in my life, which I’ve really appreciated. My wife’s parents, Tom and Vivienne, have been really supportive and helpful throughout.
Finally, thanks to my wife, Lucy, and my sons, Oscar and Max, who put up with my regular absences while I was writing this book. I could not have written it without the love and support of Lucy, nor the smiles and encouragement of my two boys.
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