Strategy

What’s going on

April 25, 2008 by Michael Boyle

I just realized I haven’t talked much about what I’m up to lately. When we moved back to Montreal, I had what I thought was going to be a great job developing a new, should-have-been revolutionary web product… but that didn’t really work out very well (they didn’t share my vision of what the site could have and should have been and I didn’t think it was worth the investment to think small). Since then, I’ve been working really hard to get a new company off the ground. My great friend Claude moved back from Paris a few months before I came back to Montreal and he has been working like a maniac to establish Exvisu in Montreal. Almost immediately we talked about merging our forces, and after one aborted attempt last spring, in the fall I started devoting some time to it and based on my good experiences in the early going, this past winter I dove in head first.

At the moment, Exvisu is all about doing a very unique and advanced kind of research to help leaders with marketing, communications, and political opportunities (or problems). We have the ability to go out into existing but unstructured data sets and learn a great deal more about an issue than traditional approaches can provide. From there, we work very closely with our clients to develop appropriate web-based strategies to address the opportunity or problem. And, to round out the offering, if our clients lack the capacity to execute on the strategy themselves, we’ll work with them to do the job.

It’s a pretty broad offering, but we’re exceeding the goals we set for ourselves in January. We have several clients and partners we’re working with such as AGY Consulting, K3 Media, Gartner Lee Limited and several others I can’t really mention. As well, we’re working hard on a couple of different technology projects that will be the key to moving from a pure consultancy to a much more ambitious play down the road.

Distribution > Destination

March 1, 2008 by Michael Boyle

Avenue A | Razorfish’s Garrick Schmitt has written a great post in the Digital Design Blog that riffs on information from their Digital Outlook report: Does the Home Page Still Matter?: Why Distribution Trumps Destination Online. Most of the web folks that I know have been working on this basis for some time now, but it remains important to underline that the old “get people in through the homepage” model is broken (and likely always was, it was just harder to figure out before).

Trying to force people into a specific usage pattern is a recipe for failure – trumped only by the mistake of trying to predict where users will come from in the first place. What does this mean in practice? Many things (and the conclusions in the post are right on), but two immediate things spring to mind:

Deep links have to provide context within the URL itself (i.e., be readable)
Don’t hide content in non-machine-readable formats that people can’t link to directly (and that Google can’t grok)

On Facebook friend limits

October 16, 2007 by Michael Boyle

In two recent posts (Facebook sucks, The you-don’t-need-more-friends lobby, Robert Scoble has complained about the 5000-friend limit in Facebook. He said,

[…] it isn’t scalable and falls apart at 5,000 contacts. It pisses me off more and more every day because of that scaling wall.

and

Someone asked why I keep pointing out the 5,000 friends limit. Why? Because I still haven’t gotten through and I’m still getting pushback from the lobby. So, let’s try one more time.

I agree with Scoble to some extent. The issue is important: scalability, both in terms of network size and application quality across different functions is where sites like Facebook will live or die. Plus, Scoble is an edge case, clearly, and I always think edge cases are important for webapps to take into consideration as they grow and develop.

There is a problem, however, and it is quite simple. The problem is this: Facebook seems to have been explicitly designed to NOT be a rolodex, to NOT scale to thousands of friends per user, and to NOT be an application that scales to the needs of highly-networked businesspeople as a function of their job. I don’t think it’s just a difficult engineering problem that will be overcome with time – it’s intentional. And, more than that, I think that accounts for the success of Facebook.

Facebook’s success isn’t just dumb luck (though there was almost certainly some luck involved). There are lots of other social network sites out there – including MySpace, which is still (arguably) bigger than Facebook. Of course there’s also Friendster, Orkut, Tribe.net, and many more. I’ve been on all of these, and a whole bunch more to boot (more task-oriented sites like Flickr and Shelfari). Facebook, however, is much bigger (for me) that all of these. Why?

Facebook has always been popular outside the tech/internet/weblogging crowd. On Orkut and the rest of them I always had the same kinds of contacts/friends. Some YULBloggers, friends who I’ve been in online communities with since the mid-90s, tech/business folks involved in other social networking or web properties, etc. My college roommate? Never. The girl I dated for a few months in twelfth grade? Never.
In Facebook, you can’t “collect” friends very easily. This is a huge difference from almost all of the other social networking sites, which explicitly privilege friend collection.
It’s easy to say “no” in Facebook. There isn’t even a message to the requester when someone declines a friend request. In some of the older systems, it was a big deal to not accept someone’s request – I suppose they thought that the social pressure to accept requests would grow the network faster. Without that social pressure, though, a paradoxical thing happened: even though it might have slowed the growth of the network, the whole system was non-threatening to non-professional users, who stuck around (in droves).
In Facebook, your friends list isn’t the most prominent part of the interface as it was for almost every similar system in the past. Rather, it’s what your friends are doing that’s front-and-center. Having more or fewer friends is simply a way to have more or less “stuff” parading up the screen from hour to hour, day to day. The “social graph” isn’t fundamentally about the list of friends – the social graph is just the conduit to the real content: interaction opportunities with other people.
There’s a cost to the user for each friend that they add. Each friend makes it that much more difficult to follow what any one friend is doing. This social cost is important, because although it puts negative pressure on the number of friends a user has in his or her list, it also helps most users to keep their friends list uncorrupted by non-friends who are simply collecting names (like they do in MySpace).

In all of these, there is a common thread: Facebook is expressly NOT there for collectors, it tries to privilege real life relationships as opposed to fleeting acquaintance. Scoble says,

[…]a “friend” in Facebook is NOT a “real friend.” (Let’s define “real friend” for now as someone who you’d invite over to your house for dinner). In social networking software a “friend” is someone you want in your social network. Period. Nothing more. The fact that people assume that you should only have “real friends” in your social network is just plain wrong.

In fact, I think that the distinction between Facebook and the other social networks – and the primary reason for the success of Facebook – is that is about “real friends” or at least is trying to be. MySpace and the rest were about collecting as many “friends” as you could. They were about the scope of the network above all things. Facebook isn’t about the network, but what the individuals in your network are doing: events they are going to, photos they are posting, games they are playing, chumps they’re biting, and all the rest.

Maybe the Facebook engineers were being honest with Scoble and it is just an engineering issue. If so, then they’d better watch it – because anything they do to remove the negative pressure against “collecting” instead of privileging the content over the network for its own sake could be Facebook’s downfall.

Earlier today

January 31, 2002 by Michael Boyle

Earlier today

Ed quoted a post by Christina Wodtke referring to JJG‘s article:

I’ve always held that information architecture is architecture in the information space, and must embrace content architecture (a.k.a. little or narrow IA), interaction design and information/interface design, and the architects are those who practice and excel in those arts.

Christina goes on to say that, “a lack of thoughful […] architecture results in sites that are difficult to navigate, difficult to use, unprofitable, unrealized and generally stinky.”

I agree that is often the case, but I don’t think the solution either begins or ends with IA, whether referring to the practitioner or the discipline. I think it starts much earlier, which is what I was getting at earlier today.

Ed suggested that a web designer should be a part of the solution, and on that we agree, though I would underline that a web designer is not simply a graphic designer working in Photoshop. A web designer (I prefer “developer”) works with the graphics and the code, realizing the graphical concept she or he has come up with in working HTML/XHTML/CSS etc.

For me there are four equally important tasks to complete once a web project has been given the go-ahead. Design, IA, content (or editorial) definition, and application/DB development. Further, none of those tasks can be completed in a vacuum – the job of each relies on the work of the others. Hence, for instance, the person doing the content definition must know what happens in the code, at least superficially, and the apps people have to know about what the IA is going on about.

All of the tasks have to be completed to a high level of quality, of course, whether it is one person trying to do it or a team of 10.

There’s one other person that needs to be in the mix: the project manager, or as I say sometimes, the product manager. This person has to know the web, they have to have lived in it, and has probably filled at least one of the other roles at some point in their career. This person is the one who figures out (and documents) the initial strategy (in consultation with “the business”), and who works with whomever is necessary to research things before high-priced specialists are brought in to make it happen for real. The project manager, to me, isn’t just a process person, it’s fundamentally a bridge position between the business needs that form the reason for doing a project in the first place and the more techie folks who will develop the specific elements that become the finished product.

It seems to me that the heady days of the dot-com bubble introduced a lot of inefficient processes to the web world. Most importantly, maybe, was the introduction of the idea that the “boss” didn’t have to know what the “web folks” are actually doing day to day. For me, that’s the foundational problem behind why there are so many “generally stinky” sites out there. IA is important, for sure. As are the other roles in a web project (don’t get me started about how important it is to have a real “jack of all codes” technical lead when a project has moved into a more quotidian integration or maintenance phases). But those disparate tasks, usually completed by people who quite literally speak different languages, need to be brought together by a skilled and experienced person who has a good idea of what each of them is doing. It might be Information Architects who often get pulled into that role, but it’s not strictly an IA role that they’re filling. It’s a layer away from what I understand IAs (the required tasks) to do: it starts earlier, and it ends long after. Maybe never, as long as a site is alive.

Luckily for the field of IA, it’s just that kind of project manager who knows the value of IA people, and would only consent to developing a site without one under great pain!