{"id":647,"date":"2007-08-08T20:52:13","date_gmt":"2007-08-09T00:52:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/08\/affordances-of-social-software\/"},"modified":"2007-08-08T20:56:22","modified_gmt":"2007-08-09T00:56:22","slug":"affordances-of-social-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/08\/affordances-of-social-software\/","title":{"rendered":"Affordances of social software"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following up on my last post, let’s spend some time discussing what makes certain social software sites easier to adopt than others. I’ve written about technology affordances before<\/a>, but I think the affordances of a given social software site have a huge impact on its adoption. We’ll start by analyzing why I found LiveJournal<\/a> so easy to adopt.<\/p>\n

I started using LiveJournal because I wanted to read the posts that my friends had “locked” so that only their LiveJournal friends could read them. I figured I would create a free account, get accepted as a friend to those people, and that would be it. But as I started using it, I discovered more and more ways in which to use it.<\/p>\n

LiveJournal made it easy for me to keep track of all the people whose LiveJournal posts I wanted to read. Instead of having to go to each individual person’s page, as I had been doing, I could just go to my Friends page<\/a>, and get a list of what my friends have been up to organized neatly into reverse chronological order. To expand my network was also trivial. When I clicked on a person’s name, it took me to their LiveJournal profile<\/a> which listed all of their friends, making it easy for me to find other people I knew. <\/p>\n

LiveJournal gets several other details right in helping me figure out what to do. For instance, if you look at the Friends page<\/a>, on the left side, it shows me my main options: Recent Entries, Archive, Friends, User Info, My Website. There are other options in various menus, but the primary ones make it clear that LiveJournal is for writing my own posts, and for reading my friends’ posts. Also, LiveJournal allows me to jump into a comment thread wherever I feel comfortable, which reduces the anxiety of public “speaking”. <\/p>\n

Making things easy is vital in getting me to do something. Blogging software is a great example. When I first started my web page back in 1994, I had a section devoted to ramblings<\/a>. I only posted every few months, though, because the cognitive overhead of having to create a new HTML file every time I wanted to say something was too much. It’s not hard to create a file, but it meant that I was doing something other than trying to write my thoughts. Once I switched to blosxom, it was slightly easier because I just had to create a text file, but when I switched to WordPress<\/a> and could start blogging with one click, things got much easier. <\/p>\n

Good software should make it obvious what I should do first, and make it straightforward for me to accomplish something useful. LiveJournal has all sorts of things that I don’t use, like communities and tiered permissions, but that’s okay because I still get value out of it from the things I started using from the beginning. WordPress is unbelievably customizable, but I was able to start putting up posts quickly, and only look into customization when I want to try something new. <\/p>\n

I mentioned in my last post that I couldn’t figure out what to do<\/i> on Facebook. Now that Jofish friended me and has given me some tips, I can see there was a bootstrapping issue, as none of the people I had friended were using Facebook extensively, so I had no examples of how one might use it. Facebook also suffered because I did not (and still don’t) have a compelling reason to use it, as contrasted with other new technologies:<\/p>\n