Breaking Social Web Rules

While browsing in my local library I found Joshua Porters book 'Designing for the social web'. After reading the book and writing this post I realise that I'm breaking the following 'rules' right here on my site:

• Assuming that once you've shared, or in this case clicked on one of the links out to Amazon, that you don't want to do anything else.
• While this page has a unique URL, I haven't given a URL to each comment – unless the comments aren't social objects – I'm still confused.
• Not providing sufficient options to share.
• Not measuring (I'll go outside and shoot myself for that one right now)
• Not really thinking about ongoing participation or collective intelligence.

Shameless affiliate link to Amazon: Designing for the Social Web (Voices That Matter)

Designing for the Social Web (Voices That Matter)

Mostly this is a brief review of the book as well as a summary of its contents. Read on...

The book is clearly aimed at people that have some sort of requirement for 'social enabling' an either a new or existing web application – certainly I was reading it with my own site in mind.

There are plenty of real-world examples of various features, both good and bad, with plenty of pictures and diagrams to illustrate them

First history and scientific theories are discussed and then a basic framework to approach the change necessary to implement social features is proposed.

The importance of authentic two-way conversations is discussed, along with the mechanisms that can be used to achieve them.

The details of design methods to maximise signups and subsequent participation by the various types of visitor are discussed.

For me, the most interesting chapter was about collective intelligence and how the users of a site/application can influence change. This is largely due to the lack of any such feature on my own site (or anything I'm responsible for).

From my own web analytics perspective, the chapter on analysis / optimisation was the least interesting, seemingly an afterthought at the end of the book. That said, it did provide some insight into what are considered the best metrics for measurement and the typical places to take them from.

While it may be obvious to others, if I could take one thing from the book it would be to identify your social objects and give them a URL.

A good book, one worthwhile reading - and although the £30 RRP is a little meaty, I can see that you can get it for a lot less, so if you can't borrow the book then you can buy Designing for the Social Web (Voices That Matter) from Amazon.

Comments about pretty-much anything welcome...