11. Wikis Second Life long tail search tagging World of warcraft Search engine optimization Web 2.0 AJAX Real time collaboration wisdom of crowds YouTube MySpace
35. Popularity metrics Metric Goal Favoriting Remember stuff Show others what you like Tagging Remember stuff Commenting Interact with others Digging Decide what goes to front page Viewing Watch it Embedding Share on your blog Emailing Share with your friends
There is something really interesting going on with social software today. Essentially, there has been a marriage of information finding and community. You start with a utility for sharing files in a particular manner. Or it could be a way of telling stories. You create a free, social space in which people can use that utlitity and share along with the others. You provide incentives so that people are motivated not just to contribute, but also to organize that information. That organization becomes your navigation. Lets digress for a moment and talk about second generation social networks. Lets think back to the first generation of social networks, many of which are still around and thriving. In a manner of speaking, they were simply about putting your address books online. About a way of remaining connected with people you cared about.
GENESIS OF THE IDEA Why sharing. The idea came to us at a conference. Its hard to share ppts. Right now, its easier to share video than it is to share ppt. Which is weird if you think about it. Office documents have been around for a long time. And sharing them is still a problem. Google has made search trivial, but when it comes to sharing between people, we are still sending each other huge pdf's, ppts and crowing inboxes. There have been a lot of disucssions about editing documents online and collaborative editing. Now, thats important. But I think the most important problem is of sharing a document. Why do I need to send you a document and crowd your inbox. Why can't I send you a url. If I update the document, next time I grab it, you get the new version. There have been a lot of critiques of POwerpoint - a cognitive, tufytesque analysis. I think there is another problem. The problem about loss of context. So many times, you see this discomfort with people just seeing the POwerpoint slides from your presentation because they get dissacoaited from the context. How can you keep some context attached, so its not just a file floating into the nether. The social nature of the experience needs to be retained. Who said what in the context of the slides. Describe the public alpha: the obviousness of the idea IMPLE SHARING WEBSITE Why is SlideShare a social system and not a utility If you look at the heart of the system, SlideShare is a way of putting a powerpoint file online. Just the way that YouTube is a way of putting a video online. It did not need to be thought of as a social system. In fact, lets imagine a system where YouTube has this easy way of getting you to put your video online and they decided to launch it as a video hosting service. Everyone had their space on YouTube, you could buy different levels of hosting. Your information remained private in its own space. And if you wanted to, you could put a wrapper around it and host the video online. Now you could do this, but it have nowhere near the type of impact that YouTube has. It would not have the type of Network effects that a social site. Now the idea of public sharing, its not necessarily obvious to everyone. We learnt this the hard way right from Day One.
WHAT DO PEOPLE SHARE Its about sermons (one of the first groups that discovered us) Its for teaching (of course, whole classes use SlideShare, soemtimes using one login) Professors put their lecture online Poeple put pictures online, but in a diff manner than with Flickr. On SlideShare they create PhotoEssays Or a linear narrative Or share recipes
Slides as microcontent A little while ago, I had posted some slides as html on my site (this was before Slideshare). One of the interesting learnings was that one slide received most of the traffic to the site. People linked to it on blogs and grabbed the image to remix and reuse in their own presentations. I basically wrote the html for this presentation. We explicitly built While building Slideshare we wanted that each slide should have a its own home. You should be able to link and comment about an individual slide. The notes and text of that slideshow are also shown on the slide. This made the slideshow more technically challenging than it would have been otherwise. I think this is a good thing to have but it goes beyond just being able to link to an individual slide. As some of the early users of Slideshare have noticed, making single slides accessible brings with it a promise of remix, splicing, and reuse that is not possible when the slideshow is the basic unit. Of course, this leads to other design challenges. When you can comment, link to individual slides, then we also need to make that findable. There are so many more pieces of content to show you when you are using (To link to a particular slide, just add that slidenumber to the end of the url for that slideshow. Or go to that slide and grab the url from the Slide URL box. You can comment on individual slides, but its not easy to discover which slides have comments currently - we are adding an easier way to find comments soon.)