SocialStartups.com

Just saw this via Read/WriteWeb . The topic was the latest Windows Live announcement, as if this one will better explain it than the previous ones. While reading the article, I came across the following two slides, which would make Mr. Tufte vomit:

One would hope that the creators of PowerPoint would have a clue as to what a well-designed slide would look like. Instead, they have way too much text, glaring colors, differing font sizes that do not correlate to importance, and enough bullet points to make your head hurt.

Communicating your thoughts clearly really shouldn’t be this hard.

First, read this.

The Opaque Value Problem (or, Why do people use Twitter?)

Thanks. This is important, and most people over the age of 25 don’t understand this. (Uh oh, I’m not bringing up the age question again, am I?)

Let’s start from a simple statement.

How compelling you find content is directly proportional to how relevant it is to you. The more relevant to you, the more you care.

OK, how about one more simple statment.

The people in your social network are relevant to you compared to those who are outside your social network. For more on that, read this.

Let’s mash the last two statements together.

Given that your social network is relevant to you, content generated from your social network is going to be compelling to you. The more content generated from your social network you get, the better.

It’s going to be boring nonsense to everyone else. So what.

Sites need to realize that if they want customers to visit at least once a day, there needs to be a lot of content available for consumption generated from their social network. This is what Facebook does. This is what Twitter does.

How well does your site integrate with my life?

I’m noticing some concern from bloggers about Facebook’s platform as a strategy to lock in companies. (I’d post more links if Google reader would just let me search my feeds. Ironic, isn’t it.) On the surface, that would seem to be true.

But wait – there is a way out. Bonus – it works with any social network that lets you programmatically get a user’s friend list, like Facebook does.

The way out requires 3 steps.

1. Build a compelling application that gets even more compelling if the user registers with your web site. (Really, this should always be step 1, no matter what you are trying to do.)

2. When the user registers, record their social network user ID.

3. See if any of that user’s friends have already installed your application. If so, invite them to connect on your site.

The linchpin is, of course, nailing step 1. Once you’ve got that one down, make your #1 metric application adoption. The more adoption of your application, the more times you can ask your users to connect with their friends.

Message them with something like this: “We’ve just discovered that your friend Joe is a Foo.com customer/user/member. We know this because you are friends with Joe on Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn. Would you like to connect with Joe?”

Now you’re on your way to building a modified copy of that user’s social network on your site – modified in that the connections she chooses to create are relevant to her experience on your site. Plus, it works for any site, not just Facebook, so the more sites that offer what Facebook offers, the better off you are.