Social Software and Simplicity

"Maybe a partial explanation is that having a simple shared mental model makes network effects much more powerful. When we think about social software as a user, we don’t just think about the software, we also think about the network of other users, and it’s important to be confident that we have a shared understanding with those other users. If we’re not confident of that shared understanding, we won’t connect, and the value of the software will diminish."

I really agree with this, and I think it's also true from a design perspective. A few of the people who've tried my social microblogging site (mostly people who'd come over from Tumblr, which I find to be pretty anti-social), testing it in isolation without adding any friends, have complained about the lack of control over the design -- you can change the color scheme, but not your style sheet or layout. Meanwhile, users taking advantage of the social features have noted how nice it feels to know that the friends with which you're interacting are all immersed in the same basic interface: through the awareness of shared experience, network effects end up multiplying the value of the design, and the interaction becomes that much more satisfying. So far, I've found it to be well worth the sacrifice in customizability.

When Twitter launched a lot of the early commentary was about how that style of application had already been done and done better, where better meant more features. Upoch had groups. Dodgeball had a mini language for describing what you were doing. But neither of those applications had the one feature that mattered: people.

So, I think the author has it right when he says that simplicity makes it easier to get at the network effects. In many cases the value of the network effects dwarf any other feature you could imagine. However, that doesn't mean that social software can't be complicated. MySpace is complicated. Facebook only seems simple because it's compared to MySpace.