Rules of the 2.oad

Over the last few years there have been several rule sets written for Web 2.0, rules for social media, and rules for social networking.  Rules, rules, rules.  Yet, new web sites repeatedly make mistakes that are entirely borne of not paying attention to these rule sets.

It took me only about an hour this morning to overpopulate my del.icio.us archives with rules.  Dozens of them.

I started thinking about this today, after Ben Newman left a comment on my Evil Spock post.  Ben was responding to Andrey Golub's comment before his.  Andrey was making the case that Spock was pure web 2.0 and a search engine and therefore was exempt from the moral implications of data misuse.  (Which frankly shocked me so much, I never commented back.)

Ben said it better than I would have:

The problem isn't that 2.0 is evil, the problem is that the Spock platform seems to ignore one of the most critical aspects of any online community — the ability to know where information comes from.

When we look back over the various rules of [web2socialmedianetworking], we find several rules in agreement with Ben's interpretation.

The problem is there are about 100 rules now, splashed across the Internet.  If only to get a handle on them myself, I thought I'd make a distilled list of rules.

Here's the big huge map of ones by Jimmy Wales, Dion Hinchcliffe, David Chartier, Visionary Marketing and the 5-turned-17 started by Influential Marketing.  You'll have to click on this puppy to read it.

All together, these seem more like the Tax Code of Social Media than they do a set of design tenets.

Let's try to get them down to some good ol' Moses-style pithy.  You'd need an airlift to get these tablets of them mountain.

So here they are.  It's the web, feel free to turn these into 8 million rules again. :-)

I folded all of the previous ones into these families and gave them some categories.  But, just like there's apparently a lot of gray area around commandments like "Thou Shalt Not Kill", there are elements of these commandments as well.

So, the elements are:

Be Useful

Web 2 and social media applications need to build extensible, self-organizing tools.  Developers need to give the users the freedom to use the basic application.  Also APIs and feeds are standard practice for all sites, all pages and all searches.  In the end, listening to user needs and quickly responding to them in text or in action is vital.

Be Open

Users need to feel a connection with Web 2 and social media sites.  A lot of this is through "Being Real" - your site needs a personality of its own and personalities behind it.  I know that my personal use of sites like Platial and Yelp were greatly enhanced by their community advocates.  The cohort of friendliness is honesty.  Every list talked about transparency in one form or another.  Users need to feel that you are dealing straight with them.

Be Nice

Nice people are by nature respectful and ethical.  The Nice elements fall into ranges between the two.  You want to reward people for everything you can think of, you want to treat them well (talk nicely, don't forget them) and you want to give them gifts in the form of good services.  You want to share anything you have with them and always be respectful of their content and their identity.

Be Community

You are the creator of this microworld.  You need to participate, you need to facilitate.  You have to show up for your own party.  Communities grow, so you need to nourish them.  Don't let them grow too quickly, seed conversations and participate to keep them flowing, encourage real collaboration, reward good deeds, and allow users to edit nearly everything.  Help your content travel throughout the Internet, let ideas go and let them flow.

Here's the whole re-orged mind map.

To see the full run downs of all these line items, here's the source:

1. Rohit's original post that launched several more: he started with 5 rules that spread to 17.  This post has links to the other additions.

2. Visionary Marketing's 15 Golden Rules for Web 2.0.

3.Jimmy Wales' list on CNN

4. Dion Hinchcliffe's technically-oriented very detailed list.

5. David Chartier's rules - from Dec 2006!  Look, longevity on the internet!

Technorati Tags: Dion Hinchliffe, David chartier, Jimmy wales, visionary marketing, social media, social networking, Rohit Bhargava, Ben Newman, rules, edicts, mandates, commandments, golden rules, online communities, community indicators

Photo by Karuvelil Thomas.

Comments

[Kathy Jacobs]

I like your rules. But I find one missing: Provide training.
Users of the site need to be willing to be educated about what is proper and improper use of the site, and the company generating the site need to be willing to provide that training in a way that doesn't get in the visitor's way.

In the case of Spock, I don't think any of us who use it and encourage its use recommend it be used in a way that breaks any of the rules you state above. I think the difference comes in what people do when they are on the site. If they send out trust messages without really knowing the people being contacted, is that really any different than someone in FaceBook sending a friend request without really knowing the person to whom it is being sent?

As a social networker, it is my job to ensure that I only accept contacts from people I actually know or from people that are recommended by people I know. That is no different on Spock than on any other network.

Just because the political bots are following me on Twitter doesn't mean I have to follow them or that I am going to recommend them to anyone on my network :)

[Jim Benson]

But, Kathy, that wasn't Ben's point.

Ben's point was that Spock was breaking the rule of respect for the integrity of information. Spock is publishing information before it has been vetted and presenting it as reliable.

[Ben]

Since I've been invoked, I may as well clarify my own thinking. I posted a second, more in-depth comment to Jim's earlier post, which I'll summarize and expand upon here:

The Web contains three kinds of information about people: (1.) information associated with a person's name by that person (e.g. a profile page on a social networking site), (2.) information associated with a person's name by other people (e.g. a Wikipedia article), and (3.) information associated with a person's name by a machine (e.g. search engine results).

Of course, information of the third kind is almost always one of the other kinds repackaged in response to a query.

A key component of Web literacy is knowing which kind of information is which, and what to expect of each kind. This isn't incidental — many types of information are problematic or impossible to interpret in the absence of this kind of context.

Almost all of the web is built such that I know the status of the information on a site before I see the information itself. This affects the amount of time I'll spend reading, how much I'll trust what I read, and what I can read "between the lines" (what is implied by the fact of the information's being there). The act of reading, in other words, is structured by this meta-information. A site that lacks it will usually be bewildering if not downright misleading.

Spock has several features which seem to violate this:

The ability of people in the community to vote on the validity of tags associated with a given profile seems to mix information of the first and second kind, but this is actually well-understood: Many sites have features where information is provided by one person and then tagged according to its quality by other people. When Web users see this sort of thing, they know what to expect.

More pernicious is the confusion between information of the first and third kinds. There's every difference in the world between a search engine and a social networking site. Users visit them for different reasons and have different expectations about the information they will find.

In particular, users expect that a page which appears to be, or is identified as, someone's profile on a social networking site was created by that person and contains information of their choosing. This is what it means to say, for example, that someone "already has a profile", so when Spock invites you to email people you know who "already have profiles", where those profiles are just search engine results, this is at best unclear and at worst deliberately misleading. I'm pretty sure that this is what most of the complaints have been about.