Make your app social: 10

lessons from SlideShare

Rashmi Sinha
www.slideshare.net
Presentations are hard to share
Large-scale sharing like pictures/video

Office 2.0?

2
3
on slideshare...
Users drive navigation (tags,
popularity)
Embeds, RSS, simple urls
Slides as microcontent
Mash up slides with audio

4
What people share...

Activism Humor Movie reviews Lesson plans

Cartoons Sermons Mother’s day cards Talk slides

Paintings Standalone Love Songs Images of women

lectures
5
 object-
SlideShare as an
based social network

6
Social networks as a graph
1) I am linked to ->

-> to you

--->You are linked to her ->

-> to her…

How it works
•People connect to each other
•Six degrees of separation
•“Are you my friend” awkwardness

02/09/08 7
 Object based social networks
(conversations over objects, e.g., Flickr, YouTube, SlideShare)

1) I share my pics ->

-> with you --->

-->You share your pics ->

---> with him

How it works
•People share objects | watch others
•Connections through objects
•Social info streams: emergence of popular,
interesting items

02/09/08 8
10 lessons about
social design

9
Forget the ipod!
10
Give up control
This is messy!
11
Plant seeds, let
people connect 12
emergent
social
architecture
13
1. Make system

personally useful
solve ONE problem well

Don’t count on altruism

thrive on people’s selfishness

14
online editing is
going to take a

generation
Om Malik
FOWA 07, Day One

15
2. Embed it in the social
context
Individual contributions
can be embedded, collected & mashed-up
Simple, guessable URLs for everything

Slideshows > by Events

Music > by Playlists

16
what kind of social do
you want to be?
a social space or a widget?
own a piece of the social graph?
play in the facebook playground?

17
3. Privacy is social
Sharing is often in closed
circles

18
Public Private
Indexed by Only in My My Only
Google place groups friends me
(everyone/ever
ywhere)

19
Porous boundary
between public & private
People will share for the right
returns. Set defaults to public

Privacy settings on Flickr

20
4. levels of participation

Everyone will not create!

Implicit creation by consumption
Remixing - adding value to others’ content

21
Source: Bradley Horowitz’s weblog, Elatable, Feb. 17, 2006, “Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers”
5. Enable social navigation
Help people connect
Let them feel presence of others

ways to browse: tags, popularity,

virality

22
Popularity on

SlideShare
Metric Goal
Favorite & tag Remember stuff, tell someone
you like their stuff

Comment Interact with others

View Watch it

Embed Share on your blog

Download Keep it on your desktop

Email Share with your friends

23
diff strokes for diff
folks
most viewed
most favorited & tagged

24
Wisdom of crowds
Cognitive Diversity
Independence
Decentralization
Easy Aggregation

25
 conversation
6. Get into a with

users
Answer emails personally
Monitor blogs, subscribe to RSS
Customer service as user research

26
7. The beta as the market probe
get feedback to the real thing
the risk of failure

27
social sites as complex systems
28
7. Launch first refine,

later
Avoid analysis - paralysis
Look at best practices, take a
guess
Put it out there. Respond.
Refine.

29
8. Be agile
You don’t know the right answer
Fail fast to get to the right answer
Track metrics, adjust, change

30
 Blog posts
Web analytics

Personal emails
Shadow App Feedback email

User forum
Metrics
Satisfaction

Slideshows about
SlideShare Phone conversations

31
10. Most of all, allow for
play

32
Finally
slides at
http://www.slideshare.net/group/future-of-web-applicat

find me at
http://www.slideshare.net/rashmi

33