InfoQ: Opinions: Why Most Social Software Fail and how to Avo...

It’s easy to get sucked into doing things that would make a single user’s experience better, but makes the experience of a network of users worse.

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Simplicity is another keyword of Shirky’s law. To be shared by a large number of users, the underlying user model needs indeed to be simple. According to Michael Nielsen, there are two reasons why this often isn’t the case. First of all, programmers tend to do technically impressive things whereas the most successful social software rather “starts out doing one task supremely well”. Finding such a task, however, is extremely difficult. It should be a useful, original and simple task, a task that “can’t be reduced or explained in terms of existing tasks". Discovering this task is much more of a social challenge rather than a technical one, which explains why many successful applications were created by people who do not come from a purely technical background or else invented "by accident”. Blogger, for instance, was a part of a project management system, Flickr came out of the project of an online game where players can share photos, and the first wiki was created because Ward Cunningham got “tired of responding to user’s requests to update a website he ran”.

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First of all, programmers tend to do technically impressive things whereas the most successful social software rather “starts out doing one task supremely well”.

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Discovering this task is much more of a social challenge rather than a technical one, which explains why many successful applications were created by people who do not come from a purely technical background or else invented "by accident”.

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simple mental model does not necessarily mean technically simplistic software.

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but this technical complexity should be hidden from users.

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In the real life people often have different facets that they share with different persons whereas on friend-networks such as FriendFeed, it is impossible to choose one facet of a person.

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In Michael Nielsen’s opinion, it is possible to introduce more complexity at the mental model level provided that users are already well familiar with the application and are “confident in their shared understanding”. Hence, it can only be done at later stages of the software existence, in the way Facebook did it, progressively adding complexity after it has already reached a certain weight.

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it is possible to introduce more complexity at the mental model level provided that users are already well familiar with the application and are “confident in their shared understanding”. Hence, it can only be done at later stages of the software existence, in the way Facebook did it, progressively adding complexity after it has already reached a certain weight.

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Nielsen stresses that having a simple idea that obeys Shirky’s law is necessary but not enough for building successful software. One can have a great idea but still fail to execute. Besides considering a number of purely technical and business issues, one should constantly make sure that the match between the software and the user model is maintained all along the development process in spite of probable flaws in developers’ perception of the user model. This is why Michael Nielsen asserts the importance of building early enough a base of beta users and releasing early and often.

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