Technology Cheerleader
I was thinking about user-participation and community as it pertains to Web 2.0 and wondering how exactly we are to go about getting our users to adopt the tools that we provide. With the myriad of choices available, how do we convince users that it is our community that they should hang out in? Our tools they should use? I think that with the extremely distributed nature of community on the Web today, this is not only a frustrating question for community builders, but for users as well.
As a user myself, I have accounts with photo storage communities, bookmarking sites, online calendars, an Ajax start page, and I subscribe to 41 feeds in my Bloglines account. I have diligently cataloged all of my personally owned books on LibraryThing, created a profile on LinkedIn, made my titillating list of life goals on 43 Things, added 83 movies to my Netflix queue, and made wish lists on Kaboodle. But when I try and share much of my resulting data, I find that many of my friends and family don’t belong to the same communities that I do, and honestly could just care less.
I have a “family only” set of images on Flickr, the link to which I sent my mother with explicit instructions as to how to join. A week later I received an email telling me she had signed up with a link to her vacation photos that she had put up on Yahoo!Photos. This was all reminiscent of the Kodak Gallery debacle last year.
I would love to set up a “for:” tag in delicious for everyone I know and send them fyi bookmarks to their accounts, but only one person I know uses it, and he doesn’t check his inbox. I’d enjoy teaming up with friends and people I know on 43 Things to cheer each other on to reach goals, but again, don’t know anyone that uses it. Sharing my Netflix queue with friends would be cool, if I knew anyone with an account. I joined Friendster a year ago, didn’t know anyone there, felt like a loser, and left, too embarrassed to return. My Wayfaring map of the garment district in NYC goes unseen by any of my acquaintances, as does my personal Movie Database, and my birthday Kaboodle went unheeded this year.
If I can’t, as a fellow user, get the people that I know to use the tools that I think are effective, what are communities to do? Do we need to be technology cheerleaders in order to get people to try out the tools that we provide and then continue to cheer them on so that they actually use them?
I have just created an Intranet for my entire family on Jotspot and am really putting my foot down about making everyone join. It’s too bad we can’t strong arm our users in this way. I’m finding that everyone is very excited, and relieved to have everything all in one place; a blog, shared calendar, polls, profiles, recipe wiki, etc. And further they are excited that they didn’t have to create it, nor will they have to maintain or groom the space. So is part of the answer that we also need to make life as easy as possible on users as an incentive to participate? I’d love to hear other ideas people have for focusing users’ attention.
Could it be that your friends and relatives don’t use these tools because the tools aren’t built to appeal to people like them?
Many of these tools seem to require a fair amount of work and effort. Geeky early adopters are willing to tolerate that pain, but I’m not sure the mainstream is. There has to be immediately, obvious, and overwhelming benefit for mainstream users to bother with these tools.
Josh Kopelman has a nice post on this point recently called “53,651″.
http://redeye.firstround.com/2006/05/53651.html
Comment by Greg Linden — May 18, 2006 @ 3:39 pm
I agree with Greg and would add that the mainstream might simply be intimidated by the unknown. In the movie “What the bleep do we know?” there was a part about Native Americans not being able to see Columbus’ ships on the horizon because they had no vocabulary or previous experience with which to even register such a phenomenon. As Josh notes in the 53,651 post - most people haven’t had any contact with these Web 2.0 ideas. Here in the academic library where I work, we’re still trying to pitch the internet to some of our professors; we’ve offered online course reserves for years but every semester without fail, many professors still bring us paper materials to put on reserves. Is this the technology bell curve? Will the good folks at the slow end hold back the rest of us?
Comment by Sara — May 18, 2006 @ 5:05 pm
Both comments have really hit the nail on the head. I’m involved in the developing of a UK eco site. We’ve been trying to get friends and family involved in populating it thinking they would find it easy…. but it’s not as natural to them as it is to us - they don’t use computers day in day out and other web 2.0 tools, so they are lost. It’s been interesting to see how they are responding to it though.
Comment by Jane — May 23, 2006 @ 10:33 am
look for new friend not the old one
Comment by ginger — May 30, 2006 @ 10:51 am
School librarians are familiar with your problem. We always deal with one teacher at a time. It’s very slow, but you can’t deal with the whole staff/family at once.
Comment by Kathy Kawasaki — June 1, 2006 @ 9:55 pm
This is one aspect of the problem we are trying to solve at SuprGlu. You can get all your stuff together under one roof to share with anyone. Web 2.0 aware or not, they just simply follow one link and they can see what you’re sharing/reading/writing. We presented this back in the Dec. NY Tech Meetup, and we hope it’ll be a good first step for everyone to adopt the openness of the latest web services.
Comment by DW — June 9, 2006 @ 3:47 am
Web 2.0 的服務對象
在看到 Dr. Wendy Schultz 於 OCLC NextSpace 電子報 所講的 “Library 4.0 將不會取代 Libraries 1.0 至 3.0” 這段話之後，讓我對目前 Library 2.0 或 web 2.0 的推廣有一個想法，那就是 Web 2.0 技術是用來…
Trackback by Library Views 圖書館觀點 — July 11, 2006 @ 1:40 pm
I think that people have to need to use the technology to do so, and they need the time to participate. Your comments point to Social Infomatics, but this only helps inform us. Different communites serve different aspects of our being…as Ginger noted look for the new friend.
Comment by Grace — August 4, 2006 @ 10:52 pm