Slides:

Xianhang Zhang: Lessons from Social Software: From Facebook to Face to Face Design Guild

Audio:

Related posts:

1. Faceted Identities Presentation at Internet Identities Workshop X
2. Mozilla Presentation on Space & Narrative: Designing for Social Interaction

The Brief:

Designers learn best by working with other designers. However, modern team sizes mean that virtually all startups can only afford to hire a single designer and an entire generation of designers is emerging that has never had that experience. I wanted to create an organization that would increase the proficiency and productivity of designers by providing them with a chance to do the kind of collaborative design work one might find in a studio based environment.

The Problem:

From the start, I wanted the Product Design Guild to be an organization that great designers would want to participate in. Great designers, by their very nature, are busy people so, as well intentioned as they may be, lower priority commitments inevitably get bumped. I thought that the only reliable way to convince busy people to come was if coming would save them time over not coming. That is, spending an hour designing at the Product Design Guild would be more productive than spending an hour designing alone.

The Solution:

The Product Design Guild holds meetings once every two weeks in the Bay Area and once every month in New York. Each meeting lasts for 6 hours on a weekend with lunch and space provided by a different sponsor every week. Each meeting starts with introductions consisting of:

• Your name
• Your project
• What you’re really good at
• What you need help with

After the introductions and lunch, meetings are left deliberately unstructured and members self-organize in order to work most effectively.

Membership to the Product Design Guild is open to experienced designers only and I personally vet every single application for the Bay Area. During the meetings, we have three rules:

• You need to bring work
• Be intensely helpful
• People are trusting you, don’t be a dick

From the beginning, the Product Design Guild was deliberately structured to set itself apart from other meetups in a number of distinctive ways, all towards the aim of being a more productive space than solo design:

• Effective design collaboration requires understanding and trust. By pre-vetting our members, any designer can start working with any other designer and know that their suggestions come from a place of expertise and experience. This allows for groups to form and disband fluidly and rapidly.
• Our rules set up an expectation of helpfulness and productivity that affects the conversational tone. Because one of the shared requirements is that everyone has to bring work, conversations are started around the project.
• Each meeting is 6 hours long which allows for designers to fully explore the depth and nuance of a design problem. The timeframe naturally affords in depth exploration.
• Setting each meeting at a different company allows designers to be exposed to multiple design cultures.
• During each meeting, I am constantly figuring out who should meet who, trying to maximize the utility of having lots of smart designers being in the same room as you.

These deliberate design decisions have resulted in the steady, high quality growth of Guild membership and transformative experiences for those who attend.

My contribution:

• I founded the Product Design Guild
• I run the meetings for the San Francisco Chapter, including finding sponsors for every meeting
• I am responsible for all marketing & promotion.
• I lead the creation of the South Bay and New York chapters by finding appropriate local leaders, mentoring & communicating the values of the guild and providing assistance and guidance
• I vet all memberships for the Bay Area
• I moderate the private Facebook Group

More reading:

• Product Design Guild Homepage
• Essay: Designing a Design Guild
• Talk: BayCHI – Social Software: Creating a Design Guild

No related posts.

Apture was a contextual search startup (now acquired by Google) that allowed users to gain in page, rich media search results through text highlighting. At the time, Apture was just about to release Apture Hotspots and was seeking new strategic directions for its product. I was brought on to provide strategic thinking about potential new avenues for Apture to explore.

The Problem:

Although Apture had great reach, it had to strike a delicate balance between providing utility when needed while also not being annoying when not needed. This tension meant that the designed interaction was so unobtrusive that engagement was low. Apture Hotspots was one new way of bringing the Apture experience to a broader range of people. What were some other ways to balance these two competing needs?

One of the ideas that I explored was in how best to surface ambient behavioral information from people that you cared about. For example, if you were reading about Cleopatra, would it be useful to know a friend had also been researching Cleopatra a few months ago? When & how would this be useful? What would the privacy norms around this be and what would be the best way to present this to the user?

The Solution:

In order to gain insight into these questions, I built Ambient-Wiki, a prototype to be used by internal Apture employees only. Ambient Wiki used a browser plugin to log every Wikipedia page that any Apture employee visited and broadcast this only a shared, ambient display in the office. Simple annotation features were also provided and annotated entries would make an entry extremely prominent on the display.

It was decided that Wikipedia entries were innocuous enough that privacy was not a major concern but interesting enough that they provided an insight into co-workers curiosity.

Findings:

Over the 4 week period that AmbientWiki was running, we discovered that the threshold required to start a conversation was relatively high. However, people did enjoy the voyeuristic element and paid attention to what others were searching. AmbientWiki primarily sparked conversations when you saw someone else searching for something that you have knowledge of (rather than the other way around as we had thought). Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to integrate these findings into any solid product direction.

My Contribution:

• I conducted several user studies on Apture’s existing product
• I created animated interaction mockups of new interactions for new bottom bar and close window behaviors
• I coded the AmbientWiki internal app, including a Chrome Extension, a Ruby on Rails backend and a HTML+CSS+JS frontend.

No related posts.

The Brief:

Modern smartphones are capable of replacing a myriad of single purpose hardware devices, including the remote control. To date, most smartphone remote apps presented a rather literal translation of a remote control interface onto a screen. At Peel, we instead believed that this was an opportunity to fundamentally rethink what a remote could be and to fully exploit the power of an internet connected smartphone. In particular, a smartphone remote could serve as a gateway into a shared social television experience.

The Problem:

Existing social television products were largely uncreative concepts and I didn’t believe they captured the true power of a compelling social experience. I was tasked with figuring out what social experiences peel should build to serve as a key differentiator in the remote control marketplace.

The Solution:

I designed several potential social experiences for Peel:

Peel Overlay: Peel Overlay is like a mobile Quora for television. It allows real time, question asking and polling of other users watching the same show and also integrates with data sources like imdb and Wikipedia to allow it to automatically answer questions like “What other shows have I seen this actor in before?”.

Peel Groups:

Different people will watch the same show for different purposes. Peel Groups allows people with a similar purpose to find each other, organize and engage in a shared experience around a show. Sports fans can use groups to bet on whether their team will score this field goal, jeopardy watchers can compete to see who can answer correctly the fastest, watchers of cheesy sci-fi can make fun of the same show together. Groups allows television watchers to convert from a solitary experience into a shared social experience.

Peel Recommends:

Peel Recommends provides an elegant and lightweight way of notifying friends about a show they should be watching right now. It optimizes the sharing process by remembering who you’re most likely to share with and what mode of sharing they prefer and reduces the friction of sharing a recommendation down to just 2 clicks.

Related posts:

1. Fashionista

In early January, I left my previous job to work on an idea that's been a burning passion of mine for quite sometime. The premise behind it is pretty simple:

1. Our social relationships are some of the most important assets that we own
2. We are horrendously inefficient at leveraging those assets

To point number 1, in the past week, I've helped someone navigate which neighbourhoods in Seattle to rent a house, helped a friend spec out a new machine for work, offered to introduce a bright young kid to a potential mentor, referred 3 separate marketing/PR to a promising startup, cooked brunch with 4 close friends, offered to cook dinner for a friend in town from the East Coast and spent 2 hours talking over the social experience design problems with the lead designer of one of the top 10 websites in the world. In return, this week has been of commensurate value with all of the offers of help that have been extended to me by my friends. My friends are like a secret superpower, they make me 10X more awesome.

To point number 2, while these points of contacts were enormously valuable, they were also largely arbitrary. They only really occurred during the points in time when two of us were physically co-located and were able to have genuine, productive conversation. What about the friends who, by whatever circumstance, I only get to see once every 3 months or less? When we do get together, our conversations are so valuable and productive I wish I could continue them once we part ways but it's always so frustratingly difficult to do so that those conversations eventually whimper and die. The web has the potential to turn our 10X superpower into a 100X superpower but the tool to do so is not there yet.This is not a new or original idea. I first had it almost two years ago when I found myself spending close to $3000 to travel to a conference just to be able to have those genuine, productive conversations. But it was only until recently that I finally had the assets to truly feel confident executing on this vision.

• Asset #1: I've been thinking about the field of Social Experience Design for close to five years now. I'm pretty confident in saying there are, at most, a dozen people who have the depth of thinking at this point in being able to marry all the diverse disciplines of knowledge required to think through this issue (Social Interaction Design: Where are the most interesting uncharted waters in social software design? is a reasonably comprehensive list of everything I've been thinking about)
• Asset #2: My go-to-market strategy is, I think, incredibly strong and relies on deploying assets I've carefully been cultivating for a while, chief among them is Product Design Guild. There aren't many companies who are able to meet with their customers for 6 solid hours once every two weeks like clockwork and I'm enormously excited about this as a potential asset.
• Asset #3: The Product Design Guild has been an amazing testbed for many of my hypotheses and large parts of the product have been dramatically warped due to my experiences there. This is the ultimate lean startup, we built a following before we built a product.
• Asset #4: I spent the formative years thinking about this in Seattle, outside of the Silicon Valley bubble and I think my unconventional thinking on this issue gives this a secret edge. While other people were going gaga over photo sharing and coupons, I was hanging out with academics and salesmen, watching how they navigate their social relationships.
• Asset #5: My extraordinarily amazing CS educators who gave me an abiding love and appreciation of technology. I asked my friend Sutha Kamal to give me his notoriously tough engineering pre-screen test for Massive Health which rejects 20 candidates for every one it admits and I was, rather depressingly, able to pass it without too much undue effort. My first programming language was Haskell, I've built computer vision systems before, I can still rattle off the performance characteristics of close to two dozen algorithms and yell at you if you aren't using tries when you need to do fast string retrieval. I don't have the operational experience to be and engineer anymore but one thing that's clear is that, while this will be first and foremost a product company, deep in it's bones, it will also always be a technology company.

Which brings me to the one asset I don't have right now, an amazing technical co-founder. Let me be clear, this is not just a big vision, it's an enormous one. While the people I've been meeting in the past few weeks have been great, it's not yet been love at first sight because my standards for this are ridiculously high.

The person I am looking for is:

• Obsessed over product. If you can't name me four products that frustrated you with their inadequate design that day, then you're not the right person, even if we're meeting at 9AM.
• Passionate about doing something meaningful. If the choice is between working on this or being the CTO of Zynga and this is a hard choice, you're not the right person.
• Excited by grand visions. We might try and fail and only achieve something great instead of something world changing but at least we fucking tried.
• Gets shit DONE. nuff said.
• Has the operational experience to solve the hard technical problems necessary to achieve truly great product vision. There are some startups that can be made purely with pluggable, off-the-shelf components. This is not one of them. While the MVP is currently deceptively simple, there's some deep technological challenges that need to be solved that are fundamental to this space.

If this sounds like you, email me at hang@bumblebeelabs.com and tell me a little bit about yourself. If this doesn't sound like you but it sounds like someone you know, introduce me and I'm willing to offer 2% equity as a referral bonus if that person becomes my co-founder. Human assets are important and they deserve to be rewarded as such.

edit: If you're neither of these people but you're intrigued and would like to know more, you can add in your email here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/…

Let's fucking do this thing!

Post on Quora

Related posts:

1. The Long Stick Startup
2. Announcing: The Product Design Guild
3. Disregard ideas, acquire assets

There's a ton of brilliant 22 year old kids these days all churning through the same bucket of rather trivial ideas for web startups. Games! Group Messaging! Coupons! The reason why is that when you're 22 and just out of school, there's only a limited scope of ideas that it's actually practical for you to execute on. What I've found though, is that the most exciting startup ideas are mostly not in this pool but are, instead, backed by a hidden asset.

When I talk about assets, cash is the least interesting of all of these. Instead, I'm talking about more intangible assets like skills, reputation, relationships, attention & fame. I'm of the strong opinion that the most reliable path towards startup success is to focus relentlessly on acquiring interesting assets and then execute on the startups that naturally fall out of them.

Stack Overflow is the perfect example of this. The software that runs Stack Overflow is actually relatively trivial and really could have been built by anyone at anytime. What made Stack Overflow possible were two hidden assets:

1. Without an initial community of high quality users, Stack Overflow would have died. Joel Spolsky & Jeff Atwood ran, at the time, two of the most popular programming blogs in the world and were able to generate sufficient interest and attention to get SO over the initial cold start hump
2. Without great software design SO would not have been able to retain users at the rate they did. Joel Spolsky & Jeff Atwood had both been thinking very deeply about the structure and organization of social software for a very long time and avoided a number of obvious mistakes in the fundamental foundations of the software. Here's a blog post from Joel in 2003, thinking about these issues: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ar… and the Stack Overflow podcasts are a secret mine of excellent social experience design insight: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/ca…

Neither Joel or Jeff had any grand, overarching vision of starting Stack Overflow when they started blogging for the first time. Instead, they just diligently worked to each build this amazing asset. But by building this asset, they opened up a thousand new, good startup ideas that were unavailable to most other people in the world and all they needed to do was to pick the one most appealing to them and execute on it.

I talk to a lot of different early stage startups these days and, inevitably, the ones I'm most excited about are those with a hidden asset backing them. Joe Edelman who built one of the most sophisticated reputation systems in the world at Couchsurfing is now deploying that asset towards Groundcrew. Gabe Smedresman who ran real world social games at Yale is now deploying that asset towards Gatsby. Yishan Wong who is one of the one of the world experts at startup engineering management is now deploying that asset towards Sunfire Offices. Sutha Kamal who is one of the most relentless business development minds I've seen at work is now deploying that asset towards Massive Health.

Inevitably, the story was that these entrepreneurs focused on acquiring assets and they reached a point where they couldn't not do a startup with them. It became like walking through a field of low hanging fruit and wondering which ones they should pick.

I think the conventional startup narrative is mistaken in that it casts the world into those who are temperamentally suited towards only doing startups and everyone else in the world who can be regarded as a brighter species of sheep. Instead, practically every one of the entrepreneurs in that list has spent significant time being an employee, quietly building up assets that would later become valuable. Many of them were even reluctant to become entrepreneurs.

What I take away from this is that I would like for a new startup narrative to emerge. One that focuses on the less sexy aspects of building a startup which is the 10 years before you write the first piece of code. I'd like for people to start thinking of startups as less something you decide to do and more an opportunity that gets handed to you. I'd like for people to focus first on making real contributions to the world before feeling like the world owes them a startup success. It's things like this that are the key towards shifting the ecosystem into a more mature startup culture and most optimally deploy the scarce human capital that we have.

Disregard ideas, acquire assets.

Post on Quora

Related posts:

1. Announcing my new startup
2. What is Bumblebee Labs?
3. Introducing myself…

To demonstraJaco, over at the guestlist blog, has an excellent time lapse video of the design of the guestlist front page which, IMO, convincing demonstrates how visual design encompasses so much more than making things look pretty:

Timelapse of Homepage Design from Jaco Joubert on Vimeo.

Related posts:

1. Google’s lead visual designer quit due to a clash of cultures
2. How should designers best take advantage of the current design shortage?
3. Announcing: The Product Design Guild

Yesterday marked the second Product Design Guild meeting and it’s becoming clear that we’ve managed to hit upon something special with these events. Fortunately, I took some video at this event so I can let the attendees speak for themselves:

For those of you who are not familiar, the Product Design Guild is about having designers come together and bring real work so that they can help each other. At our last two events, we had roughly 30 attendees each time, mostly from small, exciting startups but also the occasional big company like Yahoo & Autodesk. They bring anything from glass bottles for Fijian Rum that they’re working on as a side project to tools to help better manage digital assets within a team to the latest beta version of their new front page. Projects range in maturity from whiteboard sketches to functioning code that gets modified live during the event. We hold an introduction at the start of each event where every person stands up and gives a short spiel about what they brought and I’m always struck each time by the breadth and diversity of projects present in the guild.

After reflecting on this for the better part of a day, I think I’ve managed to uncover just what it is that makes this group “magic”. The world of the technology founder has undergone radical innovation in the last couple of years. Y Combinator, the rise of co-working spaces, hackathons and convertible notes have all radical changed what it means to found & run a company. Meanwhile, the process for workers has remained largely the same. Even at exciting new startups, while the tools might be slightly different, the basic way that work is done hasn’t really changed. The reason why the Product Design Guild feels so fresh & news is that it’s trying to do for employees, what Y Combinator has done for entrepreneurs. It’s changing the bargain of work into a new form which is more radically open, collaborative & cooperative.

The first rule of the Product Design Guild is that you have to bring work. It can be a side project or something you do for fun but we would prefer for it to be your everyday work. We want you to shut off your laptop at your office on Friday at 5pm and then bring that work over to the Guild on Saturday at noon and resume right on working. Already, this is quite a radical concept. For most companies, work never leaks out beyond the walls of the building, at least not without a thicket of contracts and regulations. Sure, you get to see the company website or iPhone app or hardware device. But you never get to see the half finished PSDs, the initial sketches and doodles, the bits of barely working code that has yet to be skinned. To be able to sit down and work with someone who you’ve just met is what I think causes the spark you hear in people’s voices as they describe the guild.

Of course, revolutionizing work is not easy. If it were easy, it would have been done a long time ago. Right now, we’ve captured the magic but the main challenges still lie ahead, in trying to keep that magical spark alive. To do that, I think we need to focus on five key elements we’ve managed to nail:

• The quality of the people: One of the themes that was repeated in the video was how just being around smart and talented designers made this event special. From the start, we were determined to keep quality high and for to only get higher over time. This means not only lots of time spent on the back end, filtering for candidates who met our standards, but also time on the front end, personally selling the guild so that high quality candidates actually applied. This relentless focus on quality is something we’re committed to keeping to over time.
• An attitude of helpfulness: While I expected quality to be an important factor, it surprised me how much the attitude of intense helpfulness that we’ve managed to develop in the Guild has, in many ways, been even more important. You go to a typical networking event or mixer and everyone you talk to is only half paying attention to you while trying to figure out who else in the room they should be connecting with. You might exchange pleasantries or generalities but it’s mostly surface level conversation. After experiencing that, there’s really something indescribably about coming to the Guilt and having another person giving you their full attention. Your problem suddenly becomes the most important thing in their lives. Such an attitude is infectious. At both of the events we’ve held, it was clear that everyone in the room was more concerned about giving help than taking it. Thus far, it’s been a happy accident but, moving forward, it’s also something we’re going to be taking very seriously.
• Supporting confidentiality: Part of the reason why it’s so satisfying to participate in the Guild is because you feel like your help has impact. People there are working on real products that affect real users and you can help make real improvements to those products. Confidentiality is a major part of making this work. This is why fully half of our rules and all of our policy is designed around respecting confidentiality to the fullest extent possible.That being said, confidentiality being violated at the guild is a matter of when, not if. Some designer will bring in early versions of a new product launch and they’ll wake up tomorrow to find the details splashed over the pages of TechCrunch. There is nothing we can ever do to eliminate these breaches in confidentiality, only to mitigate them as best we can.
• Managed serendipity: In my last Guild meeting write up, I talked a lot about the Human Expertise Routing Network and this was the meeting which saw it pop up into existence. Over and over again, during the event, I walked into a conversation and figured out that I could add value by dragging in the right person. This was so evident that people actually explicitly commented on it at the end of the day as significantly enhancing their experience. It’s this type of serendipity that really leverages the true strengths of the Guild format.
• A commitment to offering value: Our mission for the guild has been very clear from day one; we serve designers and the profession of design. While we may try and help out other interest groups like engineers, CEOs or investors, it’s never at the expense of designers. Over time, this means figuring out ways of supporting designers with creative and helpful services.

  This Guild meeting marked the beginning of our “in Residence” program. Drake Martinet from the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD because our first “Journalist in Residence” and added immense value by providing design insight from a journalistic perspective. Over the course of time, we’ll be adding other “in Residence” partners from Engineering, Investment, Marketing & HR.

  The next Guild meeting will be the beginning of our “Bring a friend usability session”, a program designed to get startups onto the usability testing bandwagon in as quick & efficient a way as possible.

  Beyond that, we have other exciting projects coming down the pike that are still too early to talk about. Part of why designers are so willing to give to us is because we’re so willing to give to them. It’s only be demonstrating this commitment to offering value that we can keep that enthusiasm alive.

It’s still very early days and so these are just a tiny fraction of the lessons yet to be learned. That being said, I think this provides a pretty robust framework that captures the essence of our experience and allows us to “bottle the magic”. Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be actively talking with people about setting up sister groups and so this serves as some useful documentation about how this will happen. Here’s to hoping for future success!

To be notified of the next Social Software Sunday piece as it’s posted, you can subscribe to the RSS feed, follow me on twitter or subscribe via email:

Related posts:

1. Social Software Sunday #5 – Designing a Design Guild
2. Announcing: The Product Design Guild
3. Social Software Sunday #4 – The “Kickstarter” social mechanism

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1. Social Software Sundays #0 – An Update

In the fashion industry, clothing can either be made bespoke, made to measure or off the rack. Bespoke clothing is custom made to the individual, fit with meticulous care, godawful expensive and, as a result, a tiny niche of the market. Made to measure clothing involves some degree of measurement but the patterns are standardized with carefully designed in room for modification. It’s still a tiny niche of the market but much more affordable. Finally, off the rack is the clothes you and I actually buy. We go into a retailer, try something on, find the best fit we can and accept that this is the price you pay for stupid cheap clothing.

Online communities can also be thought of as bespoke, made to measure or off the rack. Bespoke communities such as Quora, Reddit or Kickstarter are custom built, one at a time, for a single community for which they are designed to serve. They are distinguished by having the designers of the code also being the designers of the community.

Made to measure communities are ones which the owner of the community obtain the basic software from elsewhere but then make modifications to suit their purposes. This blog is an example of a made to measure community. It’s based of a stock wordpress installation by with many plugins & custom modifications involved. Similarly, many of the forums I’ve participated in over the years have modified their software to suit the community. Made to measure communities are distinguished by their community owners having limited control over the software environment based on what extension capabilities were built into the software.

Finally, the ready to wear communities are ones in which a completely stock version of community software is used as-is. Blogger, Skype & Facebook Groups are all examples of ready to wear software. They’re distinguished by performing all of their customization of the social experience from within the social layer since the community owners have no ability to access the technology layer.

The comparisons between online communities can be illuminating, especially in relation to how fashion houses manage the complex mix between the three categories and what implications this has for web companies trying to do the same.

A short and mostly remembered history of online communities on the web

The web was social from the very beginning. The entire point of connecting computers together was to allow for rapid communication and a simple, cobbled together version of email was one of the first programs ever written for networked computers. This early phase of the web was hand crafted, in the same way that all of early clothing was hand crafted. People largely cobbled together their own software system from the original source code and every user was also a maker.

The first waves of serious communities happened via Usenet, BBSes & MUDs; ready to wear, made to measure and bespoke respectively. These three systems provide us a view in just how these three different economic models affected the eventual social systems. Usenet was a mass market system (well, as mass market as you could get back then). It was the global commons which provided the most basic infrastructure around conversation and not much more. The endless groups had the same cheerful austerity that you find in low-income housing, where individual neighbors desperately tart up their apartments in order to hide the dreary sameness.

BBSes, on the other hand, were the wonderfully quirky community hangout spots. Each one was run by an individual, according to their own tastes and going into one was like entering into the living room of the sysop who ran it.

Finally, MUDs or Multi-User Dungeons (Think World of Warcraft, only 100% text) were more like artistic experiments, designed to push boundaries and explore radical issues related to this brave new frontier. It’s no co-incidence that many of the studies of radical issues such as gender-bending, online rape or radical libertarianism happened within the context of these game spaces as the custom built nature of them allowed them to go further and faster than most.

The next phase came from the development and subsequent domination of the web as the primary way that internet was consumed. IMHO, the web was actually a pretty big step back for social technologies as the fundamental underpinnings of HTTP do not mesh well with the needs of social systems (only now are we starting to see abstraction layers like the LiveNode system that Quora runs which rectifies a lot of these deficiencies).

Once we finally managed to figure out how to hook up dynamic, database backed websites into the a system designed for viewing static documents, we started to see the holy trifecta of online communities start to take shape: blogs, forums & chat. This was later joined by Wikis to make what were almost regarded as the platonic solids of the community space. It’s hard to remember for many people now but this was the era when “community management” was the hot buzz term and there was almost a Lord Kelvinesque attitude that “there is nothing new to discover, all that remains is more precise measurement”.

This is what I term the “social winter” that ran from approximately 2000 to 2005. With a couple of notable exceptions such as Slashdot, bespoke social software had virtually disappeared from the scene and everyone was fiddling around with some variation of blog/forum/wiki/chat, only innovating in terms of what made to measure plugins could be retrofitted into those basic paradigms.

I place the creation of Digg & Reddit as the first resurgence in interest in online communities again and some serious fresh blood coming into the field. Social news was a completely different beast from the blogforumwikichat and demonstrated convincingly that more social primitives were left to be explored. Since then, we’ve seen a number of notable bespoke communities, all exploring different facets of this space. Aardvark, Stack Overflow, Quora each represent intriguing experiments and even blogs got revitalized with Posterous and Tumblr both providing fresh spins on the concept.

I had originally planned for this to be a piece investigating how the fashion strategy of diffusion lines apply to shifting bespoke designs “downmarket” into more mass friendly designs but it ended up veering into a completely different tangent and this seems like a discussion for another day. I’m going to end this essay here and hopefully take it back up another week to provide a more conclusive conclusion. I’m tired and it’s time for bed, gnight.

Related posts:

1. Social Software Sunday #3 – All social software are inherently socio-technical systems
2. Social Software Sunday #4 – The “Kickstarter” social mechanism
3. Social Software Sundays #0 – An Update