Tag Archives: social

So… you want to build a social network?

Posted by Carmen on 02/04/2012 None comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2012 Spring Edition. This post is from the Fandomain team (@), formed by Carmen Bermejo.

Half of the entrepreneurs I’ve met in the last two months told me that their project consist on a social network. It reminds me of ten years ago when everybody wanted to launch a web portal.

But this is just a more dynamic way to organize and create content. If your idea is really trying to cover a necessity and not just following the trend, that’s fine.

Where is the problem? Big established social networks (and I’m not looking to anyone) has set a very bad example to follow. If you are doing this, there are a couple of things you should consider:

 

Open software: Are you sure you want to reinvent the wheel?

Ok, you have an awesome idea for a social network. Perfect. But that doesn’t mean that you have to program all from scratch. There are a lot of previous work done that you can use so you can center your efforts on the really innovative aspects of your idea.

Also if you use open software that will aloud your users to collaborate, fixing bugs or creating new features. That will also have the benefit that they’ll consider your social network something of their own and helps you to build the sense of community that it’s one of the most important things a social site needs to succeed.

Cons: If you have some very secret implementation that you don’t want anybody to copy or your end goal it’s to sell your site/software to a big company.

Examples:

  • Diaspora Software written on Ruby on Rails.
  • Elgg Software written on PHP.
  • Apache Wave (previously Google Wave). A protect Google gave away to the community after they decided to focus on Google plus. Written with GWT (Google Web Toolkit).

 

Federation/OpenID: Sharing only with yourself is not sharing.

When you say that you want to build a social network one of the main problems people thinks are: “Register on another site, no thanks.”. Well, in case you didn’t knew, Internet wasn’t suppose to work like that.

What I’m talking about? Think how email works. You have an account on a server/email provider, like for example gmail or hotmail or even your own server and you can use it to communicate with anyone that have an email account on any server on Internet, it doesn’t matter where.

But social networks can’t be like that right? That’s where popular belief it’s wrong. Not only it’s possible, there are in fact a lot of social networks and initiatives that works exactly like that.

You have an account on a social network that is in a server and is managed by someone: a company, a free software foundation, a group of friends or even you on your own server. And you can use that account to share content and communicate with anyone that is in a “compatible” social network. That usually means that it’s another social network based in the same software but in other server, but there are some protects and initiatives that aims to create protocols and standards so social networks build with different software could communicate.

So if this is possible, why doesn’t everybody does that? For big social networks, having the monopolio goes on their advantage. It doesn’t matter if what they offer it’s better than smaller social networks or not, because they have the users and if you want to communicate with them you need an account on their system. That works for them, but remember, you are not Facebook.

 

For more information about this projects:

Game mechanics: A way to improve your solution.

Posted by ACrowdOfMonsters on 26/10/2010 1 comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from the “A Crowd Of Monsters”  team,  formed by Axel MGarcia & Rafael González… among other monsters.

In this post I’m going to analyze how I think some game concepts could help to improve your solution.

Nowadays social perception of games.

Most of the people tends to  relate the verb “to play” with a childhood activity. There’s a lot of people who relates “play games” with consoles, geek people or with cases of addiction.
However games are starting to gain respect among the people due to the good job the industry is doing. Nowadays the game industry manages more money than cinema; a completely new industry related with serious games is starting to show benefits of applied games; big super productions are arriving to the living rooms impressing everyone; new platforms as Wii or Nintendo DS are offering completely new ways of gameplay, much more affordable for every one and that have engaged a big mass of public.
Despite all of this, popularity of video games stills far from movies and keeps generating doubts as a powerful tool for our solutions and as a reliable business deal.

To play definition. Why we like to play?

What’s to play? To play is a PREDISPOSITION of humans to reach a feasible GOAL, taking into account a set of RULES, that generates a CHALLENGE, and that will provide REWARD.

Playing, wining challenges and achieving new goals is in our nature. Children use games as a mechanism for learning and training. Children run, challenge their friends, try to overcome themselves every moment, and for every goal achieved they get a reward. The most curious thing is that this reward is not just a trophy you get: Achieving a goal generates a strong feeling of satisfaction. This feeling is due to a chemical substance, dopamine, that is delivered by our body as a physical reaction to reward us. As every chemical component, the way in which this substance affects humans is highly complex. It’s almost a proven fact that this substance is the responsible of this feeling of satisfaction and wellness that we all experience once we have completed a task or achieved a goal, i.e. wining a race, understanding something or just finishing a level of a game.

How is that connected with a business?

Games based methodologies have been used in the learning contexts for a relative long periode. More recently some companies are starting to make use of more elaborated REWARDS for their workers, going a step forward of the classical ”a bigger salary”. This has lead to a more proactive behavior of the employees and a better perception of the work’s place and atmosphere.

Going back to the given definition of “playing”, and taking a look to our current lifestyle, we could imagine our job as a game… let’s just give it a try.
For every job exists a set of rules: to work X hours per month. With a goal: to be a good employee; the best whenever possible. This implicitly supposes a challenge: do all your assigned tasks correctly. And that will provide you with a reward: a salary.
This is not a bad game, vast majority of the people shows a predisposition to play it, and it’s perfect if your tasks fit your interests or if the reward fills up your personal expectations. But obviously this is not always like that, and in a lot of cases the goal doesn’t generate motivation. In others the challenge doesn’t imply any effort (monotony) and in others the reward lacs value for the employee.

As I said before, there are many companies that have started to flexibilize their goals and to provide more exciting rewards that adjust better to the expectations and interests of every employee. Just simply adding some game values to the organization, results and experience of the users can be improved.

How to apply that to your solution?

If we take a look of the most successful communities and social networks nowadays  (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or StackOverflow), we will see that all of them offer some kind of point based reward systems providing social visibility, followers or just points and medals. All of them have their game mechanics: posting about your daily life, discovering new places o providing technical answers. Finally all of them provide you a goal: having feedback from your friends, more than X followers or to be the major of a place. Social networks don’t state a wining case, so goals are not already defined, they are just set up by the users along the time.

Taking all this into account I believe that thinking in your business from a game perspective and providing a game layer, can help you to engage more your users, to have more visibility, to get a bit more effort from your users to understand your solution, and to get more proactive and happy users.

At the end, if we look on how people react against an unknown game and compare it with how they react against an unknown application, we will observe that people tend to have more predisposition to understand a game, than to understand an application.

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