Supersonic Feet

Brian Oberkirch has been on a bit of a blitz of great posts about social networking today (and I'm not just saying that because he picked up on bragster supporting hCard import yesterday).

The one that I really liked is from "simple to obvious", in which Brian has a go at the propensity people have for assuming a 'regular user' exists and can/should be catered to. You should read the whole post for the detail, but the bit that got me at the end was this:

I think we?ve made a fetish of 'simple' software... Simplicity is not a value in & of itself. It's a condition of usability within a given context. Maybe we should start trying to make 'obvious' software instead. What's obvious to someone may not be obvious to another.

This is a really good point. There's a clear danger of just designing 'simple' interfaces and interactions where what we really want is something that's obvious to the user. It may be that a successfull task is not a 'simple' thing to complete, but if it's always obvious what you need to do next, success becomes more likely. As Steve Krug would say, "Don't make me think!"

While you're at Brian's site, be sure to read "What PR people should know about social media".

Having mentioned I wanted to implement proper hCard support on bragster.com, the opportunity arose much sooner than expected.

Having played with the mofo Ruby gem over a weekend, it became obvious we could implement not just hCards on our profiles (which is a very quick thing to do), but that we could follow Satisfaction's lead in letting people import their hCard-supporting profiles when they sign up at bragster. So we did.

We just deployed the code to our live site this morning, so new users on bragster can now click the logo of the site they have a profile on already (places like flickr, twitter, last.fm), or the microformats logo to enter the full URL to any page that has their hCard on it, and it'll pre-fill the sign-up form with as much data as we can use. Depending on the profile you're importing and how much of it you filled out, it can pre-fill your username, first and last names, and which country you're from.

This will hopefully be a first step and we can later add more features like subscribing to your hCard to get auto-updates to your profile; finding which of your friends are already on the site via XFN and more. Along with stuff like OAuth, hopefully we'll be able to move away from asking for users' passwords for other services (e.g. Gmail) just to help them move their data with them.

Tantek Çelik's slides from his talk on Social Network Portability are a very good, quick read as an introduction to supporting social network portability on your own site/service using microformats.

The slides include real, practical demonstrations of how it can be done and having made a bit of a start (i.e. not a good-enough start) on making bragster profiles support hCard and XFN, it's pushed me to get it sorted on bragster as soon as possible, both in terms of properly marking up the profiles as well as potentially doing some importing of hCard/XFN info.

A 2-minute play with mofo shows it's not hard to do the importing bit, so (dev-time time allowing) I'll be seeing how we can use it to good effect on bragster. Satisfaction's signup form is a pretty good example of a first step in hCard importing - helping you fill out the signup form quicker by pulling some of the data you've already given to another social network.