With the release of the Qwidget fast approaching, I want to give a quick update on what is occupying our time in the lead up to our launch.

• Our QA (quality assurance) server has been set up to run a few VMs so we can test how the Qwidget works with different OS/browser combinations.
• We are tweaking the design of the Qwidget interface to make it easy on the eyes and easy on the brain.
• Refining the feature set that we will launch with.  As we play with the early versions, we are discovering features that seem necessary even though they weren’t in the initial specs.  I am also working with our awesome engineers to refine and improve a few of the existing features.  To be clear, we’re not adding new features willy nilly.  It’s simply a process of adding new and better ways to accomplish the one and only goal of the Qwidget - to increase reader participation on publisher sites.
• My fantastic designer/animator friend Erin Kilkenny (who posts great sketchbooks online) has been designing the Qwidget logo and style guides.  We are in the last rounds of notes and the logo is looking pretty awesome.  When it is finished, I will post it here along with some of the logo treatments that we did not choose.  We will also relaunch this blog with a custom theme that Erin built.
• Preparing to build the Qwidget.com site.  We have wireframes ready and are waiting on the style guides from Erin.  It will mostly be a site that shows how the Qwidget helps publishers increase engagement on their site and then showcases some of the activity generated by Qwidgets around the web.
• Assorted other items like: establishing a TOS, setting up feedback mechanisms, etc.

In my ongoing series about how Joshua Porter’s great Designing for the Social Web helped us develop the Qwidget, I now turn my thoughts towards chapter 4 “Design for Sign Up” in a series of posts that will cover a few aspects of his thinking on this matter.  At the end, I will describe how the Qwidget sign up process was influenced by  this very important chapter.

When creating a social web product or service, it can be dangerously easy to imagine throngs of new users beating down your door to use your fantastically innovative, convenient, feature-filled, awesome new tool.  But as Josh points out, when they first encounter your social software, most potential new users are skeptical and perhaps confused by what you’re offering.

He suggests that you approach designing the sign up process in the same way a journalist would approach writing a news story: by focusing on who, what, where, when, why and how.

What is it?

This is the first question that you must answer for any potential new user.  The key here is to explain very clearly what your product/service does without being confusing.  A user must immediately grasp what you do and consequently which of his/her problems you can solve.  Porter gives a great example of a website that aces this task and another that doesn’t.

Example 1: If you looked at the top of Blinksale’s site for only two seconds, you’d still know what they do.

Example 2: Bill My Clients has a clear name but does the design immediately convey what they do? As your eye travels across the page, you’ll probably see the login box before you see anything about what they do.  All that communicates to me as a new user is that this page is not really meant for me.

Note: Porter’s book has an image of a previous version of the Billmyclients.com homepage.  However, the new version pictured above is as unclear as the one in the book.

The launch of Cuil, a new search engine founded by ex-Googlers, has been covered extensively in the blogosphere so far. But a couple of great tech bloggers have begun to point out the amusing/strange results that come from “Cuiling” their names (doesn’t have the ring of googling, does it?).  These are people whose names are plastered all over the web, theoretically giving a search engine much to work with.  Chris Brogan’s own blog didn’t come up when he cuiled himself. A cuil search for Louis Gray turns up some of his social web profiles with hilarious mismatched photos.

Joining the fray, I was surprised to learn that Hometown Baghdad was not about three Iraqi students trying to survive during wartime. It was about American football. Who knew?

In all seriousness, I am in no place to criticize a new tech product. We are a few days away from launching our very first release of the Qwidget. So tiny bugs in first releases are something I can certainly forgive. I just couldn’t resist posting this screen grab.

With all the information Facebook collects about its users, they have a strange habit of showing users ads that are obviously meant for completely different demographics.  One 33 year old was shown an ad for a social site for people over 35. I just signed in to Facebook, went to my profile page and saw this.

Notice the ad that I circled. Here’s a close up.

“Hey Jew” is how they address me. Not only is that weird and borderline offensive, but I am most certainly not Jewish. While I don’t publicly announce my religion in Facebook, I have checked off my preference.  It’s not Jewish.  Strange. Who’s fault is this? Facebook’s ad targetting? The advertiser’s misdirected campaign?

Our Webby Award statues for our web series Hometown Baghdad arrived in the mail two days ago and I got the chance to play with them up close. I was surprised by how heavy they are and how bouncy the slinky is. I thought it’d be stiff metal. Check out the detail shots below:

	Here is a close up of the label on the award we won for Best Reality.
	A close up of the News and Politics Series award.
	A close up of the Best Public Service and Activism Award. This one was especially meaningful to us because the series was done in the spirit of public service and was funded by philanthropists at the Shei’rah Foundation and Cinereach.
	Here are all three awards lined up. Where on earth should we put them in the office? The conference room? Near the entry-way? WWSGD?
	I thought it was pretty cool that there are 1s and 0s on the slinky.
	Here is a little detail that I almost missed myself. The Webby Award logo is printed inside the slinky.

Yesterday, Gawker announced that newspapers shouldn’t allow comments. It’s a familiar argument and has a grain of truth that makes the whole thing quite tempting:

Comments are thought to be an added value to a newspaper’s site—providing another reason to read. You come for the article, and stay for the interesting discussion. The only problem is, there is no interesting discussion. Almost never. Not even from the mythical supersmart New York Times readers.

Gawker takes the easy bait, pointing out a few incendiary examples of comments that are almost poetic in their nonsensical offensiveness. (What was going through the mind of the commenter who left this little nugget of wisdom “W-H-O-R-E” is a question that is almost zen in its impenetrability.) Since there is no value in the newspaper-comment-o-sphere, Gawker says abolish it.

Though I have made similar points about the unfulfilling experience of commenting (here and here), newspapers can’t do away with all forms of reader interactivity for a number of reasons:

• Online dialogue drives pageviews and time spent on site. When people are actively involved in a site, they come back more. They refresh the page to see what others have said. This is an advertising game and the New York Times needs pageviews as badly as the Gawker editors do.
• Allowing the most active and vocal readers to express themselves lets the Times and other papers demonstrate to advertisers that their readers are engaged.
• Comments allow editors to get a near constant stream of feedback. This stream develops value in the aggregate over time. Editors can get a sense of the tastes of their audience and how they are developing over time.

Even Gawker acknowledges that comments are the “life blood” of blogs. However, most blogs have something that the Times does not: a community to curate the conversation. Communities are more likely to develop around blogs because bloggers are more approachable and responsive than newspaper reporters and editors. So readers feel a closer attachment to the content and conversation that ends up on blogs. Furthermore, many blogs with thriving comment sections are directed at particular niches with people that are amenable if not downright interested in conversing with readers with similar interests.

Major newspapers, on the other hand, must face the problem that the social tool of commenting is not well-suited for the type of interactions that happen among an extremely large heterogeneous audience. In this type of environment, it is simply too easy to disrupt intelligent dialogue. And so a small minority of people do exactly that with or without nefarious intent. One often adopted solution is hiring a community moderator that must approve every comment, which has the dubious distinction of solving one problem by creating another. With a moderator holding up comments, the user experience becomes less immediately satisfying for those readers who are adding constructive thoughts.  These users now face a bottleneck holding up the flow of their dialogue. Furthermore, as I’ve already discussed on this blog, commenting online is not well-suited to the average web user anyway.

So should the New York Times and other major newspapers abandon their comment sections? Perhaps. But should they abandon all efforts to have their audience participate in a dialogue around their content? Absolutely not. As the rest of the web becomes more social and users become more accustomed to dialoging online with strangers, this would be tantamount to admitting that they cannot adapt to the new media landscape. The Qwidget solves these problems by making it easier and more intuitive for web dialogue neophytes to get started and minimizing the power that trolls have to disrupt the flow of conversation for everyone else. Expect to see the Qwidget in alpha mode on this blog soon.

Chapter 3 of Joshua Porter’s super-helpful “Desiging for the Social Web” focuses on a common theme among the web’s cognoscenti: customer service is the new marketing.  Since this new age of social media is all about community and conversation, the way a company speaks with its customers is inherently part of their product.

Joshua also points out that many successful web apps are developed by the same people who use them.  Reading this had a very reassuring effect on me.  The Qwidget was built for web publishers who want to create more dialogue around their content.  That’s us.  We began as a company as content producers and we continue to produce television and web video with the aim of fostering conversations.

With our stated mission being “create dialogue,” it wouldn’t be very helpful for me to aim for a huge distribution without helping people maximize the use of the qwidget.  Web apps like Top Friends on Facebook don’t necessariliy need action to be successful.  You install it, pick your top friends and you never need to touch it again.  But the dialogue we aim to create requires constant attention.  So I will always try to heed Joshua’s advice and give my all to helping our users.  We also don’t have a marketing budget so providing good customer service is kind of my only shot. 

Usually I keep this blog focused on our upcoming product the Qwidget, our company Chat Ventures and the state of online dialogue tools.  However, occasionally I can’t stop myself from posting bizarre stories, links, videos, etc.   Check this out:

A dear friend tipped me off to the inspiration for SNL’s infamous Dick in a Box video.  Behold Color Me Bad’s “All 4 Love.”

Watch them back to back.  It will blow your mind.  The original is here.

One of my jobs here at Chat Ventures has been to make sure that the features of the upcoming Qwidget release will provide some kind of real value to the people who use it.  I have thought a lot about what is necessary when starting a fulfilling dialogue.  And what features would be extraneous and confusing.  In this process, I’ve relied a lot on my team.  But I have also spent a ton of time scouring blogs, books, papers, and magazines for guidance.

In this time of research, no other writer has been as helpful as Joshua Porter who writes the fantastic blog Bokardo about social web design.  His writing is crisp and his thinking on how people interact with social software and social web apps is dead on.  While I think I’ve read just about every post he’s made to bokardo.com, I recently purchased his fantastic book “Designing for the Social Web.”  As I read it, I would like to post some of its more interesting ideas with occasional commentary on how it aligns with some of our thinking with the Qwidget.  I’ll also link back to some of his blog posts that talk about similar concepts.

Chapter 1

In chapter one, Josh outlines the growth of the social web.  He makes the compelling, if familiar, case that we are living in an attention economy due to the constant bombardment of information that we all receive on a daily basis.  Being the social creatures that we are, we pay what limited attention we have to our friends and to other similar and interesting people we find online.  Social software enables us to do more and more tasks in a social environment.  Jost points out that many of the leading web properties are social by nature and that this trend will continue as more and more people come online.  (Read his thinking on why social web sites are passing adult sites in traffic here.)

Josh and I share a belief that people’s innate sociability is determining how they spend their time on the web to ever increasing degrees.  His main argument is that the tasks we perform online - everything from shopping to consulting encyclopedias - become easier and more fulfilling the more social they get.  I agree.  In fact, the Qwidget seeks to make consuming content more social.

When we were releasing Hometown Baghdad, it became evident that only a small percentage of our audience was using the social aspects of our site - the comments and our short-lived forum.  We realized that these social tools were not built for the every day person.  My mom would never leave a comment on our blog, but she would always talk to just about anyone she met in person about the series and about the war.  So obviously, in that example, she had the desire to be social but the obstacles to talking in person were way lower for her than the obstacles to conversing online.  The Qwidget aims to address that problem.  I can’t wait until we release the beta/alpha version in a few weeks to see if it does.

Favorite quote from “Designing for the Social Web” so far: “If the interface is too confining, people won’t use it. If the interface is too flexible, people won’t know how to use it.”

On June 9th, the Chat the Planet team took a trip to the Webby Online Film and Video Awards to accept three Awards for our production Hometown Baghdad. (As is mentioned elsewhere on this blog, our experience producing and distributing that series online led us to develop a better way for web publishers/bloggers to foster dialogue around their content. But that’s a story for another post.) Saif, one of the documentary’s subjects who now lives in Boston as a refugee, and his wife Noor were able to come down to New York for the show. Fady, the Iraqi producer of Hometown Baghdad, was also able to come. He is in NY for the summer on break from getting his MFA at USC. Here is our night in pictures:

Saif, Fady and me (L-R) at the pre-award show cocktail party

That’s senior editor Barrett Hawes accepting the award for Best Reality. His five word speech was, “Brave Iraqis made this possible.”

That’s executive producer Kate Hillis saying, “Real Stories help overcome ignorance,” upon accepting the award for Best News and Politics Series.

Here’s our other executive producer Laurie Meadoff accepting the award for Best Public Service and Activism. Her speech, decided about thirty seconds in advance, was, “Alright brave Iraqis, please stand.” When she said those words, Fady, Saif and Noor, who were taken by complete surprise, stood up to a big ovation from the crowd. A very cool moment as captured in this incredibly low quality video.

Laurie, Fady and me at the after party.

Kate, me and Fady at the after party.

At the after party, there was this cool little photo booth taking portraits that were then shown up on a big screen at the party, right above the DJ (who happened to be LCD Soundsystem!!). Here’s me, an excited Saif and Fady posing for our close-up.

Webby winners were asked to do a short interview at the party on the “red couch.” There were a lot of Chat people there so we crowded up the couch. Too bad editors Will Gardiner and Barrett Hawes and exec producer Laurie had left by that point.