(This is a post I wrote on an internal blog at work, and I wanted to reproduce it outside the firewall because, well, I find the issue so fascinating. Given more time, I’d rewrite it for Infovore, with a slightly less preachy tone. But for now, here it is, warts and all…)

This Flickr support thread is a must-read if you’re interested in online communities, and in particular, how they change as they grow.

Flickr’s always been a playful place to hang out; after all, it grew out of Game Neverending. The staff are known for injecting their sense of humour into the product. And so, when that silliest of invented-on-the-Internet-festivals, International Talk Like A Pirate Day rolled around, they decided to have some fun.

What they did was really very trivial, namely:

• They overlaid a pirate flag onto the Flickr photo
• They altered the explore page algorithm to display only pirate-related pictures
• As a bonus, they added an extra option to their langauge-selector at the bottom to every page, to translate text into “Pirate”

All of which was only online for a single day. Sounds fairly harmless, right?

Oh no. Check out the thread. A lot of users – who weren’t aware of the jokey “holiday” were shocked and angry. Many assume the site – or worse, their computer, had been hacked, explaining that they saw the pirate flag as a “universal signal for hackers”. Several pointed out that it’s only funny if you know about it, and complained of Flickr’s bias towards all things American. One person pointed out that many users, for whom English is not a first language, are “already making a great effort” to communicate, and the last thing they need is confusing jokes. With a lot of people, it didn’t go down so well. The mangling of the “explore” page went down even worse – some users complaining that all they want to do is make “beautiful pictures” and share what they deem “art”, but instead the Flickr staff have to engage in “childish” behaviour. (Needless to say, many people complaining about their pictures not making explore were, to be frank, making pictures that had little hope of making explore anyhow).

At the same time, fans of the site fought back a little in the thread, pointing out it’s nice to be part of a community that hasn’t sold its fun-loving soul to the corporates, or that they appreciated the joke. For them, it was exactly the kind of thing they expected from the site – probably because they’d all been users for much longer and appreciate the history. For many of the newer users, less versed in the lore of the community, it was more jarring.

What impresses me is how the staff reacted: they didn’t break frame once. They turned up in the thread, answered the odd question here and there, made the users feel like they were being listened to – and at the same time carried on talking like pirates. They were gently deflating the group ego, and being amusing in the process. But more importantly: they were reinforcing the community values, and also the conceit of the day’s joke. They were making it quite clear: this is a place where we have fun. Not forever, not maliciously, but we like the gags, and they’re staying.

Ultmiately, though the thread has over 400 posts from nearly as many users, that’s still a vastly small fraction of the users of the site – which, remember, has about 1.3bn photographs on it as of now. The thing about a vocal minority is that it’s still a minority. The majority were not vocal enough to complain, or presumably care. That, too, speaks volumes.

It’s a good reminder that, whilst it’s healthy to have a sense of perspective when dealing with user requests and, no matter how community-driven your site is, it’s still perfectly reasonable gentle control over the community’s values. At the same time, it clearly demonstrates the way that communities, by necessity, become more conservative as they grow, and become more conservative as they have to represent a greater spread of languages, cultures, and values. It is, perhaps, a necessary evil of internationalisation. Balancing the focus of the community with the demands of an ever-broadening spread of users is difficult, and the whole thread makes for a great illustration of this difficulty. Do read it if you get a chance. By turns, it’s both amusing and informative.

(And, of course, it’s a reminder that some jokes just don’t translate.)

I was, partly in jest, invited to join tourfilter by a friend today. What started as an elaborate social-networking joke turned into a really positive piece of user-experience I wanted to document.

What I wanted to share was the sign-up process. Normally, with social-networking sites, you have to endure some form of semi-elaborate sign-up before you’re allowed in… and then you start having to ram content in. Tourfilter neatly turns that on its head.

Tourfilter is a site that scrapes listings pages for information about your favourite bands, generating emails, RSS, or iCalendar files to keep you up-to-date. It’s a really simple, single-minded site that gives music fans personalised listings.

For a new user, there’s a form on the left of the homepage with a large textarea, in which you write the names of bands you like. I entered one band name… and via Ajax, a huge list appeared to the right of the field, of other bands I might like. Of course, I did, so I started clicking on some of them to add them to my form… and the process slowly became addictive. Pretty soon, I had a long list of bands I’d be potentially interested in seeing in London. The Ajax made it very compelling, and pretty quick. And, of course, the more bands I added, the more useful the fly-out Ajax list was, because it had better data to compare against.

Underneath the text box are three fields: username, password, and email address. Once you’ve filled them out, all you have to is click the submit button… and your brand new account is created, with all the information you’ve just filled out.

So tourfilter reverse the customary process: you add your initial data first, and only then create the account. Once you’ve done that, everything’s ready to go. I really enjoyed this experience: the Ajax element quickly showed the value of the site, which only increased the likelihood of me signing up.

I think tourfilter still has a little way to go – sometimes its scraping leaves something to be desired – but still felt its compelling sign-up process was worth commending.

So I’m only the umpteenth person to say that I’ve just ordered a whole bunch of MOO minicards. Having seen them from some friends already, I can tell you that the quality is great, the size is lovely, and the colour repro is spot on.

What I find really interesting about them, though, is that MOO describe them not as “business cards” but as “calling cards”. I really like that; it’s an important distinction, and a nice reminder of the origins of what we now call business cards. They’re tools of etiquette, ways of seeking permission to see someone and also permission to engage with them. They’re also a signifier; in the old-fashioned usage (seeking permission to see someone) the card with a name on is presented before the card’s owner is even permitted inside the house.

And, as Wikipedia points out, we exchange business cards to swap not only contact details, but business interests. When I look at the cards I have, even though many of them are from friends, it’s still a reminder of what they do rather than who they are. We all have so many ways to contact us now – mobile, email, IM, VOIP, MySpace – that it makes sense to resurrect the idea of cards precisely for personal usage. No business strings attached, no implicit sell; just me, my name, my number.

That’s why I really enjoyed reading the comments on this Techcrunch post about MOO, which Tom linked to.
“Handing out photographs as business cards is confusing, difficult to read and unprofessional,” writes one commenter – but he misses the point, because these aren’t really intended as “professional” tools. The fact they can be used as business cards is, in fact, a nice side effect, and several commenters in that thread point out the value of photographic cards for trade purposes. But really, they’re just ways to remember who people are, and perhaps how to contact them.

I love the revival of a simple, physical identifier in an age when we’re drowning in digital identifiers that we keep losing. I also love that it’s designed for constant, ongoing delight (rather than just an immediate “wow!”). I guess that comes from the certain satisfaction in pulling out a physical thing you’ve had a part in making. Chris remarks that “the best thing is that each picture has memories and stories attached”. He’s spot-on. Every time you give one away, you’re not only giving away an identifier – my name, my number – but also a descriptor – “here is a photograph I like, which I took, which in part describes me through my taste”.

I’m looking forward to receiving my free set, and then I’ll set about getting some more. Demand will no doubt be huge, but I’m sure Stef and the team will cope. More to the point, I can’t wait to see what else MOO are going to do in this field. There’s so much exciting content around the web (besides text), waiting to be dumped out – I commented on the value of hard copy at Reboot in June. As such, surely there’s never been a better time to be in the print business?

I recently did some consultancy for openTrust, the parent company of openDemocracy, and now that the project in question – chinadialogue – has gone live I wanted to mention it, mainly because I’m so impressed by how the final product turned out.

The best way to describe chinadialogue is as an entirely bilingual online publication about the Chinese environment, built on top of an entirely bilingual CMS.

By “entirely bilingual”, I mean that all content appears (eventually) in both English and Chinese on the site – not just links and headings, but the full text of every article, and of every comment. The site is designed so that whilst everything appears in both languages, the original source language is always highlighted. The translation between languages is performed by Mark 1 Human Beings, incidentally. I found a certain frisson to seeing English and Chinese standing side-by-side everywhere you look; it feels very subversive, given all the issues around Chinese state censorship.

My role in the project was admittedly very limited. I did some early-stages exploratory work around publishing platforms, considering whether to use a pre-existing, open source CMS/blogging tool and extend it either through plugin APIs, or a more major fork of the source code, or whether to build from scratch – and if so, in what. One of the major factors in this decision was the bilingual nature of the project: extending any existing system would require heavy use of the plugin API, but that would mean one language’s content would exist as the primary “content” for an entry, and the other would be banished to the meta-fields. Given that either could come “first” in the workflow of the site, and that both are of equal importance, I suggested that both should also be of equal importance in the database schema.

In the end, they went with the final option, and built the project from scratch in Ruby on Rails. We discussed this option at some length, as whilst there was a strong internal desire to build in Rails, the first thing that comes to mind when you say “Chinese” and “Ruby” in the same sentence is “holy Unicode support, Batman!”

But Unicode-in-Ruby can be stepped around if you know what you’re doing (and try nothing too fancy), so it’s great to see that they not only made Rails work for them – and, by all accounts, had a good time doing it – but also they managed to step around one of the more common Ruby gotchas.

Best of all, I note that they’re planning to release the CMS that runs chinadialogue as open source towards the end of the year. I’m really looking forward to seeing some of that code.

All in all, a pleasant experience, and very cheering to see the results. If you’re working on social publishing projects of any form, and want someone to throw ideas around with (for a reasonable rate) do get in touch.