Lowering Barriers to Participation - Bradley Horowitz

Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo! guru gave a talk on participation: how do you make it easy for people to get involved with your site? Bradley talked about Yahoo!’s philosophies of creating engaging experiences that users can’t help but get involved with.

Horowitz stated that Yahoo! is the biggest group of people using Agile programming methodologies.

Horowitz believes that Yahoo! developer network takes a backseat role to the coders working with the technologies they provide: "We’re the roadies" "We’re the session musicians." (That’s a really solid example in how much Yahoo! believes in getting people involved: the build technologies (APIs, etc.) to let people play; that’s the whole reason they’re building things. They devlop just for facilitating the creativity of others.

Horowitz supports Yahoo!’s "Hack Day," where all 12,000 people in the company spend a day building something cool. Each person (or group) has 90 seconds to wow the others. The quote: "mash-up or shut up."

Often, competitors are using another competitors’ API. Instead of shutting APIs, Horowitz believes competitors should operate under the motto "if you provide us an API, we’ll provide one for you."

Horowitz spoke next on community dynamics. He states that for each single content creator there are 10 who synthesize that content and 100 consumers of all those products. Indeed, creators are also consumers (even of their own mashed-up content). This synthesis of materials leads to people Horowitz term "happenstance artistes": amateurs who build something cool by sticking small, separate pieces together. Anyone with a keyboard is now an author. Anyone with an iPod is now a DJ. Anyone with a [blank] is now a [blank]. These are happenstance artistes.

This rise of the amateur leads us to ask: is it all great content, or is most of it just "stupid human tricks," like many of the (in)famous viral videos found on sites like YouTube. Even though there is a glut of bad content, there is still an abundance of great content [here Horowitz showed a series of beautiful images from Flickr]. Users and the system surfaced these photos as the most interesting; they combined to promote great content.

Horowitz asked, "What makes Flickr special?" (This is a terrific question: Flickr is the epitome of the Web 2.0, experience-and-community driven site). Flickr is special because:

1. It features user-generated content.
2. Computer vision is hard. Here Horowitz showed The ESP Game, an attempt at double-blind tagging for images. Flickr is powerful, in part, because of its user-organized content: a computer does not need to see an image to tag it "dog," the user tags it such. Users add all value around the content for each other.
3. User-distributed content.
4. Opening up Flickr as an API (which made it even more popular as the mash-ups exploded).

Horowitz then got into search, using the innovations on Flickr as examples. Link flux and page rank believe that importance is based on link structure or the number of incoming links to a page. Flickr introduced the concept of "interestingness" as a new way to measure results. (As an aside, I’m not using sort by most interesting exclusively when jumping through Flickr images. Tons of great stuff comes back, and you can really feel the serendipity).

Horowitz is looking at clustering as another search feature of Flickr (search for dog and it returns dog-related results). Clustering looks at co-occurences between words. It lets us sift quickly through groups and dates.

Finally, Horowitz talking about Yahoo! Answers, which Horowitz believes will lead us to "better search through people." In Korea, this type of search (asking a question which is then answered by other users) dominates the market, and is run by a service called neighbor. Yahoo! Answers, like neighbor, connects people to a community who is best suited to answer their question. Search connects people to pages, with the caveat that the page must exist: that’s the only way it becomes a result. Answers can be concepts, ideas, or knowledge: there needs to be no single destination page to have a meaningful result.

[Audience question] What techniques are there to seed participation after a soft launch (the gradual, no-publicity release out of beta that is now the norm)?
Start conditions are super important. If you’re not careful, suddenly you’re the world’s best site in Brazil (is that really what you were trying for?). Yahoo!’s My Web was announced to the Flickr community only because that was the best audience for the product. You must have patience. It’s easy to over-promote, but that kind of behavior destroys the community and ecosystem already thriving around that product. Horowitz said this is precisely why Yahoo! will never promote Flickr on the Yahoo! homepage: the great increase in signups would destroy the community; organic, word-of-mouth signups are what keep Flickr’s commuity strong.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 9:04 pm and is filed under learn, ux week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.