The enormous growth of social media services, with Facebook now over 175 million users and Twitter having a yearly growth rate of 1382%, validates the need for companies to start using these social platforms to engage with customers. And with more people joining these platforms, the amount of content created and shared also increases, with users becoming more sensitive on the way they build their personal network.

At first, users are driven to sign up by curiosity or bombarded by constant friend requests, joining their close circle of contacts. The trouble is that it doesn’t stops here. You then become a fan of your favorite author, start following you favorite basketball player on Twitter or discover that old colleague from trainee years.

The social network, once reserved to our closest friends, is now growing beyond any reasonable Dunbar number and providing much more value that keeping us connected and building group stability.

Friending is a social verb

We can’t deny it: we love groups. We need to belong to a social circle. Bigger online social circles usually imply an increasing complexity of filters and preferences necessary to make it manageable, with revised criteria for friending people. As personal networks grow in size and influence, we also get to the see how artificial barriers to entry are built, with cultural groups creating psychological boundaries (from celebrities to intellectual prejudice).

From Coleman’s concept of network closure as social capital to today’s social media rise, we’ve kept the need to include in our social graphs both weak ties and strong ties. What changed was the way both geographical and social circles were affected by the Internet. Twitter, for instance, favors an asymmetric behavior regarding groups, by not requiring two-way acceptance to get updates. Facebook, on the other hand is focused on a reciprocal relationship that implies social approval.

The nature of these social network relationships also changes according to the stage of a person’s life, with younger demographics having fewer and closer friend evolving to adult life with connections more essential to structural sustainability and innovation. Linkedin, a professional social network, is based on more private conversations and encourages these weak ties, quite valued on today’s economic uncertainty.

In most of these online social networks, users put a great deal of effort to perfect their profile, showing that it goes beyond fine tuning preferences, it’s also a public expression of the self. At social music service Last.fm, your playlist is a pretty good psychographic profile of who you are. Or at least, how you want to be seen by others.

But all these profiles, filters and preferences, where users spend hours so they can have a better experience, are mostly useless. Useless in the sense you can’t easily get this data out of centric platforms.

Portable me

These platforms have been evolving slowly, from pre-api times were each user had to login on services and invite all his relevant social circle to today’s APIs with password anti-patterns and OAuth Support.

If Facebook started providing closed filtering and grouping mechanisms, Google has pushed even further by releasing Portable Contacts. The open standard makes it easier to access your social circle information in a safe way, using existing standards and libraries (OpenSocial, OAuth, vCard).

Users can port in their existing network of friends and see who they know is already using a site. It goes beyond the Facebook feature of optional grouping when adding a friend, by enabling 4 system groups for each user, accessible by service providers. Any user can manually add contacts to the Coworkers, Family, and Friends groups; the My Contacts group contains contacts added to contact groups by the user.

Your mom

What’s your mom have to do with this? Well, let’s put it bluntly: most of us don’t want to share some of our social network updates with our mom, the same way most of us as teenagers didn’t want her to know who we started dating. Or as Clay Shirky mentioned last year at Web2.0 Expo: “What filter just broke ?”  As experience architects, we should be thinking on providing context to social circles and encourage the integration of third-party applications that respect this behavior.

Your mom probably doesn’t have a clue what Microformats or Data Portability is, but she still would love to have a future where she could setup a TV with her media preferences, thanks to a simple Facebook Connect on a Boxee device. That way, you don’t need to worry that she messes your remote when staying for the weekend.

With each consumer defining proper contexts, with new tools and better ways to manage their portable profiles, brands and services that encourage this open portability will get to build better behavioral approaches to this ubiquitous vision. The structural holes that will be detected once the data starts flowing will provide immense growth opportunities and gains in productivity, as each person starts connecting their networks with the appropriate context.

Cross posted at DraftfcBlog
Revised by Andr3

Illustration remixed from Mags and Bryan Veloso

You can also Discuss on the Facebook Page. (See what i mean: the irony of writing this post ad inviting people to closed conversations)

As promised, here’s the presentation from yesterday at RIApt AUG, on a 30 minutes talk about why you should care about Progressive Enhancement and how it can be applied to websites developed with the Flash platform.

The sample code (with SWFObject, SWFAddress and XSLT samples) is also available for download.

Update: As Marcos rightfully points out, the Slideshare link isn’t that “accessible”. So here’s a PDF or ODP for download.

During this month, some of the most established names in web design and development have been publishing a daily article at 24ways.org, keeping the tradition of previous years.

From Jeffrey Zeldman to Drew McLellan (not to be mistaken with Drew from Marketing Minute), the 24 articles are one of the best web design resources created this year, with solid tips from beginner to advanced for web professionals or just to impress your friends.

Highlights to the articles by Jason Santa Maria on Making Modular Layouts and a art direction beginner class by Mark Boulton. A edgeofmyseat.com production, it was edited by Drew McLellan and Brian Suda, with design by Made by Elephant.

Meet John Scope and Emma Creep.

Scope is tidy and well structured, with nothing disturbing his world order. He completes his duties on a very efficient and resourceful way.  And even if we scramble their world view, things don’t fall apart.
On the other hand, Mrs. Creep is quite flashy, very liberal and never stays too long on the same place. She loves to please her friends and clients, even though she doesn’t succeed every time.
Here’s our Scope Creep couple, a vision of what goes on in interactive projects.

Scope starts at the activity definition, with an overview of required resources. It then continues to create the processes that are agreed among all parts towards a final goal.
And then comes the Creep, with the chance of being hit by last minute change requests, way beyond the initial briefing or suddenly being confronted with a reality that wasn’t present as the project started.

Scope creep usually happens when the initial requirements and resources are incorrectly defined or when unforeseen changes and tasks appear along the project, requiring new functional adjustments and project rescheduling.
The saddest truth, at least for interactive projects, is that scope creep is bound to happen. There’s no sure way to avoid it, but one could start by finding out why it happens, instead of just focusing on the final project stages (with programmers or producers getting all the blame), where each change requires a profound restructuring of what’s been developed beforehand, whether it’s animation, programing, rendering, etc.
The most reasonable approach to scope creeping in web projects is to focus on the whole process, instead of the individual .

How to deal with Scope Creep?

We start with risk analysis, a rather common technique in project management, establishing the details before the project gets started and actually produced. But with more complex projects, the greater this risk analysis becomes. On what interactive projects are concerned, the complexity gets really huge. The web has only 10 years but it’s constantly changing, with teams having to deal with several different browsers, platforms and a variety of programming languages and product release cycles of months, if not weeks or days.
Keeping the pace with all this innovation, with lack of talented or trained team collaborators and still being able to deliver projects on short schedules is a challenge that many agencies and digital studios face these days. On top of that, the constant stream of change requests and approval process are wearing out interactive teams.

John Scope could try to get things right by setting a project duration in regards to historical records, but that just doesn’t work. No two projects are the same, no two clients are the same, no two programmers or web designers are the same. He might also try some fancy new techniques like SCRUM, and while it might work for some teams, it’s really just dividing bigger problems into smaller ones so they get more manageable.
Web projects don’t seem to have a way out of the rabbit hole, as long as the creative process is based on visual comps, storyboards and those pesky JPEGs sent for client approval.

Integrating and early planning

I stand with 37 Signals, and their “no-Photoshop” approach, using fast prototyping and wireframing on web applications and services. Focus on functionality, not visuals. Worry about what really brings changes on the process, not what is the result of the process. Unless creative agencies start rethinking their silos there’s no way out of scope creep. These days, most RIAs have drag and drop capabilities, Rich text editors or javascript libraries that can bring a client or creative into the production process to perform live edits, shortening the iterative release cycles.
This process also empowers other project members, presenting them tools and concepts that they were not aware of.

And before writing the first line of code, be sure that all interested agents have the same expectations regarding the final product. The earlier you do it, the earlier you’ll finish it. And have it written, with client, agency and production team with one common agreed goal.

It’s hard, it requires everyone’s commitment, but once we get in the flow, i’m sure you’ll make John Scope and Emma Creep happier.

As if it wasn’t enough that CP+B grabbed Brooke Shields for their VW Routan Campaign, they partnered with Oddcast to create RoutanBabyMaker.

On this genetic online mashup, with careful attention to interactive details (loved the buttons), the user is invited to upload mom and dad’s photos to envision how their baby would be.

A simple but great use of this technology, and spot on at the van’s target audience. That’s how interactive briefs should be interpreted – ask not what can technology can do for your campaign, but what the campaign can do for technology.

Source: FWA

Head over to www.fly-a-balloon.be
Don’t resize your browser.
Watch what happens.

One of the best examples on how to use the browser and web technologies as a creative medium. Simple javascript effects and carefully synced video can do wonders for your interactive experiences.

Following the SOTW (site of the week), a Video Of The Week. Despite all the social media buzz, some people might not be aware of a groundbreaking moment for the web technologies. Meet Ubiquity:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

The video speaks for itself, in one huge step towards the cloud.

At least in Portugal. They better not be, since Craigslist has just opened their portuguese version and Google is starting to take local search and location based services more seriously in Portugal.

Anyway, PAI (Portuguese Internet Yellow Pages) released a new set of features that are so web 2.0 that they even have round corners and gradients. Here’s what we can do now:

Ratings and Comments

Now users can leave their ratings and comments, supposedly to improve the service quality. I wonder how long will it take until spammers and ruthless SEOs start flooding the system.

Maps

Nice one. Not Google maps, but at least they know the local market, so a tailored experience might be enough to convince portuguese users. The service is provided by Local Matters.

Search Widget

You can take the search service and embed it in your site as a widget. Unlike Google custom search, no revenue is distributed to publishers.

Things are eating up, and after web 1.5, it seems that some portuguese services are entering the 2.0 bandgwagon. Better late than never. Someday we might even ditch Microsoft government agreements and choose reliable OSS solutions (I wish …).

Meanwhile, all minor efforts are welcome. Nice work, PAI and Truvo.

Singularity is the first large-scale online web conference in the world.

Born in the mind of the Flash genius Aral Balkan, the event is scheduled for October 24-26th, 2008, with more than 100 of the world’s top web visionaries, developers, designers, thought leaders, and celebrities.

Last year, Aral asked his blog readers to promote the mysterious new brand. Shame on me for not having posted a badge before, but as i knew Aral’s work was mostly in the Flash arena, i was expecting something like a framework or some new Open Source project. But this blows my mind. It’s a huge one man effort, and skyrockets my respect for Aral as a true SOURCE OF INSPIRATION.

The sessions will be available to attendees for a period of six months, and later released under a Creative Commons license. It will take advantage of existing networks to get full community involvement (yeah, i follow you on Twitter, Aral).

And get inspired with this list of confirmed speakers:

• Andy Budd
• Ann McMeekin
• Brendan Dawes
• Carlos Ulloa
• Cheryl Annett-Baker
• Christian Heilmann
• Craig Swann
• Derek Featherstone
• Dr. WooHoo
• Ian Forrester
• Jeremy Keith
• Joshua Hirsch
• Keith Peters
• Lynda Weinman
• Mario Klingemann
• Mike Davies
• Molly E. Holzschlag
• Paul Boag
• Peter Elst
• Ralph Hauwert
• Richard Rutter
• Seb Lee Delisle
• Stephanie Sullivan
• Steve Webster
• Thomas Vander Wal

Aral, the badge is now on the sidebar, but it would be great if you had also a countdown badge. How long do we have to wait until October?