Scott Karp on USAToday.com
Scott Karp overgeneralizes a bit when he concludes that most techies think the USAToday.com social experiment is great. I, for one, didn't (see USAToday.com Goes Social, Sorta).
[from Who’s Right About The Social Media Revolution — The People Or The Revolutionaries?]What are we to conclude from stark contrast between the (sometimes breathless) praise of USA Today’s “social media” redesign among tech/media bloggers and commentators (with some saying they didn’t go far enough), and the near universal rejection of the redesign among USA Today readers who commented on it? Could it be that it’s really the social media revolutionaries who “don’t get it” when they assume that what the people want is to rise up against the media autocracy and take control, when in fact what most people want is to get high quality information from a reliable source? Or are the negative comments on USA Today’s redesign merely a reflection of the small percentage of users who are always disgruntled when you make a change?
As with most things, I think the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. Tech/media bloggers do tend to overestimate the demand for “social” everything among the masses of mainstream users, while many media companies have indeed been slow to take even obvious steps like allowing every item of content to accept comments.
Perhaps Scott is right: perhaps the mainstream users don't want social features. In this case I think it is a combination of factors:
- Avid USAToday.com readers didn't want the changes: they are comfortable with what they know. So why didn't USAToday.com offer the new interface as an alternative, at least for some reasonable period of time? That might have avoided a lot of the howling.
- The social features rolled out are fairly unintegrated with the whole experience, but have been embedded in a huge user interface redesign. And they aren't very compelling.
So put me down as one of the ardent advocates of well-designed social applications who was not 'breathlessly' praising the efforts of USAToday.com. I think these closed, social media sites are a step in the wrong direction.
Ahhh, closed is wrong. Social, not necessarily. But it seems they could have introduced social features without annoying anyone.
I can't imagine people complaining about a link to blog posts that link to the article, for instance. And the option to comment doesn't seem like it should get in the way.
Well, I can imagine people complaining. That is what they do, and it doesn't always mean you've got it wrong.
Newspapers generally try to spend years talking about something until they think they've got it right, and then launch. It's a mindset that happens everyday for them in the print world.
They should iteratively progress and learn as they move along.
Posted by: Matt Terenzio | March 05, 2007 at 12:49 PM