Building Portable Social Networks

This was by far one of the most eye opening panels of all of SXSW for me. Not sure how much ya’ll (come on it’s Texas) know about OpenID and it’s potential but it’s huge. Let’s go through the process that a Social Media application takes you through now…

So you want to join ultrafriends.com (or whatever the next one is going to be) and what’s the first thing you need to do? Create a user name and password. Second? Spend the next several weeks finding all of your friends and setting up your preferences before you can even really start using the super fantastic new ultrafriends.com which by this point isn’t really that new anymore. So much for ultrafriends.com - I’m tired and bored of it and have discovered the next new big thing. Go back to step one.

Now imagine this process if you didn’t have to go through the second step. What if you already have a universal Username and Password that has all of your friends contacts and preferences already setup. This is what OpenID is. Now the process of signing up has been reduced to: Sign In - select which friends you wish to have contact with on this new site - and off you go. All the panelist agree this would enormously reduce what they call ‘social app fatigue’ and as one panelist dubbed OpenID - the ‘vaseline’ of the web. I don’t know about you but this makes so much sense - I can’t wait until it sees it’s full potential across the web and hope to start incorporating into future sites.

Jeremy Keith (Clearleft), Chris Messina (Citizen Agency), Leslie Chicoine (Get Satisfaction), Joseph Smarr (Plaxo Inc), David Recordon (Six Apart)

Lessons in Internationalization

Man you must be thinking “Boy Rob sure picks some interesting topics” but for me Lessons in Internationalization was. This applies specifically to a client who’s site were in the process of developing and definitely has a global audience. They will most likely look to internationalize for a future generation of the site.

There were the expected stories of how a button “Enter Here” was translated into Russian and… well… didn’t exactly mean what they meant it to say. Or how the French were completely insulted that the French translation was for the Quebec-French. But there were some valuable lessons for us to be found in these stories. Some of which are:

• Unintentional translations of your company name is something you need to check out.

• Working with a translation team can help you be mindful of potential cultural/translation issues from the very beginning and help guide your design.

• Each language is not a country there are large cultural differences that need to be considered.

• Laws need to be taken into consideration and can be a huge time sink especially when contests are involved.

• Poorly translated sites are worse than no translation at all. It makes it seem like you don’t care as much about those customers as you do for those who speak the sites native language.

Something that also needs to be considered heavily is: should you go seek help from a professional translation company or can you depend on your users to help you out? You could be looking at two very different price tags but two very different work loads.

As a side note if this is something you are interested in check out the Worldwide Lexicon Project. This looks like a great tool! 

Stephanie Booth (Climb to the Stars), Brian McConnell (Worldwide Lexicon), Kelly Thompson (iStockphoto)… and a guy from Google who’s name I didn’t catch. 

SEO 3.0

Attended SEO 3.0 for my last panel on Sunday. I know - not the mostly wildly exciting topic but it was a very informative talk for me. I did manage to learn a few things that I plan to pay closer attention to for future sites - but most of it reinforced what I already learned about SEO & SEM. One thing I did notice though was that the SEO and SEM folks love they’re acronyms!

Packed house

Checked out the keynote interview w/ Mark Zuckerberg from the overflow room - while waiting I learned that when your company is worth 15 billion dollars people have a lot of… how would you say…. creative criticism for you.

Gotta respect the guy though, he seems genuine in the fact that he wants to make this the best app ever. I can’t help but wonder if his idea of envisioning where Facebook will be in 15 or 20 years is a bit optimistic? Can a company that finds immense fame and fortune through a social media tool stay ahead of the curve Apple style?

If so they better get moving. They need to start making money fast and just dump that money straight into R&D for future versions - not just make minor improvements here or there. See even I have a few ideas on how he should run that company! Mark gimme a call - we’ll do lunch.