Is your code touching lives?

Posted by Prateek Dayal

April 25, 2008

I was chatting with George yesterday and he mentioned how Muziboo had really touched his life and made it better in the last few months. He also told about how Orkut is an indispensable part of his life as it helped him connect with friends he lost touch with years ago. I think thats the beauty of web 2.0 and beauty of the code that drives it all. That led me into thinking about whether the code that you write is touching lives or not. What does it mean to ‘touch lives’ and how can you make sure that it happens.

I am thankful to George for mentioning this about Muziboo and though I agree with him partly, I think muziboo has a long way to go. So this post is also more of ideas/stuff that I would like to see in Muziboo over time and not necessarily all the stuff that we are currently doing/doing well. I think its more of an analysis of some of the comelling web services and trying to figure out what makes them so special.

Gather important user data

When you run a website, you have the ability to collect a lot of data about the users. Some of the things are (with examples):

Relationship with other users (’How well you know this person’ question of orkut or ‘How do you know this person ‘ question of facebook everytime you add a new friend).
Stuff they like (Ratings from this user, Answer to ‘Was this information useful to you?’)
Professional Background (Work history, college information etc on linkedin/facebook/orkut)
Click patterns (ever noticed the ‘visited 3 times on Jul 11′ on google search results?)
Acceptance of recommendations your system makes (Facebook lets u reject stuff they recommend and you don’t like)
Testimonials/recommendations for other users

Give back some value

Thats just a few examples of the kind of useful information you can collect from your users. However this information is nothing if you don’t give something back to your users. Something that they want and will benefit from. This is where I feel your code can be beautiful and touch lives. You can use this data and generate stuff that the user would truely care about. This is where I think the scope for innovation really lies in web 2.0. Here is some of the stuff that you can give back to your users

Help people discover old friends/colleagues that they have not yet connected with (LinkedIn does that and facebook recently started doing that).
Make recommendations about movies, books etc based on information from people they trust (people they have written recommendations about are generally people they trust)
Fine tune your recommendation algorithms based on their acceptance of your recommendations (Everytime you reject a recommendation, I am sure facebook’s understanding of you has gone up)
Show relevant ads (based on the tastes of this user, education level, relationship status)

All of the above would basically help the users improve their quality of life, discover interesting connections, media and eventually spend more time on your website. Very few users love switching social/professional networks every now and then to try out new services (most people hate learning curves of any kind). I would not do it unless another website has something really cool to offer me and that ‘cool’ stuff cannot be simply better colors or ajax based live search and/or unlimited photos instead of just 500 photos. The value of these networks lie in the connections, personalized recommendations and your understand of the users once they have spent some time on your website. Once you have a system that does this well, its like a feedback loop where every new minute the user spends on your website, makes him stick for longer and makes your system better.

So lets hope that code you and I write can touch people’s lives. Do share your thoughts here and I will add the relevant stuff back to the post over time.

Popularity: 16% [?]

find this blog feedworthy. Click on the number to subscribe!