Danah Boyd talks about social networks, how to develop web sites for kids and teens, the meaning of cluster effects and her definition of Web 2.0.
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Episode 10: Bringing People Into The Picture
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DevSource usually focuses on the gritty underbelly of software development: how to make the bits line up in useful, if not always elegant, formation. In this latest video in our Great Minds in Development series, we examine some of the design issues you should consider before you begin thinking about the specifics of any particular Web application: who the audience is and what they want.
In this twenty-minute video,
Danah Boyd, a researcher at UC Berkeley (previously at the MIT Media Lab) discusses the evolution and importance of social media, and in particular the way that youth — teenagers and children — interact with the Web applications they use.
That is, if you think of these Web sites as applications; that might not be a good idea. One point that Boyd makes is that these users don't think of what they're doing as using a tool. Adults see the Internet as something we "go to," says Boyd, a tool for information access and communication — like using a telephone. For teens, the Internet is where your friends are. "It's part of their lives, not some sort of foreign object," she says.
From the Web developer's viewpoint, this means that it's vital to keep in mind that personalization is essential to that group. You have to give young audiences things to let them express themselves, to socialize with their friends, to maniuplate media. Teenagers are growing up with media as something you can "mess with" or remix, says Boyd, and they're going to push against any restrictions that forbid them from that kind of expression. Kids don't care about doing stuff efficiency and effectively... no. "It's about hanging out," Boyd says.
Even if you write your applications for a corporate audience, Boyd's remarks are enlightening. She has a lot of interesting things to say about "cluster effects:" attracting the attention of one particular social group and bridging to others, and the importance of rolling out "innovation" in a way that remains relevant to the user. Web 2.0 isn't about technologies like AJAX as much as they about mixing and matching all the kinds of objects we've built, and "the way in which we bring people into the picture." She encourages developers to think about how we deal with social search, recommendations, and the tension between global info and local social structures.
Boyd advises developers: "If you're asking people to adopt something that doesn't make sense for their current practices, then it probably doesn't make sense to do it."
To watch the video in Windows Media Player, click here.
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