Lets get straight to the point: there’s a big problem with social networks - the fact that there’s a new one every day. Now this would be all fine if people didn’t care, but that brings me to the second problem: people do care, and generally love to be a part of these things. The social network for music (wait, two), the one for contacts, the one with photos, the one for 43 random things - the list goes on (heck, there’s Ning packing over 80.000 of these). Crazy. But within the chaos, something in common - you and your friends.

If you’re like me, you’re tired of having to add friends or accept friend requests in all of these networks. It makes sense to connect to people in these services (that’s how you get the value out of them), but it’s really tricky to control it. It’s a huge burden to manage all this network structure - this needs a fix.

A potential fix to the problem

I’ve been thinking about how OpenId and Microformats could play into this, and apparently, I’m not alone. We already have the identification through OpenID, there’s hCard+XFN that can provide the necessary bits of information about ourselves (and our friends) to the network, why not create a mechanism allowing networks to save us the trouble of adding friends, accepting requests and setting up preferences?

Process: I want networks to ask me, right off the bat when signing up, if I already have a profile that can be imported in (through hCard+XFN). I type in the URL for my OpenID and the network gets my information (gets OpenID page, downloads hCard formatted information, builds my user information based on that). Then it can grab my list of friends from XFN formatted data. With one textfield (the URL for either my OpenID or a profile on a different network), it would pre-populate both my information and the information for friends I want to add. Sweet.

A good start: A few social networks already have microformatted data on user profiles (Last.FM, Dopplr, Twitter and Cork’d), meaning any other network could easily consume this data when you sign-up, saving you a load of trouble - which is exactly what Dopplr (being smart as it is) does. Now if other networks would tag along, that would be superb.

Because, really, we do love participating in these sites, and we love having fancy profiles with all our friends on there, but actually going through the trouble of setting that up every single time is crazy. Social network developers, help us out here, we’re going bankrupt. Thoughts? Notes of frustration? Suggestions? Feel free to leave a comment on this story.

Update: Seems like Wired picked up on the need for open social networking platforms and published an article by Scott Gilbertson called “Slap in the Facebook”. Nothing you haven’t read in the blogosphere in the last couple of days, but still a good read. Go have a look if you will.

If I were to ask most entrepreneurs working in the web-based application space (not just social apps - all the rage these days) what the process that brought them to their idea was, I suspect many would tell me “it was a problem that needed solution” but that only a few actually made a conscious decision to study the problem before moving to action.

Perhaps due to the old days writing about startups for Techcrunch, I love to know how people got to the problems they’re trying to solve with their companies - I love ideas but more importantly I love the process towards refining them. In several conversations with entrepreneurs working on their products, I noticed how many were out-of-touch with the real needs of their audience, and were set to please the early adopters, the 2.0 crowd, the people like you or me - clearly not the way to critical mass.

Enter ethnography

Enter ethnography - a method to look at user needs through observing people in their naturally setting rather than through research or, like we usually see in this space, guessing work. Ethnography allows you to design (in the broad sense of the word) products that are more in touch with your audience - to solve real problems, and not those you think people have.

Examples: How do you think Sergey Brin and Larry Page got to the idea of an improved search? Likely, by observing people (and themselves) use previous search engines and recognizing how lousy both results and the experience were. Or (to use a product design example) how IDEO realized how children toothbrushes needed to be thicker for a better experience because of the way kids grab them? Through observation. Ethnography.

Or our own example: we launched Goplan (our online project management and cooperation application) after realizing how competitor products were so poor in terms of user experience, and after realizing how new companies (particularly companies working with several remote people - clients or peers) need to spend less time on phones and more time actually collaborating. The need to build a product came out of observation of both the problems of other companies and our own.

“If you want to understand what motivates a guy to pick up skateboarding, you could bring him into a sterile laboratory and interrogate him… or you could spend a week in a skatepark observing him interacting with his friends, practicing new skills and having fun. Ethnography is observing people’s behavior in their own environments so you can get a holistic understanding of their world - one that you can intuit on a deeply personal level.” - LiAnne Yu, cultural anthropologist

Using ethnography in your own organization

You likely do part of it already - albeit not consciously. You probably notice problems (like that one time you had a hard time finding something on some website because navigation was poor) but ignore them. Try spending some conscious time observing and noting down problems - both in your own solutions and in those of others. Not only will you find issues, but you’ll likely think of great solutions that can evolve into products or new businesses.

Watch people interact with both your product or competitor products - again, not in the lab, but in their own environment - and collect data that can meaningfully guide you through the changes you need to make to bump your experience up a notch.

You were likely following the news, so I’ll cut things short - today was the WWDC, and together with a bunch of other cool news, Apple launched a new website. “Great!”, I hear you say correctly. The new website is beautiful. Except for where it isn’t - content organization.

The screenshot above portrays the new navigation scheme on Apple.com (specifically, the new iPod+iTunes page). I have to wonder what crossed their minds that made them mix products (like the iPod models) with accessories and user actions (”Download iTunes”) in the same navigation bar. I mean, that’s mixing apples (pun intended) and oranges.

I know once you do something cool - like that awesome new navigation - you want to use it everywhere, but this is Apple - come on guys, you sure as hell can do better than that in terms of information architecture.

We spend so much time looking at web-applications these days that we tend to ignore desktop apps. Still, every once in a while there’s room for pleasant surprises, and today was one of those days with the release of CSS Edit 2.5 (by Macrabbit) and Coda (by the guys at Panic).

I guess it is a little weird to be singing praises to desktop applications when it is a known fact that access-anywhere is the killer feature, but even with Ajax or RIA environments like Flex, there’s (at this point) no way to get the same kind of “gratification” from web-apps. The web still doesn’t manage to compete with the responsiveness and the constant look and feel of a great desktop application. This is unfortunate, and although changing at a rapid pace, its just not there yet.

Developing for the web and developing for the desktop are two very different concepts (although Adobe’s Apollo and Joyent’s Slingshot are blurring the lines), but there’s a lot to learn from the world of the desktop.

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