Twitter is a fascinating service. To many people, it is not clear what exactly it is supposed to be used for. Chats / conversations? There are better services for that, like email, IM, and discussion boards. Blogging? There is better software for that too. Twitter seems to be something new that can’t easily be put into existing bins, at least according to its advocates.
To me, one of the most interesting features of twitter was mentioned briefly by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in his Freakonomics interview. He says
Many of the features we have launched were created by users including @replies, and there are more to come.
Twitter has developed a culture of end-user innovation. This is when the users of a social media system find innovative new uses for the system itself. Those new uses can then be developed into explicit features, or they can remain implicit. End-user innovation is extremely valuable because it allows users to customize the experience of using the system to make it more useful.
But from the point of view of designing this type of social media, what kind of design features can encourage end-users to come up with innovative uses of the system? This is the incentive version of the this problem; how can we design a system that encourages end-user innovation?
The most interesting part of this problem is that we do not know ahead-of-time what innovations the end-users will come up with, but we still want to encourage them. In many ways, this is similar to the user-contributed content problem; we don’t know what content users will contribute but we still want to encourage contribution. But innovations have slightly different properties. They are often patterns of contributions that others can pick up also. For example, on twtitter, using @username to reply, or using RT to mean re-tweet, and even using #hash-tags are just patterns in contributions that some users innovated that have now been coded into the system. Innovations are also less explicit; there is no place for me to type in my innovation like there is place for me to type in my content. I just have to do it and convince others to also.
We know some things about encouraging innovation from the economics literature. The major way we encourage innovation is the various forms of intellectual property. In particular, innovations are usually encouraged through patents: monopoly power over user of the innovation for a fixed period of time so that the creator can make lots of money off his innovation. That doesn’t work so well in social media; giving the person who came up with @replies monopoly power to control who can use them might stroke his or her ego, but I don’t think it is a good way to encourage people to innovate. It also strongly discourages adoption of innovations and derivative innovations, and discourages the system from codifying the innovation.
Another way that might work better is prize mechanisms. The classic example is the Ansari X-Prize: the $10 million dollar prize for the first private team to produce a working spaceship. A number of teams competed to win the prize and a large amount of innovation resulted. Similar prizes could be instituted in social media; for example the most innovative use of a tweet; best way to organize groups of individuals on flickr, etc. If you can come up with measurable goals, prizes might be a workable way to encourage innovation in social media systems.
But, there are still a lot of open questions in this area. What kinds of system features discourage innovation and force people into a single way of using the system? What kinds of features encourage innovation. How do you balance flexibility (which is important for innovation) and supporting specific uses? When is innovation harmful to a social media system? How do you set goals and prizes for innovation?
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