Rethinking cookie cutter websites: ugc ugc ugc

It’s a truism that cookie cutter websites are bad things. Poor knock off copies. Mercado Libre vs Ebay, or just about anything yahoo does. Take somebody else’s idea and do the same thing, with your own twist.

It’s the kind of thinking you get from folks hiring elance and odesk developers. Fast cheap, and kind of like what joe was doing over there. Back when i was working on Odeo somebody posted wanting to pay $1000 for a clone of the site.

But if we think about it a little more we can realize there is some value there. Really nothing we do is original or new. We’re always riffing off of each other. When somebody does something which is NOT copying and adapting from others, then things don’t work. An idea which is “ahead of it’s time” is perhaps an idea which is to original and insufficiently derivative.

We live in a world which places the truly original, paradigm shifting ideas above others. The lone Einstein who goes off and reinvents the world. It wasn’t Ted Nelson’s hypermedia that changed the world, but the community of folks who mashedup gopher and hypertext decades later. We need people working on crazy reinventing the world ideas, but mostly those folks fail. Even if they do come up with great ideas, they will be ignored.

Most of the creative work we do is copying and deriving from ourselves. It’s a community of people who come up with ideas and build things together. Sure one person might do the design, another the coding, it is their work, but the ideas floating around can’t really be owned. We’re derivative and that’s ok. Relevant work, useful arts, are derivative. A user interface must be derivative for it to be useful.

And websites?

So, how does this get back to websites? Websites are my craft, they are what i create. Sure i actually work on the code behind them, but the goal is to create websites for people. Even things like Fire Eagle, which mostly get used by software to talk to other software, is really about people. I’ve been building websites for well over a decade, and will probably keep doing it, I enjoy what i do.

So then the question becomes, what kind of websites to build. Well we could do the standard cookie cutter idea, copy somebody else’s thing whole hog. Or we could do flickr for video, twitter for xyz, take somebody else’s concept and change the nouns.

But if we step back a bit we realize that interesting websites are about sharing things. Jyri says what’s being shared are social objects and while he has 5 steps, the important ones are what’s being shared how. The noun and the verb. I share photos by uploading them.

What does that look like? Well Matt Jones of dopplr says they are sharing trips as the social object, and the verb is to plan. Once you get the frame to think about it’s pretty easy to see what people are doing. So then you’ve got Platial, Mapufacture, and google maps are competing in the space creating and sharing maps online.

For me the idea that what we should be doing is creating a way for people to share something together, that’s what we’re doing in social media, has taken a while to become clear. Sure Twitter is a microblogging service, or a many to many message routing system, but really, most importantly, it’s a way to share what’s going on in my life.

Back to the cookie cutter thing

Instead of copying something which is already successful, I’ve been thinking about how to decide what’s interesting to work on. The first step is to find something people value, something they are sharing with others, and which makes them happy already.

Here’s an example, i used to play ultimate frisbee. Teams play in tournaments all around the world, and each one has a distinct culture. The way players used to find out about cool tournaments was over the rec.sport.disc usenet group and at parties during the tournament. Teams want to know what’s cool to go to, but everybody’s definition of cool is different. For example, the hyper competitive teams like UCSB want to play hard all day then get drunk at night. Other teams want play naked, smoke a bowl, and sample the field side BBQ. There’s no good way for people navigate that social space. A website which let people share about the tournaments would be very meaningful to the small world of ultimate frisbee. What they need, the sites, tools, information being shared, model of permissions and openness, are distinct to that community.

But isn’t that yahoo, friendster, myspace, facebook, twitter…?

Isn’t there a generic one size fits all platform which will do this? Perhaps not. Right now facebook reigns supreme, and it’s because it does a lot of the sharing right. It’s also because they are able to make things work much better having a semi-walled garden. What’s not at all clear to me is if it’s possible, or even desirable to have one big site. Even with the F8 platform, i’ve only got one kind of relationship. Is what’s good for keeping in touch with college and work buddies good for finding a cool fall tournament to go play frisbee at? Sometimes.

Sometimes not. When communities get big they tend to regress towards the mean. The way you share one kind of information, and with whom, is not how you want to share other information.

Take Flickr for example. Most people use flickr to share snapshots with their family. Some people use it to become better photographers and show off their stuff. Others use it as liberated space for their own very niche subcultures, often sexual or deviant. The same space, properly segregated works pictures of your kids and eroticized pictures of 6 inch tall women. The reason it works is that flickr is very good at creating spaces and knowing how to create a space for a self managed community. It’s only by knowing a LOT about sharing photos, the reasons people do it, and the spaces they need, that you start creating something wonderful. The Facebook photo gallery on the other hand is really great for sharing the kinds of photos you’d take at a party, on a trip, visiting friends. The ability to mark up and link to who in which photo is amazing. It’s something which would actually hurt members of the tiny women fetish community.

So, one size fits all doesn’t work for political reasons, it creates incredible centralization of power. But if it were just politically bad, that wouldn’t be enough to stop it. The ways and with whom we share things are contextual. I’m sure the tiny women folks would rather not use their real names, like facebook requires, perhaps for good reason. The rules of the game, the constraints, matter. What you can do, how you share, what you share, all of these things are which there can be no universal solution. It is this dynamic which will keep facebook, or anything else, from taking over the whole of the web.

So what should i build?

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot since I left Yahoo Brickhouse. At brickhouse we spent a lot of time discussion what to build, how to go about building innovative things. What made sense for us, for yahoo, for brickhouse. Now that i’m not working for big purple any more, i’ve got to answer the same question, what do i do, what do i build.

One option is you do consulting, and you build what the client wants, not what they say they want, but you talk them through discovering what they really want. These days everybody seems to say they want facebook. That’s being to cookie cutter. Copying the image of what works elsewhere without understanding the underlying meaning. Facebook lets people share what’s going on in their lives and present an image of themselves through that. Clients say they want facebook, but really they are trying to achieve something else, and they don’t know how to ask for it.

People want to share. If you are an Oracle DBA, you want to learn about and share information about your work. Server configuration, optimization, and stored procedures. Sharing and learning, creating community in the context of Oracle DBA’s means solving their needs, knowing what they need to share and how. Some of that might be snippets of SQL, but some of it might be sharing how hot shit they are, and how when they are looking for a new job you should hire them.

What will i build?

The ideas i’ve been mulling over, hacking on, and playing with are how to share things i’m personally interested in doing. Places where you see somebody is already sharing, but in a broken way. An example i like is Localism, it’s a realestate website, but instead of sharing property listings, it creates a space for agents to share information about communities. It’s the hidden knowledge that real estate agents have, and creating a site for it helps some agents show off how damned well they know their beat.

Find something which needs to be shared, which is being shared but poorly, and build a new way of doing it which better serves the sharers. To share is a fundamental human need. It’s why solitary isolation is considered a horrible punishment. We live in a world where we have a multitude of different identities, and every one of them is reflected in a community of others. In thinking of what to do next, i’m trying to find out how to server individuals participating in their communities.