I belong to a few communities and with all of them there seems to be a fine line between a good or bad user experience. To a certain extent, a system in my opinion, can only stay stable for so long, before a variety of factors kick in and a user no longer is enjoying the service they receive.

What makes a good user experience good? What makes a bad user experience bad? Why is it that websites seem to go in and out like trends. Will people soon be too cool for a MySpace page? Or is MySpace here to stay? All of these are questions we can ask, however the answers to all of these questions becomes null if a user is not enjoying their time on a site.

If one thinks about the life span of a popular site (or any product for that matter) there is a definite trend starting with the rise and ending with the fall. Narrowing down further, to sites with a spice of social web 2.0 goodness, one can see many sites that have risen lately, many sites striving to rise, and sites that have fallen. And looking even closer at the rise and the fall, one can see a trend going from too few users to too many users. The former leads to a site never getting wings, and the latter leads to a bloated system (in some cases) that is doomed to fail for various reasons.

Too Few Users

I will begin by stating the obvious, if you have the best possible idea/site in the world, and you don’t have any users, it will fail. But why? Part of the glorious benefit of belonging to a site with a hint of social goodness is the benefits one gains from all of the other users.

Digg allows me to see all the other news entries the rest of the community deems important with a fairly democratic voting system. I can participate and digg stories, as well as comments, up or down. Without people, none of this happens. Obvious right? Digg is a no-brainer, it needs people to make it move.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service, a social…bookmarking…service…MmmmMmm. Social, relating to society or its organization, Bookmarking, relating to a record or address of webpage, Service an action of helping or doing work for someone. Uh oh, I am going to state the obvious again, without a good sized user community, del.icio.us wouldn’t be useful. Wrong! Del.icio.us doesn’t suffer from too few users as it does from too many. There are many people using del.icio.us who aren’t using it’s too it’s full potential.

Having too few users in a community is a no-brainer on the path to never getting off the ground, however some sites do offer enough of a lift without the social side of things to function fairly successfully.

Too Many Users

Having too many users can tip the balance of a successful website in a few different ways. Anytime there is a whale, it’s going to attract sharks, or maybe the whale gets hungry and eats all the food in the sea. Metaphors and analogies are NEVER a good way to get to the point, let me elaborate.

Attracting Spammers - AKA the Shark Theory - Wherever there are big crowds, there is money to be made. Beggars aren’t on empty streets asking for change (at least the ambitious ones, ironic). The internet’s beggars are spammers. Hey look at this and click on me. In other words, the spammers are going to work to figure out how to get their message out to the most people in quickest way. The density of a very popular website is a sure fire way to achieve results. I wrote recently of del.icio.us spam I have been receiving through my RSS feed. Somewhere, someboty (gasp!) is populating the sites they are getting paid to promote into my del.icio.us feed. I get myspace messages and friend requests from people who are deleted by the time I get to looking at it. Sharks I tell ya. Not that either one of these services are doomed, but this is the kind of shit that really annoys users.

Trolls - Shark Theory Continued - Are there trolls on unpopular sites? I can’t remember cause I am so trendy. With a popular site full of Apple fanboys (guilty) there are bound to be a good number of Apple hating trolls. Trolls make reading through comments/forums annoying, decreasing user experience.

The Ego - When a site gets so big, a la MySpace, it may forget the users that go them there in the first place. Here’s a scenario: MySpace get so big that they start their own competing services to offer photo slides, skins, and video uploading services to their users, while at the same time shutting out all the services that allowed users to do that in the first place. No problem, they will just have to conform to “our” way. Anyone see the flaw in this logic? Maybe a person has built up their youtube profile equally as big as their myspace profile. Or maybe, social networking site x offers a cleaner interface and encourages you to piggyback on the profiles you have already created, people start moving, MySpace begins it’s fall. People don’t like their walled garden closing in on them, nor do they like unexpected change (look at Netscape and their blunder), be thoughtful with your upgrades.

Coolness - Just like it was once cool to dance like NSYNC (at least to me) it was also once cool to have a MySpace profile. Unfortunately, everyone got that, the service got popular they forgot about the users, and people started migrating. Have we really seen any nice improvements to MySpace since it got popular? Think about how decent hotmail seemed until Gmail came along. I’m getting off topic, but my point ultimately is that once you have a MySpace page and your mother has a page, maybe it’s time to ditch the service.

Conclusion

Ultimately the people pulling strings on these big sites need to achieve a balance. Don’t get too big unless you can be assured your users’ experience on the site isn’t compromised. If you’re small, start hustling (like you need me to tell you that) and get some users. I don’t think we have even come close to the ceiling on this social thing. The other day I sold my Mom on del.icio.us telling her about subscribing to other people’s tags. All we need is someone out there stating the obvious, and that’s what I do!

Cheers.

Popularity: 11% [?]