Social Networks and Inertia
When it comes to social networks we geeks can be very fast and nimble. We’ll jump into any new social network that crops up just to check it out. Besides Facebook and Twitter, most geeks have probably also played with Pinterest, Instagram, Path, Google+, Stamped, GetGlue, etc. Checking out new stuff on the Internet is in our DNA. It’s what we do. When something better comes along we leave the old behind. Remember MySpace? Right.
But the mainstream population doesn’t move quite as fast. Almost everybody we know is on Facebook now but it took years for non-geeks to understand what Facebook is, why they should be a part of it and to sign up and participate. Facebook’s 800 million users aren’t going to start using another social network just because it’s technically better. Geeks don’t care because we’ll go wherever we want to anyway. However, there are some smaller online communities where the inability to move to something new can be a problem. Take Alameda Freecycle for example.
Freecycle is a system where members in a community can exchange things. Instead of throwing something in the garbage you give it to someone else in your local community who wants it. We have our own freecycle community in Alameda as does many other cities and towns. It’s a good thing because it keeps stuff out of landfills while allowing people to easily get rid of stuff they don’t want anymore. Obviously, we need a way to communicate what’s being offered/taken/wanted and arrange pickups. Alameda Freecycle uses Yahoo Groups to facilitate this communication.
I see a few problems with using Yahoo Groups for this purpose.
It’s Yahoo. The usability of the web interface is horrible.
It’s a mailing list. This is the real root the problem as it requires the user to do a lot of menial work in order to be an effective participant in the community.
You need a Yahoo ID or an account with another Yahoo-approved 3rd party authentication provider like Facebook or Gmail. You just can’t type any email address into a field and press the ‘join’ button.
You are responsible for organizing the messages. By default emails will start appearing in your inbox. You need to read/delete them or move them somewhere else. If you choose to move them somewhere else you’ll eventually need to deal with them when enough have piled up to become a problem. Old messages will continue to hang around on your computer long after they cease to be relevant. You’re responsible for getting rid of them.
If you do choose to keep your freecycle messages in a mail folder separate from everything else you’ll need to create a mail filter to make sure they go there. It needs to be a server-side filter because chances are you have more than one device you receive email on. You probably also want to create a rule to automatically mark the emails as ‘read’ so you don’t see a ridiculously high unread count on your email icon.
You have the option of subscribing to “digest” emails which cuts down on the number of emails you receive per day. Instead of getting individual emails as they’re sent you get fewer emails with multiple messages per email. If you do subscribe to the digest and want to be on the ‘taking’ side of freecycling you’ll always be behind since you’re not getting the messages in real-time. In my experience, items tend to go to the first responder.
For casual members it’s annoying to always be receiving email from the group when you only participate occasionally. It seems like a really inefficient use of resources to have about 60 emails delivered to my computer, iPhone and iPad each day when I ignore them most of the time.
When you post to the group you need to know the correct email address to send to. If it’s not already in your address book you need to search it out. Casual users aren’t going to remember the email address when they only post something once every few weeks.
You need to remember the format of the subject line when posting to the group. Frequent users will have this memorized but casuals users aren’t going to remember the subject line format.
It’s difficult to include images. The best you can do is upload an image to an image hosting service (normal people know about those, right?) and put a link to it in your email. People reading the message need to select the link which will take them to the image in a different web page or application. This is not a good user experience. For a community based on exchanging physical objects I would think images of those objects would be pretty important.
A quick search of the App Store shows there are better options out there. Yard Sale is one example. It’s a very nicely designed iOS app which facilitates selling and buying things with people around you. You can also list items for free. Images are a central part of the app. This app and would work perfectly for the Alameda Freecycle community except that nobody uses it. For it to be of any use you need a critical mass of users in your neighborhood to be using it. That’s the big problem. How do you get enough people to move over to a better better platform in order to force everyone else to follow along?
It’s a shame that in 2012 we’re still using a glorified listserv for something as important as the freecycling community when much better alternatives are sitting around begging to be used.
