Isaac Sukin

Facebook hasn't switched everyone to the new Timeline profiles yet, but they will soon.

I've been building open-source social networking software for the past four years, which has given me the unique opportunity to be involved in a wide variety of projects to build social networks and related tools. My experience has revealed a number of insights into the way that user interaction patterns are designed on websites that encourage a website's engagement and adoption to the point that it can grow organically from almost nothing – or, conversely, that doom a website to silent irrelevance in a distant corner of the web.

Finding the Balance between “Contribute Now” and “Register First”

People don’t like to sign up for things. Signing up is mentally equated with receiving spam marketing emails. For example, at a blood drive event near me last year, only a handful of people signed up ahead of time, but almost six times more people showed up.

Web designers face a similar dilemma. It’s important that users sign up for websites where users contribute content, both to reduce spam and to track and identify users’ contributions. But often users don’t want to sign up, even though they want to contribute – and the barrier of signing up will keep some people from contributing. I’ve experienced this personally; especially when dealing with something contentious, people often don’t feel comfortable giving an unknown website their identity in this age of limited privacy.

As the maintainer of the Facebook-style Statuses module for the Drupal content management system, I like to read around the web and see what kinds of statistics and innovations I can find on comparable systems. This week, there was a gold mine that indicates that the "status movement" is going to grow its already expansive online presence exponentially.

I recently compiled a list of things that increase the "wow" factor in a website theme, in anticipation of building a new theme for one of my websites.