I’m still in awe of the essence of the Web: connection and collaboration on a previously unimaginable scale. Yet I also feel like these connections waste my time. Not because anything in old media can provide them more effectively, but because the tools that make up the social web are still in a very early stage of evolution and they create a lot of unnecessary waste. This waste is a consequence of the Seven Digital Sins. … »

The defining characteristic of social media is a revolutionary undermining of the distinction between producers and consumers of media. Instead of producing content, social media services merely facilitate user interaction. Given this, one would have thought that the tenets of User-Centred Design (UCD) would be highly pertinent to the design of social media. In fact it is very difficult to find a major social media service which was created via a genuine UCD process (almost as difficult as finding an interaction designer who does not wax lyrical about the importance of UCD). Blogger, craigslist, Delicious, eBay, Facebook, Flickr, Gaia Online, Last.fm, LiveJournal, Skype, Wikipedia: none of these pioneering legends of social media were born out of the ethnographic observation techniques, ‘personas’, ’scenarios’, low-fidelity prototyping or constant pre-development testing that characterise UCD. Why don’t UCD techniques seem to be necessary for the creation of great social media? I propose five main reasons, not all of which are peculiar to social media. … »