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. … »