This is an open letter to @Wossy, which both seeks his ideas and a discussion amongst the book club community.
The book club website, which can be found at http://bit.ly/wossybc (or wossybc.com soon), was initially created as a response to @Wossy’s tweet asking for thoughts on how a forum could work. It was never really meant for the big time, especially as it’s first iteration had an unclean design and lacked some of the vital features it really needed. Over the next few weeks the book club saw a decreasing trend in activity as we discussed The Strain, Me Talk Pretty One Day and Leaves of Grass. The forum was hard to engage with, and was easy to get lost in. There was a lot of data, with lots of people writing lots of stuff in a condensed time period. This made it hard to follow conversations – especially as replies weren’t threaded for the first few weeks. There was no mobile version, so anybody on the road at the book club meeting time got left out. It was also hard to communicate, with the site lacking functionality for @Wossy to send a little email or tweet or DM to people letting them know what’s happening with the book club.
Quite a lot of this changed, though, with a redesign implemented just before the book club … collapsed. The design was changed to have a cleaner menu bar and simpler functions. The site moved from being a forum to being a book club with discussions focussed on books rather than topics. A version of the site optimised for iPhone, and compatible with BlackBerry and Android, was made the default for users on mobile devices. Functionality and interactions that we see on the twitter.com web site were implemented on the book club: mentions, favourites and a delightful little popup to let you know when (and how) to refresh the page. Threaded conversations made it easier, but it’s hard to find an example of an actual discussion ever happening. There were no emails when someone wrote something directly to you, and the vast quantity of tweets being sent when people joined meant that everybody deactivated tweeting by the time it came to writing a reply. What would have been cool is to have been notified by email that someone had replied, had a mention show up in your timeline, and to have had a small popup show in the website (like a Facebook notification) with a link to see your discussion.
Unfortunately, though, there weren’t enough users left in the environment whilst this was all being developed and changed. I reckon, though, that with a few changes we can make something really cool and pretty damn popular. Here are my suggestions:
Reviews, not posts
Rather than writing a post, users should either write a review or a comment on a review. Each user can write one review for a book, and they get a grace period to edit and change their content. Once it’s written and they’re happy with it, the review is placed in the discussion on that book. Reviews could be shown in two columns. On the left there would be reviews that users have voted up – so the best reviews. On the right would be the latest reviews, reviews from users who normally write really good reviews, and a selection of random reviews that the system or a moderator thinks are good.
By default comments on a review are collapsed, but when a user engages in a review, the comments and a % like/% dislike count displays. Like and comment buttons should always be there, but the conversations need to be sorted and kept in proper places.
Short and tweet-like
Whilst book reviews need to be fairly long and meaty, it would be best if we could show users a short, tweet-like review first. This excerpt/summary/title would be tweeted from the user’s account, and attract another user’s attention like a headline, rather than being overwhelmed by a short essay. We could either make a summary ourselves, or ask the user to sum up or title their review.
Voting and rating
Two new interactions would help the book club gain traction both as a book club and as a way of finding good reviews. As I’ve mentioned, users should be able to vote a review up if they think it’s good, with the best reviews getting the limelight of being featured on the homepage. Bad or spammy reviews would go down, and all that junk being posted by (as yet) unknown authors would disappear toward the bottom. Users should also be able to rate a book out of 5, to give a quick summary of where the book club places the book. A rating system like this would also allow a neat little sticker to be placed on books, with a picture of @Wossy and the reader’s verdict. Which publisher wouldn’t want their books to be endorsed by the Twittering classes? (And, as we all know, @Wossy might want a new job too!)
Development platform
It would be awesome to let users build apps and add to the book club as a platform, potentially expanding the system and its content in to other areas. Creating a JSON based API would let developers create widgets and tools – perhaps a native iPhone app or the ability for a publisher to embed reviews in to their website. In this space monetization has huge potential – publishers could add iAd’s for related books, for instance. Whilst it would be cool to open up the development community, we can always restrict platforms just to our apps created in-house. Best of all we already have the skills within the community to create a couple of apps, which means we have the opportunity to perfect our API. We still have to sort out authentication though, as we use a positive connection to Twitter in place of a login powered by username and password.
Social integration
In the last year there have been huge developments in the social media space. Twitter is launching Annotations, a product that allows developers to append information to a tweet. For instance, a tweet from the book club telling a user’s followers about their review can carry metadata including the name of the book, the rating given out of 5 and the content of the review. It’s not clear how this information will be implemented yet, but it’s likely that popular clients will display annotations soon – at least for Twitter’s recommended types, which include books and reviews. Protocols such as Facebook’s Open Graph mean that we can integrate other social networks too: “Ben likes The Strain on the Wossy Book Club“.
Keeping in touch
The site already uses the favoured Twitter authentication technology, OAuth, which means we don’t have to go anywhere near the user’s username and password. This does mean we have to ask for the user’s email address, but we don’t force user’s to validate it. Development of the Twitter API with OAuth allows us to write even more tweets and send even more direct messages than before, as well as making it easier for users to take Twitter actions (for instance following a user) right from pages within the book club. Making it easier to follow the book club and being able to send more messages and interactions every hour will make it easier to keep in touch with the community. Improved communication is vital to developing the book club.
Video
Nobody needs reminding that video rules the web these days, and whether we implement HTML5 or Flash, there are exciting opportunities for adding films, interviews and a bit of commentary from @Wossy. Monetization can follow here, with adverts placed inside the video.
Administer
Moderators and administrators should be able to control all the data on the site nice and easily. Using structures that already exist and libraries of code I’ve already written, we can enable a really clever but easy-to-use administration panel for managing the site from.
These are just my initial ideas on functionality and interactions. Design is something to work on once we know exactly what the site should be doing, although it plays a major role in dictating content. I’d love to hear everybody’s ideas, so if you have any suggestions please throw them in!