I’ve been hearing about NPR’s new social networking feature for a while now, thanks to its progenitor, the talented and affable Andy Carvin.
Today, I realized I couldn’t wait any longer. Given that we know that a large portion of our readership is employed by or married to someone employed by NPR, I feel like I’m cheating Andy if I don’t jump in as early as possible.
My first impression: At least it’s better than the “New Facebook.” I know that’s harsh. New Facebook sucks. But it’s still Facebook. It’s still a major time-drain for a lot of people.
But more to the point, Facebook put a lot of money and time into making something worse than what they started with.
NPR Community is, for the time being, an excessively simple implementation of social networking. And there’s something funky with the layout – headlines butt up to the edge of the browser window, which I’ve always hated.
But if Andy Carvin continues to work the way I know he can work, NPR Community will only expand the functionality of NPR.org in a convenient and easy-to-understand manner, and will do so with limited cost to NPR as a whole.
I’m not saying he’s a miracle worker, but… yeah, I am saying that.
Facebook gets massive money, and then starts sucking. They take a relatively unassuming – and therefore effective – exercise in translating existing communities from the real world to the Web, and transform it into a swollen behemoth every bit as bloated and annoying as MySpace.
The NPR Community, as it now stands, is little more than an account that makes posting a comment easier, and allows you to see what other users are listening to and commenting on. If you have an account on Boing Boing, you know pretty much what this is.
This is Facebook without collegiate drama, without crazy apps. This is good.
Andy Carvin works for an entity that tends to shoot itself in the online foot, but I have complete faith that the NPR Community will only improve from here.
Real social networking seems to succeed only when those in charge don’t quite get it. God forbid Twitter ever starts making money – they’ll probably boost posts to 280 charachters, thereby deleting everything they stand for.
One Comment
I think it’s a fair assessment to say that so far, it’s not much more than creating a profile and commenting. There have been a few factors at play. One big thing is the need to redesign the entire site. We’ve got a team of folks here working on a major redesign, which is slated to roll out next year. Because it literally takes a year to do a redesign like that, we had to decide whether to wait until it’s ready and have community tools integrated throughout the site, or if we start with the basic and force them into the current templates. We decided to go for the latter, because we didn’t think users would want to wait for basic commenting features until 2009.
We also decided to take a staggered approach to rolling out features. For example, later this fall we’ll add tools similar to Facebook groups, giving shows and stations the ability to form communities with their own bulletin boards, user-generated photos/video, event listings and the like. Again, we could have waited until those tools were ready, but the more functionalities we layer into a release, the more complex and time consuming that release gets.
Lastly, there’s the buy-in factor – getting buy-in from NPR journalists and staff. We’ve been pleased with how supportive our colleagues have been, but for a lot of them, this is very new territory. By rolling out certain features in smaller batches, it makes it easier for us to train everyone and get them thinking about the best ways to integrate these tools into their journalistic activities. So for starters, we’re encouraging staff to create profiles and join the discussion threads. As they get comfortable with that, giving them the tools to create communities with user-generated content will be an easier step for them.
Hope that makes sense. -andy
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