Breaking Through the 1% Rule
The 1% rule has been getting some talk lately, and Particletree did a nice writeup on it. I think they’ve got something, but I also believe that the one percent can be (and, by some, has been) increased by several margins.
Digg sort-of works, but most (if not all) of its users are tech-savvy folk. And even of those, only a small percentage actually look through stories that haven’t made it to the homepage. Have you noticed how while a story is in the queue, it can take several hours to get enough votes in order to get onto the homepage, then all of a sudden votes start flying? It’s easy to vote on stuff that’s right in front of you.
Newsvine does a little bit better of a job. It allows people to create their own columns, gives them their own profiles, and lets them find news that interests them. The voting system, however, could use a little bit more incentive. Why should I vote on this story? Sure, I might help it get to the homepage, but why should I care?
Del.icio.us also does a fairly good job. The popular page is not the point of the bookmarking–I bookmark, because I want to save this link. The popular page just flows out of that. Again, however, their user base seems to be mostly web-savvy folk. Just take a look at some of the most popular tags: Blog, CSS, Design, JavaScript, Web 2.0… Hmm, I wonder who could be saving those? From what I can gather, most people don’t have a need to go through tagging all of their bookmarks and giving them descriptions just to have to go to this special page in order to see them. Sure, some browsers are incorporating Del.icio.us links, but the average user doesn’t have that capability. It makes much more sense to just “add to favorites.”
Now, Flickr gets it. The whole experience is based around me and what I want. I want to upload my photos for the world to see, I want to join groups so that I can increase my skill and give more publicity to my photos, I want to tag my photos so that others can find them, and I want to favorite photos so that I can find them again. The explore page is not the point of favoriting photos, I favorite these photos because I like them.
And of all these, who has the widest user base? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Flickr’s the clear-cut winner here. Take a look at some of these people’s profiles, they aren’t all web developers. Many are, yes, but a large percentage are just normal people who love photography–and that’s what it should be.
If Web 2.0 is going to work, we as developers need to start thinking like a normal person. People are selfish, and the best application will take advantage of that.
Remember this, and you really can’t go wrong.
Well, OK, you could still go wrong. But you’d have a better chance of not going wrong. 
[...] Update (2006-07-27 10:19:32): Es gibt sogar statistische Berechnungen für das Verhältnis von Menschen, die “raw data” liefern und solche, die nur was damit machen. Und diese 1% rule zu brechen, damit haben sich auch schon Leute beschäftigt. Vielleicht kann man das ja wirklich noch weiterdenken und was mit diesen Infos tun! [...]
[...] Da legst dich nieder! Was ist denn das? Eine Website, die mir eine eigene “Kolumne” anbietet, generiert aus all den Stories für die ich abstimme (bzw. die ich “digge“)? Mit eigener Subdomain? Aber hallo, das klingt doch interessant! Und das ganze sieht auch noch hübsch aus! Newsvine werde ich jetzt auf jeden Fall mal ausprobieren. Elliot Swan hat nicht nur über Newsvine geredet und von einem “etwas anderen Digg.com” gesprochen, sondern auch erwähnt, dass Newsvine mehr als nur das kann. Das ist das erste mal, dass mir jemand diese Seite schmackhaft gemacht hat und ich auf den Link klickte. Jetzt heißt es mal selber was zu tun. Wollte aber jetzt bloß dahin linken, weil es so schön ist. Mehr hab ich noch nicht. [...]
Emil Stenström posted something your post reminds me on some time ago. I think that the web content writers have to change their face a lot from tech-savvy folks to ordinary people interested in certain things. Look at Emil’s post for further details
I just wonder what we, the tech-savvy, can do to invite someone to contribute to the web. Flickr, sometimes YouTube, MySpace – they offer something that’s interesting and that people can use whenever they want easily. No pressure, no problems; but how do we get our grandma in front of the screen in fact, literally speaking? Some may want to write something about cooking, knitting or their live. Well, if I think about “some grandmas life” the grandma of a school mate comes to my mind who visited us in class a few years ago to talk about world war 2 and how they fled to the west because they feared the Russians.
Do people want to read stuff like that?
At least someone could use this kind of information to enhance his/her presentation for classes. A page where people can write about their life and sort these articles with tags and categories? Maybe some live online biography? Sorted by ‘date of happening’? Sounds too easy to really change anything – and I bet that’s existing already.
(btw: I love commenting here because of the titled input boxes on the left
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[...] Update: Elliot Swan schreibt etwas ähnliches. Scheint wirklich aufzufallen. [...]
[...] A blog post on breaking through the 1% rule [...]
Shoot, your comments could be a bit more user-friendly. Or maybe I’m just stupid.
Anyway, I face the difficult task of trying to translate Web 2.0 features to an audience that, in some cases, is barely capable of using simple tabbed navigation.
Luckily, my journalist training helps here — we often are charged with writing for an eighth-grade audience.
I think with the right explaination, anything — yes, even RSS feeds — can be made usable.
It’s a twisted world we live in. I agree with what you say. We need to broaden our user groups! The web savvy users are already swarmed with application that are customized to fit their needs. Still, there are more people for other groups online. If we focus on them instead we’ll start to see they really interesting stuff happening. Good post.
@Christian Tietze: Sounds like a group of blogs would serve it nicely.
@Patrick: Sorry ’bout that…quite a few people tend to do that.
I agree, I think this stuff can be made useful to the public, but first it has to be made for them. It’s not easy, but I think it can be done.
@Emil Stenström: Exactly.
[...] Thanks to Elliot for pointing me to this article. [...]
Man o man, I didn’t notice that you had gotten accepted into 9Rules. Congrats man!
That is all.
Thanks, Steven.