next*

Andrew Chen recently blogged about the 5 ways to break past the San Francisco echo-chamber.

Driven by blogs, friends, co-workers, and all the other channels of information, it's very easy to get excited about the next new thing rather than realize the eternal truth of technology: [...] Whether it's the iPhone, podcasting, Facebook apps, AJAX desktop, OpenSocial, data portability, microformats, or the other legions of buzzwords, there's a LOT of information inefficiency between Silicon Valley and the rest of America.

Amen to that, brother. I'm going to go one step further and say that the echo chamber resonates outside of the San Francisco Bay Area and extends to the tech community in general. The Web 2.0 movement seems to be all about user-based community sites, and that's great. But the strategy for most of these products is to release them to a mainstream audience; you can't assume that these folks are going to have same design aesthetics and the same technological know-how as the folks who built the product.

So, let me tell you a story: before BravoNation, I previously worked on Yahoo! 360. Say what you will about the service, but there has been an active community on Yahoo! 360 in the United States - and the people there aren't latte-sipping, city-living wannabe yuppies or hipsters like you or me - they're middle-class people living all over United States, like so many Yahoo! users. Some are blue-collar. When they joined 360, many were unfamiliar with the term "blog," much less "tags," and every once in a while I would have to help out a user with a Yahoo ID like, say, sexy_mommy_79* with her profile page full of unicorns riding on glittery rainbows.

It's really easy to make fun of a page full of unicorns riding on glittery rainbows. Really, really easy. But then you have to think - why did she design her page to look like that? What is an ugly experience to you is a way for her to customize her profile page and take ownership of it.

And there lies the fine line - companies like Yahoo! and Google are leading these innovative technological movements, which in turn attract a tech-savvy crowd. We go to conferences where we chat it up with our own folk. We launch products and we call it "beta." But at the end of the day, products and people exist beyond our incredibly geeky bubble. It's up to us, the developers of social media, to showcase new technologies while fostering a good community experience for all users.

(* Flickr photo credit: jaycoxfilm. And obviously, sexy_mommy_79 isn't a real Yahoo! ID, but I've come across Yahoo! IDs very similar. And if it is your Yahoo! ID, my bad. You're, um, very sexy.)

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Hey everyone, Ernie here - among other duties, I'm one of the good folks who help set up Next*.

This is just a quick post to let you know that we currently have a small bug in our system where if your blog comment has an apostrophe, your comment goes straight into our spam folders. As apostrophes are used commonly - especially in blog comments - we'll get this fixed as soon as we're able to.

Unless you're the commenter writing about home loans and viagra. In which case, we are actively censoring your content. You know who you are. (As a footnote, this might be the first time ever that the word "viagra" has ever been mentioned on a Yahoo! blog, albeit ironically.)

Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your patience!

Good News, Everyone!
Looks like I've got the comment bug fixed. I'm not particularly happy about what was happening or the fix that had to be made, but things should be working fine now. As an added bonus, looks like your quote bearing comments weren't lost, they were merely buried behind the shed, so I've recovered them. (Well, most. There were a few spammer comments in there.)

Needless to say, if you still have problems, leave a (obviously quote free) comment and I'll try to fix it without swearing as much as I did this time.

jr conlin
(back-end monkey)

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