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And as Paco Underhill has written, make the aisles of your store wide enough that shoppers can browse without getting their butts brushed by other shoppers. (author: Seth’s Godin)

I think we can train ourselves to associate certain places with certain outcomes. There’s a reason they built those cathedrals and why you are conforatble working in certain corner at home instead of some other – think for the moment.

This article is sum of the things a good social site should have. It’s from my yestarday post with Joels video. You can watch that here.

1. Voting: Copied from Reddit, via Digg, voting allows people to vote up answers they think are good. Stack Overflow tweaked its voting algorithm, giving the person who asked the question special power to select one answer as the official answer that will rise to the top regardless of what the community voted. The second answer, of course is always the highest ranked community answer.
2. Tags: Tags allow users to specify perspective.
3. Editing: Taking a page out of Wikipedia, Stack Overflow allows users to edit both questions and answers; so answers could get better, rather than becoming “this frozen artifact on the Internet until the end of time,” which is typical of most forum threads.
4. Badges: Reward users with badges. Over time, the badges show credibility.
5. Karma: People are willing to do for free what they’re not willing to do for small amounts of money according to Spolsky and by offering karma, Stack Overflow encourages its users to do more. More Karma equals more privileges on the site.
6. Pre-search: Once you begin typing your question, Stack Overflow’s pre-search will do a quick search to see whether the question has been asked before and display the result for easy access and to prevent duplication issues.
7. Google is UI: Stack Overflow was built around the assumption that people will go to Google which will send them to the right page. Each URL has the name of the question; each URL is permanent and clean, Metatags, sitemaps; anything and everything was done to ensure Stack Overflow’s pages looked “reasonable to search engines.”
8. Performance: Ensuring answers are provided super fast was imperative.
9. Critical Mass: It’s imperative to have critical mass on day one; to ensure people are available to answer questions.

Anything missing?

Picture that! A collaborative site that runs on two servers, is managed by four people, and has attracted a third of its target demographic within six months of launch. A site that has had 800,000 posts submitted by its users in its short lifetime and has 16 million pageviews/month – and growing.

As we move from the era of computing into the era of the Internet, we no longer need to worry about computer-human interaction. What we do have to think about (in the era of social networking) is human to human interaction! You have to think as an anthropologist does.

In anthropology it’s very clear that the environment that you create influences people and how they behave. People will come into the environment and behave according to what you built in certain subtle ways; ways that you probably didn’t think about.

Enjoy the presentation it’s worth (a must if you are socal app developer/architect/planner) watching it!

Did Joel left something behind you think should be there in the soup? – lets discuss it.