Other People
I’m just finishing off “Designing for the Social Web” by Joshua Porter. It is an excellent primer of the kind of things you need to be thinking about if you are building a web app that contains even a small amount of the “social”. Although if your web app is the most socially unconnected and closed-off piece of software out there you still need to know the sea you are swimming in, because social web applications are already the standard for what most users expect the web to be like.
Any kind of social feature is tapping into deep human wiring, millions of years old. This is the kind of stuff that got us past all those saber-tooths and mammoths. It’s very powerful and hence very terrifying to contemplate resting the success of a website on understanding it correctly.
More to come on this.