A Perspective on Location Services, Mobile Entrepreneurship & Startup Life

If you’re new to developing social applications, it can be difficult to immediately grasp how good applications facilitate fun and meaningful social experiences. To accelerate your learning, we’ve come up with a list of a few light-hearted recommendations around building good social applications.

1. Engage Quickly
2. Mimic Look and Feel
3. Enable Self Expression
4. Make it Dynamic
5. Expose Friend Activity
6. Browse the Graph
7. Drive Communication
8. Build Communities
9. Solve Real World Tasks

[Source: Open Social - Social Design Best Practices]

Why do I blog this? Social media applications often provide an overwhelming user interface with a bad experience taking no care about the special characteristics of social media from self expression to the social graph. The Open Social wiki provides a very good starting point to think more about this topic.