Nicholas GallI’ve read Clay’s musings over the years (I even blogged about his concept of “mass amateurization” back in 2004 — but I’m embarrassed to admit I misspelled his last name as “Sharky”), but I’ve never heard him speak. Clay Shirky gave a keynote at the Gartner Web Innovation Summit last night and it was excellent. One of my favorite concepts is that when it comes to social software — especially software designed to enable individuals to self-organize into groups — as the software evolves it should get simpler, with fewer features, not more. As his example he used Bronze Beta – a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan site, which in its 2.0 version has fewer threaded discussion list features not more. If the point is to “Only Connect” as E.M. Forster famously said, then social sofware should be honed to do just that.
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Less is More — Especially in Social Interactions October 15, 2008 at 6:00 pm
[...] colleague Anthony Bradley posted a thoughtful response to my post Web 2.0: Now with Fewer Features. First he wonders why I didn’t mention Gall’s Law. Well, If I were to cite a law it [...]
2 Evolving Social Applications to Less? January 28, 2009 at 10:28 am
[...] cohort Nick Gall posted on Web 2.0: Now With Fewer Features. I’m surprised he didn’t mention Gall’s Law. That is John Gall’s Law. I [...]