Social Application Design Methods  by Luke Wroblewski January
22, 2006  Web applications have long outgrown the interaction
limitations found on the early Web. Today’s online services
enable people to do much more than navigate from page to page
and fill in forms. The ability to communicate, collaborate, and
even create is present in many Web applications. This increase
in possibility, however, does not come without consequence.
It’s not uncommon to find a “social” Web application that
enables users to email, rate, review, tag, save, share,
subscribe to, discuss, and distribute content. It’s also likely
that these activities produce playlists, favorites,
recommendations, trackbacks, related lists, user profiles, and
more. When you add in the metadata about a content object such
as source, quality, date, location, description, category,
title, format, size, etc. –you are looking at a lot of
information and interactions. The sheer quantity of these
actions and their outcomes can ultimately overwhelm the conten