Crunchberry Project

We Americans like to judge things. We vote for a new leader every fourth year. Pick favorite teams in baseball. And befriend only those deemed popular in middle school. So it was bound to happen. After years of judging each other, we took the game online, and ratings were born. 

There’s binary – the Ebert model – a quick thumbs up/thumbs down. Ratings done by assigning points or stars. Or there’s the more complex. Like the Topix model where users can judge comments as “brilliant,” “nuts,” “clueless,” “racy,” and a whole host of other descriptions. 

Topix

In our weekly design team planning meeting we decided we couldn’t build commenting structures without addressing ratings. But the tricky part is building a system that will not just be a copy of existing models, but rather, be uniquely targeted at each commenting structure we have built. This means we must have a separate model for the question and answer structure, short format and this week’s letters to the editor format. 

Josh and I have made some progress on a rating system for the question and answer commenting structure we designed a few weeks ago. 

We didn’t like the idea of rating questions, at least in the traditional sense. As we are told often throughout life, there are no bad questions and we don’t want to discourage question asking by judging people for their inquiries. We are, however, designing a rating system for questions where the most popular questions would be highlighted. After a question is asked users with the same question can click a box that says, “I have this question too!” This will give priority to the questions readers most want answered, and possibly motivate the reporter to further investigate the story until the answer is found. 

For ratings on answers, we are combining the Topix model with traditional binary commenting. Users click either a thumbs up or thumbs down icon to vote an answer as good or bad. When users click the thumbs up icon, they are given a drop down menu of choices for how to positively rate the comment including “interesting,” “agree,” “helpful,” “insightful,” “informative,” etc. Conversely, when users click the thumbs down icon they are given a drop down menu of choices for how they can negatively rate the comment, including “disagree,” “offensive,” “off-topic,” “incorrect,” “rude,” etc. 

This system is not entirely brand new, it’s not off the wall, but it just might work. It maintains the speed and ease of use of binary ratings, while providing a little more insight into the content of the comments so the user can decide which comments are worth their time. 

While designs for that rating system move forward, Stuart and I are still busy at work designing a rating system for the letters to the editor model. We are struggling with a way to make ratings innovative and uniquely tied to this commenting structure, without adding too many bells and whistles.

What do you think? How would you want to rate letters to the editor? We’re all ears – ready to judge your suggestions and determine the winner.

So …. Plurk.  No, I did not just use onomatopoeia to recreate the sound of dropping a wet wash cloth, Plurk, a combination of People +Lurk, and Play + Work is a short format lifestream social medium.  

Lifestreaming a la Plurk

With Plurk users can document the things they are thinking, feeling, asking, sharing, wondering and many other  ”qualifiers” in a chronologically organized graphical user interface.

Users can earn Karma for their own and their friends’ activity on the site.  Earning Karma can bring rewards such as emoticons and some other rights, such as naming conventions.  If you don’t plurk frequently enough, your karma decreases, as well as if you attempt to friend someone and they decline friendship.  

While Twitter is still the biggest kid on the short format block, Plurk has garnered some attention lately from tech-bloggers such as CNET and SomewhatFrank.   But Plurk-user Bloggeries contends that Plurk’s certain je ne sais quoi is Cliques: a method of grouping some of your contacts and friends into a quick and easy assembly that you can quickly share plurks with.

Some might say they have social networking fatigue with the plethora of BrightKites, Blip.fms, Twitters, Facebooks, MySpaces, Tumblrs, Pownces and Plaxos, and after looking at so many, I am inclined to agree with those folks, but there is always going to be room for improvement on how we get together on the Internet, so the search must go on.

In response to Kayla’s post the other day, we were called out for not getting real enough. Aron’s right. In the rush to start building, we got ahead of ourselves. Team Crunchberry needs a mantra.

As the folks at 37signals put it in their superb book Getting Real, we’ve got to:

Explicitly define the one-point vision for your app

What does your app stand for? What’s it really all about? Before you start designing or coding anything you need to know the purpose of your product — the vision. Think big. Why does it exist? What makes it different than other similar products?

So! What is it we’re doing?

First, as you’ve already heard, we’re experimenting with the format of conversations around news. By changing the shape of comments, we hope to improve their quality — by guiding the conversation and by making it easier to participate.

Second, we’re experimenting with the possibilities of Facebook Connect, a very neat offering from Facebook that will launch in the upcoming weeks. The idea is this: instead of having a login on our site, Facebook users can login seamlessly with a button click.

Why could we want to do this? Besides lowering the mental overhead of forcing a user into signing up for yet another account, we’ll be able to play with real, established social networks. (And without expecting folks to set up a friends list on a site that none of my friends use!)

For instance, when a user makes a comment, we’ll push it to their Facebook feed. Will you be more likely to comment if you know your friends will see what you have to say? Will you be less likely to act like a jackass? We’re hoping so.

The Big Idea by luckyjimmy

So! What’s the Big Idea?

I’ll be sure to bring up our lack of mantra as an issue at our iteration review tomorrow afternoon, bur I’ll try and start off the conversation with a few whacks at it…

Let people speak where they’ll be heard.

Don’t be a jackass, your friends are watching.

Or maybe:

Conversations need structure and an audience.

It’s decided. As Stuart noted one of the super features we are beginning to develop is comment structures. 

This week Stuart and I are designing a question and answer structure for comments. We decided to tackle this structure first because it has come up so often in our class discussions that we had to take a longer look. Whatever we come up with by Friday will then be passed off to Brian and Ryan, our programmers, who will build the system next week.

mikemindel/Flickr

We will likely be designing three additional structures throughout the next few weeks. We have a lot of great, innovative ideas for different comment structures – and that is the problem. An argument could be made for any of these ideas, so what we really need is feedback.

Here are the comment structures up for consideration:

Letters to the Editor (much like the Salon.com model)

Users would write a headline and more formal letter-style comment. Could include an option for editors to highlight the best letters to feature prominently on the website or in the print product. 

claireblang/flickr

Polling

This comment structure is designed for people who don’t have a lot of time. One to three questions at the end of the story, users submit their votes and see results. 

the brownhorse/flickr

Ratings

Quick votes by users. Giving stars, thumbs up/down, or points to comments. The top rated could be displayed prominently. Users could also choose to display only those comments with a rating of 3 stars or higher.

Moderated by user (much like the Slashdot model) 

Users post comments. Other users (or users with special moderating privileges) give points to those comments they deem interesting, intelligent, etc. Users can choose to only display comments with X number of points, or “interesting” ratings. 

Short format (much like Twitter)

Users are only allowed 200 characters to make their comment.

Opinion disappears

In an effort to foster intelligent discussion, not based on opinion rants, this structure makes comments containing unsubstantiated opinion disappear in a shorter amount of time than other comments, such as anything supported by a citation or reference and questions. 

Waffle Whiffer/Flickr

Mad Libs

Users leave comments in this format: “I feel _________ about _________________.” Could feature a drop down menu of choices. 

Annotation/citation/reference/footnote

Allows users to make a comment or site an additional source at a specific point in the article. 

One-click comments

Users click buttons at the end of the story with general statements about how they feel about an article. Examples: “This story frustrates me,” “This article offends me,” “This is awesome,” and “This is well-researched.”

Format 

Allows users to choose the format in which they leave comments. Could include replying via video and/or audio. 

Live chat

Registered users can see other users who are logged into the site and begin a live conversation with them about a particular story. This comment would be visible to the public and displayed on the side of the article. Other users could jump into the conversation at any point. 

We want your comments on every blog post, but we especially NEED your comments on this post. What’s interesting to you? What are your top three? Why? Are there any models/ideas out there that we missed?