Monday, March 12th @ 11:30 am
Matt Mullenweg Founder, WordPress
Problem in scaling community
forum w/out anyone in it – a bunch of empty rooms
a blog w/no comments “hey, what do you think?”
friendster
no comments available blog
slashdot traffic decline
What is scaling?
be as useful fot the last 100k ppl as the fist 100k ppl
have the same experience as a large concert as a half filled room
1. Good Foundation
Start as simply as possible (big party small room)
constitution vs. federal register 900pgs
break down to the simplest thing you can reasonably articulate
“everything that is currently free will always be free”
“we will never sell your email address”
Don’t just promise, visualize
2. Bootstrap
Be your most passionate user!
must be crazy about what you’re doing because nobody else is
Talk to people – get outside to do it.
Caterina of Flickr used to manually introduce people to each other when Flickr was just started out
Pre-moderate before things get bad
3. Let go
your fans know your better than you do – your fans know you (or what you’re doing) better than you yourself
i.e. wordpress ideas – form to put in ideas and vote on them – 487 ideas and 28000 votes
pattern for gathering feedback
*April 23rd WP2.2 release*
4. Open Source
about a process and involving ppl, the community
5. Embrace & Extend
Look at what ppl are doing – watch their behaviors – embrace and extend it
“it’s like the shout feature on dodgeball.com”
take a small subset of a successful service
6. You can’t do it yourself
hey, is anyone out there?
creator can’t let go of control.
motivation and delegation
7. Personalization
People want to be unique – let them
customization is more appropriate – take something and make it your own
every action a user does is sacred – they tell you what they love – every tag, every click
Filter! once it hits a certain size there is too much info to take in – ways are needed to filter out the good/bad
Keep it fresh – blogs of the day on wordpress.com – keep it new
Allow for some correction “My Tivo Thinks I’m Gay!” – you want to be giving people the willies – a little magical
9. Bootstrap with popular
people magazine – when brittany shaves her head, we’re gonna look!
Follow the sites that tell you what is cool and new
10. Respect your users’ time
your community/software is a means to an end, they don’t want to use your software make it easy!
Big Questions
Some things have all the right ingredients, but never take off
Have MySpace Livejournal, etc. peaked?
Why do some standards and APIs never take off?
Where is the traffic?
Where is the money?
What is the best scaling software ever?
e-mail – “all software expands till it reads email”
What is killing it?
Spam! – biggest threat to web 2.0
Bonus things
Invest in infrastructure – speed is a feature – youtube has speed as a feature
Be transparent – involve your community in the process – let them know what your problems are – someone can probably help you out.
Don’t believe your own press – you want people at one extreme or the other love/hate
Have fun! – you can tell the flickr ppl had fun when they did it