Building a social product vs a social network

As many of you (friends and family) know, at MeYou Health we are working on a social health product called Daily Challenge. We are taking some of the latest thinking in game design, social network science, and behavior change and blending it all together in pursuit of measurable improvements in people's well-being.

What is well-being? It is all the aspects that make up who we are. It is a mix of our choices in the past, the choices we can make now, and how both of these affect the choices we could make or might have to make in the future. I have come to learn that improving well-being is a partnership between what we can design in the product and what the human being who uses Daily Challenge brings to the table. Our mission at Daily Challenge is to engage. The mission of our participants is to improve. From these two things together, product and person, emerges an individual outcome for each unique individual.

Designing for this to happen turns out to be incredibly hard. But that is why I love my job.

The biggest challenge recently has been balancing the use of social features in the product that allow people to create support networks and the temptation to expand these into features that comprise an entire social network product.

The goal of Daily Challenge has always been to build a network that can support you in the improvement of your well-being. From the research that we did which informs the product, this circle of influence is rather small. Anywhere from 3-12 people. Daily Challenge was never conceived nor optimized to connect you to hundreds of people like Facebook does. It has always been about taking these larger networks like Facebook, and using that as a starting point, asking you to identify the true influencers and supporters in your life. 

But, the moment you put friending in your product. The moment you put messaging, and commenting and interacting, some amount of "social networking" is assumed. The participants of your product are going to do what they do. They are going to take your expectations in directions outside your control. And that is ok. The problem is, if the actions they do, like friending hundreds of people, is not going to move the needle on the health outcomes you are looking for, it becomes impossible to justify supporting that, no matter how vocal they become. To pivot the product to a true social network to satisfy the needs of a few who arrived for that reason would mean abandoning those that are actually using it to find a framework for support and encouragement at a more intimate scale. 

So I find myself wondering, if you add social features to your product, will you always end up building a social network? When I started Daily Challenge, it was never the plan to build a separate social network from Facebook. But it seems that you are naturally pulled in that direction the moment you start asking people to connect.

We use Get Satisfaction for our support, and that product has social features. Do some hard core users of that product consider it their social network? 

If you put friending in your product, is the creation of a social network inevitable? Is this some law of the universe? 

Comments

[David August]

Perhaps you are really seeking to build an app that integrates with an already existing social network. This can have the up-sides of letting you focus on the functionality you wish to build without needing to answer or address social network questions like whether or not to allow friending. An app that runs on the web and mobile devices and allows email/password, facebook and/or twitter logins can use systems already built for integration into users established workflows and profiles, allow them to decide how integrated with their other social networks they want it to be and also can stand alone. Just a thought.

[Trapper Markelz]

Thanks David for the comment. Actually that is exactly what we are trying to do. Facebook is really just the broader originating network, given they already have an established social graph. What a site like Daily Challenge becomes is really just a sub-group of your larger social network. As such you demand many of the same interactions with that smaller group... and in order to filter them out of the rest of the Daily Challenge site there has to be some sort of friend/connection creation. Once you have that, you have the same problems as a larger network where people start making connections with large numbers of people and then they demand the same times of systems that are needed to manage large flows of information... even if that isn't your intent.

I am not sure there is a good solution... This is my third major social product since the creation of Facebook and it seems over and over again if you set out with a dynamic that requires small numbers of friends, you can't prevent it from spiraling out of control to where some people amass hundreds and hundreds of "friends".