读书笔记 - The Tipping Point, Part III

The last thing Gladwell mentioned is about the Environment. He named the affect of environment as "the Power of Context (环境力量法则)" and pointed out that "Human behavior is strongly influenced by external variables of context". To make it more clear, he summarized it as the following rules/theories:

Broken Window Theory[3]
“If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken.”

So, if you deployed a web site externally, be careful about the features you promised. If there is any feature that didn't keep your promise, people will doubt on other features and they may think your whole system is not so stable and it may also doesn't have product level quality. This will harm your success.

Bystander Effect
It says that "a psychological phenomenon in which someone is less likely to intervene in an emergency situation when others are present than when he or she is alone."

There was a crime in New york 1964. A women was killed under the sight of her 38 neighbors, it lasted for about half an hour, but no one called the policeman. The public blame those witness be be cold blooded. But some psychological research results show that, it's just an normal human reaction when they know other people may also see it. Every body think some other people will call the police, so no one called by their own. It's just humanity, nothing related to these people's morale level, those researcher said.

I think this give us a good hint that, when you are managing a team to accomplish some tasks, you'd better assign your task explicitly and clearly to individual members. This will reduce the bystander effect.

Rule of 150[4]
Another thing Gladwell mentioned is that, according to some scientific research result: "Human Beings can only have stable social relationships with about 150 people, due to some biological limitation in our brain."

Thus, any group larger than this will automatically segment into factions and decrease efficiency. The existence of small groups helps the spread of a message because each member of the group knows each other very well.

So if you want something to get popular through a social network, you should turn this kind of social network/organization structure

in to this


This will undoubtedly improve the efficiency of your organization.

In a word, I think Gladwell did a great job on explaining those social epidemics, although whether these conclusions can really help us to make things get popular is not proved in this book.

Anyway, the author of the book gave us some very good suggestions we can take a look and have a try, maybe it will help our success.

Reference:
[3]”Broken Window”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows
[4] “Rule of 150”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

读书笔记 - The Tipping Point, Part II

As to the stuff itself, Gladwell summarized it as - the Stickiness Factor(附着力法则): "The quality that compels people to pay close, sustained attention to a product, concept, or idea."

To get user stuck, Gladwell suggested the followings:
1.Simple and Intuitive UI. Don't make the user think, no more effort is needed to use it.
2.Make it Practical and Personal: user can complete the operations easily, and let user feel the view is specific to him/her.
3.Interactive with User: Let user feel involved, let user feel being part of the whole system.

Let's use the Internet industry as study case. In web design community, there is a popular book named "Don't Make Me Think". The main idea is the same as Gladwell pointed: simple and intuitive user interface, then there will be little cost for the user to try the features you provide.

Personalized view is another core value of modern web applications. In past time, there were many portal web sites, like yahoo, cnn, msn etc. When people visit these sites, every one get the same thing, nothing different. But people are different, they have various interests and personal preferences, they wish to own their personalized view of these information. As web information keep on exploding, the need for customization keep on rising. Many pioneer content provider now exploit these results, they provide personalized view of their content. For example, Yahoo provide myYahoo, and CNN provide rss feed that user can subscribe, both enable the personalized view of the whole content.

As to the "Interactive with user" principle, I think this is the most important character that makes web 2.0 differ from conventional web 1.0. In web 1.0 age, the web site owner is the creator of all the content, they determine what the site looks like, what user will get. While in web 2.0 ages, the user of the web site created the content, they have control on the finally view of the whole system. For example, in Digg, Slashdot, there is no such positions as editor, every user is author and editor. You can submit news to the site, you can rank/comment it, which will affect the finally popularity of this news.

Another observation is from modern search engines. Nowadays, both Google and Yahoo provide login/personalized search. These search engines will record your search history and will use these information to customize/tune your search result, which will form a good feedback loop to improve the search quality. This feature exploits both "Personalized view" and "Interactive with user", although there were some privacy risks.

When you interactive with the web application, when you submit content and when you got personalized view of the content, you feel like becoming part of the whole system. You will never think of leaving out of it, because you lose too much if you do so.

Thus, the web site get you stuck to it successfully, which forms another important factor of making something get popular as Gladwell pointed out in this book.
[To be continue]

读书笔记 - The Tipping Point, Part I

-The Mystery of How Things Getting Popular & Lessons learned from the book: “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell.

"The tipping point" is a book written by GladWell, a famous New Yorker columnist, in around 2002. It gives some profound explanations on social epidemics. This is a popular book in the Web 2.0 community including Chinese Internet industry community. Here are some sum up in my own opinion about this interesting book.

In the beginning, Gladwell gave a brief description about the meaning of the term 'Tipping Point' : “The Tipping Point(引爆点) is that magic moment when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”[1]

To identify what makes a social epidemic and what makes a small stuff get popular, Gladwell pointed out three main factors in such an social phenomenon:
1.“What”: the Idea, Concept or Product itself;
2.“Who”: the People who transmit them;
3.“Where”: the Environment where those things spread and turn popular;

The main body of this book is telling the characteristics of these three factors in social epidemics.

Gladwell titled the people factor as "the Law of the Few"(个别人物法则). He said, before an idea, concept, or product can reach the tipping point, a few key types of people must champion/advocate it.

These few people can be divided into Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. Connectors are individuals who have ties in many different social networks. (Just as Hubs/Routers in Computer network) While Mavens(内行) are the information gatherers of the social network. They can be aware of tiny changes around. Finally, Salesmen are people who are extremely persuasive in inducing others’ buying decisions and behaviors.

An typical social epidemic works in this way: First, Mavens Find the Sensitive Information (Idea, Concept or Product) and Tell the Connector. Then, Connectors Transmit it to Massive People through his various social relationships. Finally, Salesmen Persuade People to Take Action. If all phases are successful, the Tipping Point is reached! Another thing he mentioned in his book is that Maven/Connectors/Salesman are just roles, one people may play multiple roles.

I think it's a reasonable explanation. Think about those people around you, they can be roughly divided into these three types. Let's study the case of Douban[2], an success web2.0 website in China.

Douban never do any massive media advertisement on TV station nor Radio station. But today it has millions of registered users, very active user created content and many people use it in their daily life(includes myself).

AhBei, the creator of Douban, is somewhat a book Maven, he likes reading books and sharing them with others. As a pioneer in web2.0 wave, he has some connections to those popular bloggers in China, such as Laobai and Keso etc. These popular bloggers act as Connectors - they have many friends and social activities in real world, and also they have many blog subscribers. They told other people about the Douban web site by means of talking with his friends or acquaintance in social party or meeting , and they can also do this by blogging.

As these people have big influence in public and have good reputation, blog subscribers or his acquaintance, who heard of Douban from him will try this website undoubtedly. So they also behaved in another role of Salesman.

Thus, many Internet users in China know this website, if this website itself has some basic factors that can attractive normal user and can get them stuck to this site, this web site reaches its tipping point and gets popular consequently.

We all know that, on Internet, in the time of web1.0, it's very easy for the user to leave for another similar service provider, it's nearly zero cost. So, to reach tipping point, to make a social epidemic, how to get those users stuck to your website in web2.0 time? What's the characteristics of those popular things themselves? What makes users get stuck to them and make them get popular?

[to be continue]
[1]http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/
[2]http://www.douban.com

说点什么好呢?

这个五一节，体验了很多东西，学会了很多东西。

有的人，注定是没法妥协的，因为始终过不了自己这一关。

我们都生活在同一个星球上，但却往往生活在不同的世界。

每个人，永远都走不出自己的世界，也进入不了别人的世界。

今年五月的北京，就像一口炽热的大铁锅，四处乱串的人们就像锅边的蚂蚁。

慢慢来吧，以后的路还长着呢。

p.s. 来北京快四年了，总算找到机会去逛了逛圆明园和颐和园，也总算见识了People Mountain People Sea的场面。