The rise of social networking services such as myspace, YouTube, and de.lic.ious mean that we need to rethink how we determine a web service’s success. It used to be that success was measured according to hits - a blunt instrument at best. Then it was page views, unique visitors, links from other sites and other similar measures. Often these were then validated by online user satisfaction surveys.
These kinds of measures are no longer sufficient to measure whether or not what we are delivering to our users is working, and some of the measures are no longer relevant.
Caterina on Caterina.net http://www.caterina.net/archive/000990.html suggests that the relevance of measures depends on what kind of service(s) is delivered. She divides services into three kinds:
Predominantly Social Systems. MySpace and Facebook are examples of services that enable communication and socializing.
Rich Content Systems Sites such as Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia (and to some extent blogs) have a core set of users that create a great deal of value for a large number of people who don’t need to add anything to the system to get something out of it…On these sites, registered users aren’t the bulk of the users. The bulk of the users are the non-logged-in viewers, surfers, searchers.
Person to Person Systems Yahoo Photos has a high number of registered users, but is more centered around one to one, or one to a few sharing rather than a kind of publisher model. Its page views, therefore, are not as significant a number.
I think this kind of distinction could be useful in starting to think about what measures of success apply to services that use this kind of community model that is not necessarily focused around a web page or group, but around the attention of users who use or visit those sites.
That sites might provide blogs (diary), a photo album, videos for viewing or whatever. The service might provide a combination of these and some of its own content. Whatever it is we need to be thinking about how we measure its success.
In the education sector, sometimes ’success’ is not something that needs to be measured. If we are a state school system, an individual school website or a university WebCT system or library, users will use the system - not because they like it, but because they have to because they are part of that system and have to get information about their course, institution etc from that web service.
But we ignore our users likes and dislikes at our peril. Competition between funky web services and mashups is furious and competes for the same demographic as many education systems - the 15-30s, who marketers see as consumers for advertisers.
Rupert Murdoch did not spend $US500 million for myspace because he thought it would be nice for people to be able to connect with others. He bought it because he figured he could sell much more than that in advertising because myspace has the attention of 100 million users - and growing.
Students in our schools, TAFEs and universities are using these systems for their personal purposes. They’re using instant messaging, posting their photos to their blogs, inviting people to be their ‘friend’. If the education system doesn’t keep up, students will come to feel that the education system is not relevant to their lives - in fact that the education system is behind the times.
Education systems need to lead its students, not follow them. Adopt and appropriate the technologies students are using for educational purposes.
And then be able to measure how successful that process has been.
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