The most important thing to getting people to use software is to make it easy. Easy isn’t easy, but some companies do a great job of making things easy. The social websites that have done well have done so because they are good at lowering the barrier to entry for people. My grandpa has a Facebook account and I since I never showed him the site I’m not kidding when I say to you that easy is what really matters.
WordPress is some of the easiest web software to install that exists on planet Earth. They have a famous 5 minute install which has worked well for millions of people. But not everyone has web hosting, so they also give a free service for putting up your blog and connecting you with other WordPress users. You don’t have to use it of course (I don’t) but it’s there to continue to make it easy to use WordPress. And remember, it’s all about easy.
Oh and it’s completely free (as in both speech and beer). You can change and add to it all you want if you got mad developer skills. Speaking of changing and adding, WordPress supports plugins which get developed by the open source community. Thousands of them. There are already projects to add social-based features to WordPress. And since the people are WordPress are so smart they have hired a developer for working on this goal. That’s important because for the social features to really get used they have to be built right in. Again, to keep things easy.
In fact, some social features are already being built right into WordPress. Gravatar support is included in version 2.5. For those of you that don’t know what that is, a gravatar is a picture that follows you from blog to blog. So if I comment on a post on your blog running the newest version of WordPress, my picture pops right up. No registration, no select my image for the 8 thousandth time crap. Super easy.
If it’s all done right, every single feature that Facebook offers now could be ported to WordPress. Even a similar apps platform could be made and then – bam – iLike on your site just like that. For an example of this, imagine a world where you your friends can still tag you in their photos with tag links that point right into to your own photo app on your blog. Maybe these applications could even automatically share photos to all people tagged in them so you get your own copy sent to your site every time someone puts up your picture. Plus now everyone can see them without them having to register for Facebook if they don’t feel like it. And if you didn’t want everyone to see them there could still be privacy controls. You control your own content and make is as accessible as you chose. No more walled gardens. Plus everything is a few-clicks-easy… do you see the theme yet?
WordPress can be the social platform of the future. And if it succeeds, we will all have much more control over publishing and using our social content.
way to hammer it out. great thoughts here. glad to see you’re tackling the big issues.
Thanks Mike!