Joshua Schachter just finished peppering us with little nuggets of wisdom in his “Lessons Learned in Scaling and Building Social Systems” session. His talk was not focused on the technical aspects of scaling social systems, but on the human/social aspects. He focused on the little bits of knowledge that are easy to dismiss as unimportant details but in the end can have large consequences.

He started off by stating that its important to highlight your product at first glance and not present a bunch of marketing as the initial impression. Let your users get right down to using the service without forcing them to wade through hype about the product. When users start getting involved with useful and functional features they’re going to get engaged with the product right away. Along the same lines, Joshua pointed out that people will often use your product for different reasons from what they initially thought. That’s certainly true for my experience with a number of online services.

Next up was his advice for not forcing people to sign up for your service right away. He suggested that you can lose up to 90% of people if you force them to sign up before they’ve gotten their feet wet with the service. Let’s people play with the service and only force people to sign up when they need to actually save something.

RSS is a big at Deli.cio.us — he says that up to 60% of their traffic comes from serving RSS feeds. Anything that can change inside of Deli.cio.us has an RSS feed so that people can easily stay in touch with the service.

Language also plays a significant role in social systems. Often times it is very easy to get caught up in implementation details of hacking together a service that people forget about the careful selection of words to convey the proper meaning for features. For instance, when Deli.cio.us wanted to give people the option of not sharing bookmarks with the public, they first added a checkbox with the text: “Private”. People are very much concerned with privacy these days, so a lot of people checked that box more often than they should’ve. But the basic concept of Deli.cio.ous breaks down when people no longer share their bookmarks. The proper solution for this problem was to name this feature as “do not share”. People understand that the point of the site is to share bookmarks, so the feature was then appropriately used.

Joshua then suggested that its important to also consider which statistics you make available to your users. Its important to keep in mind the fidelity of your users. For instance Twitter exposes so much information that you can figure out who the people are don’t like you very much. Breeding contempt in your community is a sure fire way to impact the harmony of your service.

Deli.cio.us users have frequently requested a feature to let them see the most popular links of all time, but Joshua has resisted this feature on the basis of spam. As soon as you publish a top ten list, people have the natural desire to get onto that top 10 list. Some people will work hard and honestly to make it on the list, while others will mercilessly spam the list with ads for penis-pumps and Viagra. While these lists are cool, the serve more to attract spam and the drawbacks outweigh their benefits.

Deli.cio.us also makes a point to let people take their data with them. As Joshua says: “… they can take their ball and go home”. Deli.cio.us provides an API that lets people export all of their bookmarks so that they can take their collection of bookmarks and use it somewhere else. Most other services will allow you to import bookmarks from somewhere else, but few allow you to export the bookmarks/data that actually belongs to you. If you want to keep your users happy you should not hold their data hostage.

Joshua also reiterated the importance of listening to your users. Most of the Deli.cio.us staff read all of the feedback from users, even if not everyone is in charge of responding. While we’ve all heard the adage that you should listen to your users, Deli.cio.us takes it one step further by actually tuning into the language that users use. Joshua told a story of an Internet Explorer user having a question and when the Deli.cio.us staff asked the user where she kept her bookmarks she said: “They stay in the books!” It was clear that the Deli.cio.us staff was not using the same nomenclature since IE doesn’t call them bookmarks — they are Favorites. So, now the Deli.cio.us site determines the user’s browser and adjusts the language automatically.

Thanks very much for your excellent presentation, Joshua! You could tell that people were paying attention to your every word — during the entire talk you could hear a frantic chorus of people mashing the keys on their laptop keyboards. This type of session represents why I love ETech: A wealth of useful information not to be found in any book hurled at you at a frantic pace.

Too bad that ETech is already nearly over. But there is always next year!