The last year has seen social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn updating the design of the homepage to turn it more into a notification page: the homepage as a place where you can see what your friends are doing. Your virtual center of the network.

These updates let you know what your friends are up to, but they also let you know what your friends like or share. The social networks often work as recommendation networks as well.

New technology, new business
Google added relevancy and order to hyperlinks and is very useful for the active searcher: someone who’s looking for something. Social networks add relevancy to hyperlinks you’re not searching for. The networks provide you with new information and new articles recommended by virtual friends.

Both are in a business that was traditionally the business of a news provider. Google gives you insight and background information. Social Networks keep you up-to-date and recommend information.

Does this design shift also affect the future design of news websites?
The average news website probably publishes around a hundred articles every 24 hours. We can’t and don’t want to read all the articles a news website publishes. We need filtering mechanisms.

News websites add hierarchy to the news by presenting the most important things first. But this is a mass hierarchy. It’s not personal. The sorting is based on what the news website thinks will interest most people. And this works very well for the most important news.

The news website is a large pile of stories. Is this still in the best interest for a reader? His or her most valuable asset is time. Sure there is some news you need to know about, but you get to know about the important facts through your social networks as well.

And if you know the facts you can learn more by hitting the search button. The news website is still a database with a single entry, the frontpage. This makes it vulnerable in a distributed environment.

Distributed environment
The future of information presentation (at least for the long tail of information) will probably be user-centered. Mobile devices are extremely user-centered. Successful access points like interfaces and devices provide readers with the most relevant information.

Time is our most valuable asset and the reduction of noise is a serious proposition for any new service. News itself is relevant, there is no question about this, but how do you deliver your content in a distributed environment?

Type of environments
There are different environments.

1. Get your content on other platforms through syndication or API’s. The problem is monetization, although you could distribute the news and link back to your website with hyperlinks in the text that link to more in-depth coverage.

2. Your content on your platform with a personalized presentation based on your own network or an external (social) network.

3. The current form of presentation where your content is on your platform presented in your hierarchy.

What can you do as a news website to be more relevant? Should news websites learn from the design of social networks and move to a more user centered approach? The New York Times is already doing this with Times People and with EN.nl (the project I work on) we created a personal selection based on your reading habbits.

Your Thoughts
What design elements that originated in social networks do you think could very well be applied to the basics or every major news homepage? Or what are the arguments not to implement this kind of functionality?

- Share articles with your friends
- See on what articles your friends commented
- See what your friends are reading
- See what news is happening close to your friends
- See news topics your friends subscribed to
- Discuss an article only with your friends

Painting: Jan van de Heyden – inventor of the fire hose – Fire Amsterdam Town Hall 1690 (translated link)

Two major financial losses have we seen in the last two months. Not because of the credit crunch, but because everything in this digital world is connected.

On the web new information is true until proven false. This is something you might like, or not. It is not a choice, it’s the fact of a connected medium that gives everyone a voice. We have to find ways to work with it. And we are just starting to find out the effects of this dense and very well connected network that is continues searching for the next big thing… And the network is trigger happy.

About those losses
Ten billion dollar in total. Last month an old article about United Airlines re-appeared in Google News because of a date failure. News spread across the web in no time. Traders started selling shares, loss $1 billion.

Last week a wrong story about Steve Jobs having a hearth attack made it to CNN iReport. News spread across the web very fast and Apple stock plunged. Instant decrease in value: $9 billion.

Both stories started an online fire that could only be stopped by checking the story. But, when there is smoke in the air, the whole town is already alerted. You can’t hide it. All you can do is report facts as soon as possible.

In a dense societies, like the web, and cities in the seventeenth century. The high speed spreading of information is crucial. If there was a fire in your neighborhood. It didn’t really matter that much if it small or big, you would wanted to know about it. Since all houses were close to each other and stopping a fire was difficult. Alert first, check later.

The web is not paper
Reporting fragments of information is what the web is good at. We still use it as if it is a piece of paper. We publish hypertext, but we won’t alter it, like paper. We give web pages unique addresses, like paper. After all these years we still treat hypertext like paper.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia doesn’t. This is what makes Wikipedia more an internet product instead of a print product. Wikipedia is alive, it uses fixed urls and the content changes all the time. Everything can be altered and deleted. Hypertext is alive. Wikipedia is – like the web – a continues and endless process.

Open Source Journalism
The live web poses not directly new problems for journalism, but it requires more speed and a different way of working. It will eventually require a different approach. Journalists will have to be live reporters. They don’t decide if it will be news or not. They will decide if something will stay news or not.

As a reporter you can’t ignore the smoke in your town. Everyone wants to know what’s going on and it’s the job of the journalist to figure this out, as fast as possible. And the best way to do this is by using the collective wisdom and make his or her knowledge and process public. The open source journalist will be a better informed journalist.

And about the truth?
We will see many more of these short-time information failures in the future and those will probably also lead to large financial losses. We have to find a way to live with it. The journalist that works on the web will be more active as a firefighter instead of a fire starter.

For an interaction designer not using the potential of a medium is horrible. There is this new medium with new a paradigm, new possibilities and you are using it the same way as the old medium. Let’s call it a transition period. McLuhan called it marching backwards into the future.

The value of the transition
For a designer there is nothing to gain in the transition period. It’s pretty frustrating to design the same old things on a new platform. We love using the new challenges a new medium gives us. And early adopters love designs and applications made for new media too.

And despite this there is incredible value in the transition. All thanks to the mental model. People are used in using something. And especially with digital media they have a mental model that tells them where they can find whatever they want. This is important when there is a new medium. They don’t understand the new medium, yet. But they do know how to navigate through your information as long it is structured the way it was on the old medium. And a large group of users will like it. See it as a beacon.

Examples

From paper to web
The newspaper where I work has this online image (pdf) based version. That looks exactly like the printed version, only online. From a web design perspective the interaction design is horrible. But it works for most users, since they have the mental model of the paper version. They know where to find what they are looking for. And this makes it easy to produce, and valuable for a large group of customers.

From television to web to iPhone
Dutch teletext is a very popular news service on television. TheY transported it to the web into an interface that doesn’t really make sense for the medium. And it was also transported to widgets and the iPhone. Creating a large group of very satisfied users.

From web to iPhone
The popular Dutch newswebsite Nu.nl is transporting the news website to the mobile sphere. Their readers except a similar experience on the iPhone as on the website.

From books to the Kindle
The Amazon Kindle and other eReader-devices are bringing the experience of reading books to the digital world. With a strong focus on recreating the same reading experience on this new device. In first instance they are neglecting (in communicating) the possibilities of these new devices that range from using hypernarrative structures, non-linear storytelling to importing the friends from your social network as characters in a book.

Why transporting the mental model to a new medium?
You slowly convert the mass from one medium to the other. It is often cheap to do and you will create a very popular service. It also gives you extra time and freedom to make something that is tailored to the medium. You earn some extra money and you are still connected with your users on the new medium.

Just some thoughts
How long can you stretch this? And would it for example make sense to convert the newspaper (paper version) to a pdf and make it viewable on your iPhone? Most readers will have the mental model of the paper version in mind and reading and browsing pdf-files on the iPhone gives a pretty good user experience.

Does it also work the other way around? For example the news website Nu.nl started on the web, can they transport the mental model used on the website to paper as well?

Do you have examples of successful companies that transported their content from one medium to another without altering the interface or way it works too much?