Google as a restaurant? Watch Gordon Ramsay

Jeff Jarvis says he's writing a metaphorical application of Google principles to running a restaurant. Over the last few weekends, while sorting out stuff at home, I've been watching Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares which BBC America seems to be playing continuously at weekends. If you haven't seen it, do watch some - each episode, Ramsay spends a week at a failing restaurant in the UK and tries to help them turn it around.

After seeing a few, there are recurrent themes that Ramsay comes up with: simple menus, built on good ingredients that local people understand, served promptly. Which fits well with Google's ten things - simple frontend, low latency results, user-focused. How he tries these out involve analogues for user testing, A/B experiments, and profiling under high load.

Of course, Google does run restaurants - so Jeff can read how they get built and tested directly.

I'm with the stupid network

I'm with the Stupid network
Originally uploaded by Kevin Marks

I'm looking forward to the Supernova conference next week, because Kevin Werbach always brings together an interesting group of people who care about the Internet and its future. We don't all agree on everything, which makes for some interesting debates, but we do tend to back the Open Web and the Stupid Network. It was the tenth anniversary of David Isenberg's 'Rise of the Stupid Network' paper this week, so I came up with this t-shirt design idea.

How not to be viral

Graphing Social Patterns East is on tomorrow, and I'm sorry not to be there, though m'colleague Patrick Chanezon will be. However, reading the schedule I notice the word 'viral' is still much in evidence.

If you behave like a disease, people develop an immune system

At the Facebook developer Garage last week, I heard a developer say: when I hear 'viral' applied to software I replace it with 'cancerous' to clarify. A few months back I wrote that social Apps should be Organic, not Viral, and at Google I/O last week I expanded on this with m'colleagues Vivian Li and Chris Schalk. Here's an overview of the alternative reproductive strategies to being a virus that we came up with:

r-Strategy - scatter lots of seeds

Break free
Originally uploaded by aussiegall

Some plants and animals, like dandelions and frogs, rely on having huge numbers of offspring, with the hope that a few of them will survive - this is known as an r strategy. In application terms this is like wildly sending out invitations, or forcing users to invite their friends before showing them useful information. It may help you spread your seed, but most of them will die off rapidly.

K-Strategy - nurture your young

Proud mama
Originally uploaded by debschultz

Mammals take the opposite strategy; they have a few young, and nurture them carefully, expecting most of them to grow up to adulthood and reproduce themselves. This is known as a K strategy. This translates into software by following Kathy Sierra's principles to create passionate users who will share your application through word of mouth. Another way to nurture your users is to encourage them to use your application before they have to install it, as Jonathan Terleski describes.

Fruiting - delicious with a seed in

help yourself
Originally uploaded by *madalena-pestana*

Many plants encourage their seeds to be spread more widely by wrapping them in fruit, so that animals or birds will carry them further, eating the fruit and helping the seed to propagate. The analogy here is in making sure your invitations aren't just bald come-ons for your application "a friend said something - click here to find out what" - with a forced install on the way, but instead are clearly bearing gifts to the receiving user, so they will want to click on the link after seeing what is in store. This is one of Jyri Engstrﾃｶm's principles for Web 2.0 success with Social Objects.

Rhizomatic - grow from the roots up

Sweetness / Dolcezza
Originally uploaded by WTL photos

Another reproductive strategy that many plants, including strawberries and ginger use is to send out runners or shoots from the roots, so that they spread out sideways, from the bottom up, known as rhizomes or stolons. The analogy here is for social applications that spread through appearing in users activity streams and via entries in application directories, growing outwards through the 'grass roots' runners that they send out as part of their normal usage.

Being dumb gets low CPMs

A lot of the debate around viral applications reminds me of a David Foster Wallace quotation:

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

Social networks aren't like TV - everyone sees something different in them. If you want to gather engaged, inspired, interested and indeed valued users, write an application that speaks to their refined and aesthetic and noble interests, and see how they will spread it through their social networks to find the others who share their interests.

It was interesting to see Slide redirecting away from virality today. GSP West was on at the same time and place as eTech, and I heard some eTechies refer to it as 'Grasping Social Parasites'; I hope that the growing realisation that a disease is not a good model to base your business on means that tomorrows conference will spread a better reputation for GSP East.