What features make a site "social"?

Question

If you are trying to position your web application as "social" (or Web 2.0), what are the top features you should implement?

A decent starting point is this page, but even this perhaps goes a little too far (I think the bar is likely lower).

Answer 1

User driven content; now you just need to find the most desirable way to entice folk to create it.

Answer 2

This strikes me as putting the cart before the horse. Work out what features will be useful to users, and implement those. If people deem the result to be "social" then so be it. If they don't, but it's still useful and popular, what's the problem?

Answer 3

Firstly, "Web 2.0" != "social" - It's an encompassing term for delivering a new/better breed of web content. While collaboration is a part of it, so is security, performance, and of course user interface.

Jon Skeet hits a good point.

Think about it like this, what makes a visit to you local pub/bar "social"?

You can go there on your own, have the finest beer and all the peanuts and chips you can eat, but is it social? You can go to an absolute dive bar which serves crappy watered down beer with a bunch of good friends and still have a great time.

Why might you pick one over the other? Maybe one plays better music, maybe one is closer, maybe one is cheaper, maybe one has more women? Who knows?

Pick your market, make it good for the market. Look at StackOverflow. Its geared for programmers, by programmers. Boom. Lots of programmers appear and you have a community.

Answer 4

A social site is a site that provokes interaction between the people that use your site.

If you want to make a social site here is what I suggest:

1. Find your niche audience. Make sure that your group of people is anchored around a common interest. Music, dating, art, anything people love.

2. Create simple ways in which your users can leave their mark in an immediate and public way. People love seeing themselves appear on boards, in comments, etc. Most important is that it should be quick, simple, and free to leave your mark.

3. People love to give their opinion and watch other people react to it, so give them that ability.

4. Create your site so that it can adapt to the interests of your users as you figure out more and more what tools they like and how they like using them. Do not try and herd them or lead them, let them lead you. Simply offer as many doors for them to walk through as you can, and expand on the ones they walk through the most.

Social sites are community defined. Let your community tell you what it likes and they will keep coming back.