I am worried about how the Internet defines social.
There is a big difference between shopping online and shopping in seventy-degree weather, when someone brushes your bag, and you run into your friend on his way to a soccer game. Online shopping is solitary; real-life shopping is social. Seeing that my friend “liked” a new laundry solution on Facebook is not a social experience.
I rarely shop alone. Even on utilitarian trips to the grocery or Target, even if I don’t have an accomplice, I am still out and among other people. I want my best friend to tell me what to wear and that the very short shorts look good on me and encourage me to buy a pair when I would never do so otherwise. I want Ryan to tell me that the color of the bike I’ve chosen is great and for the bike salesperson to tell me that the particular model I’ve picked out is hot across the country and is almost sold out. I want energy. I want exchange. I want life.
This simply doesn’t happen online at the moment. There is no thrill of interacting with another human being. The experience is stale, stagnant and one-sided. It is the worst of consumerism.
I am worried that online commerce is mistaking data for social. When you use my interest graph to connect me with the exact person in California who has the vintage wine I desire, that is not social. My interest graph is not social. My reputation is not social. My identity is not social. These are important as currencies on the web, but only as currencies of social relationships. They are not the social relationships themselves. They don’t form the experience of shopping. Too many sites nowadays are defining social commerce as a like, a share, a review. That is not social. That is data.
Data is good for the company, not the user. Data is good for targeting, personalization, and aggregation. Data is good for marketing, but it’s not social.
“Nothing beats targeted relevancy,” argues one online enthusiast. “And social serendipity will not beat targeted discovery.”
That is so sad. Surely if the web has taught us anything, it’s how much, as a race, we humans love to go off on tangents? To be distracted? I certainly don’t go on Twitter and Facebook to be efficient.
Most people don’t know what they want anyway. I can type in my interests and style preferences until my fingers go bare bone, but what I really want is the summer dress my girlfriend wears out on a Thursday night. She looks so good!
As sites increasingly recommend only what they think you want, you lose out on the spontaneity and delight of finding something new and different. Anyone who has used Pandora realizes this is the service’s strength and weakness. You discover new music initially, but eventually the site just plays the same things over and over.
Personalization isn’t just useful at times then, creepy at others, but also annoying. Only boring people hang out with people just like themselves and do the same things over and over and never step out of their bubble world.
The social aspect of shopping is in that real-time discovery, spontaneous input, and watching of people. The movement, the behaviors of another person. I can’t see that on the web. All of our normal cues are missing. So, we go ahead and rely on algorithms? That’s fancy, but there are easier solutions.
Let’s talk about Amazon’s new flash shopping site, MyHabit; it was just launched this week and it’s in the same vein as other private sales sites like HauteLook, Beyond the Rack, and Gilt. You might think Amazon is behind, but really, Amazon is always just a wee bit ahead of the curve, and man, do they get it right with this.
Okay, first, on those other sites, I can see the front of a shirt, the back of a shirt, I can hover and zoom or use my mouse. Pretty standard nowadays. On a slightly different site called JewelMint I can even watch a thirty-nine second video about a pair of earrings.
But here’s how Amazon, in a rather genius move, instantly differentiates the experience. In addition to upscale photography, the site features videos of the clothing on live models. So the moment you visit a product detail page, the model starts to move; she shifts, she turns, you see her back, and then she shifts and turns back around. I don’t have to hit play and the whole thing lasts about five seconds.
It’s non-intrusive and the user experience is really just brilliant. I can actually see how the model moves and how the clothes move on her. I have a one hundred percent better experience in judging and assessing the piece of clothing that a photograph can never give me. And that is social.
You may be thinking no, that’s UX. You may be thinking you’re not interacting with the model – and certainly I am not talking to her – but really I am. I am watching her just as if she were on the street and seeing how the clothes move and look on her. It is live and it is a humanizing online shopping experience.
This is only the beginning of how user interfaces and experiences, not data will redefine online commerce. I would love to see an interface that allows me to see what strangers and my friends are browsing in real-time. I’d really love to invite my best friend in Madison to go on a shopping date while I’m in DC and browse a site simultaneously while I glance at her and what she’s browsing.
If you try to imagine these experiences in the web’s current architecture, it seems clunky, unrealistic even, but I assure you, the interfaces that use the data of web 2.0 will evolve and become increasingly important in web 3.0. And that’s what will define social on the Internet.
So everyone else is busy prophesying that while “the first phase of e-commerce was the utilitarian hunt for staples, the next phase of e-commerce will be about recreational shopping where the merger of social and interest graphs will drive buying decisions,” but here’s my prediction: it’s not going to be about data. Data is useless without a meaningful experience to plug into. How the interface and experience of social is formed will drive the next evolution of online commerce.
Just you wait.