[This blog entry has been re-posted from the Protagonize blog. You can view the original entry here.]

I came across an interesting blog post on ReadWriteWeb this morning that got me to thinking a little about how Protagonize works versus many of the diverse other collaborative writing systems available on the web right now. The author of the post referred to Protagonize as “very slick”, which is all well and good, but the user comments were actually what caught my attention.

In the general sense, there are many similarities between the larger sites out there; many provide author profiles, many allow authors to collaborate on the same stories. What I have noticed is that the prevalent theme amongst many of them appears to be that the end goal is to produce a novel, novella, or something “publishable.”

One of the comments lambasting collaborative writing over on the RWW post was of particular interest:

“Penguin publishing house tried this already and it was an EPIC FAIL! It was called a Million Penguins … it was a wiki novel…and…it was awful. Never published, and they abandoned the project - but best of luck!”

As a brief disclaimer, I didn’t become aware of A Million Penguins until well after the project was over, probably about six weeks ago. It definitely has some parallels with Protagonize, but the goal of the project is entirely different. I think what the commenter above unintentionally hit on is the grey area between many of the collaborative writing projects out there right now.

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After pontificating on the newly available Twitter AIR clients available last week and how they were impacting my usage of of said microblogging service (versus Facebook’s status updates), I figured I’d write a bit of an addendum now that I’ve had a couple of weeks to use it on a more regular basis.

Twitter has been blogged about, covered by the media, and discussed to death countless times, I’m sure, but I’m thinking about it from a slightly different perspective. I’m trying to analyze how why it’s so successful and where that success lies in terms of application development; i.e. what can I learn from Twitter’s (and other microblogging platforms’) success, and what can I apply to my own products.

Something that struck my in the shower yesterday morning was how much Twitter reminded me of a certain period of my life. Back in the early-to-mid ’90s, I — along with many other socially-challenged folk I knew at the time — spent a lot of time sitting around, chatting online, sometimes mindlessly, sometimes with a bone to pick, but generally just because we had nothing else to do. Where did I spend much of this time? In the underground (uhm, yeah, well, that might be slightly overrated now) art scene on IRC (Internet Relay Chat, for those of you not familiar with it.)

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I was asked recently to put together a list of site marketing and SEO-related tips and tricks based on the last few months (and years, with other projects) of experience I’ve had trying to help build traffic on Protagonize.

(Beware, this is pretty long, but I hope it’ll be of use to you.)

Curiously, until I launched Protagonize, I really hadn’t given much explicit thought to optimizing my site for search engines. I just kind of assumed that if people wanted to find me, they would, and if not, I didn’t really care. Of course, with a personal blog, it’s easy to blow off doing any kind of serious SEO work. I had no real incentive to get myself ranked higher, so why bother?

Along came Protagonize, shortly before New Year’s eve last year. After spending several months working on the site, I immediately launched into trying to get the site to rank higher in various search engines. Apparently, this is a slightly more difficult task than I had imagined. I’m by no means an expert (obviously not, since my blog’s PageRank currently ranks higher than Protagonize’s, for whatever reason), but since I did manage to generate a decent amount of daily traffic out of absolutely nothing, I figured I’d publish my unscientific findings so far and post updates as I experiment.

I’ll try and keep these concise, from the more general to the more specific. Feel free to suggest other techniques or alternatives, and I’ll add them to the list. I also keep track of various SEO links on del.icio.us, so feel free to subscribe to my SEO bookmarks feed there as well.

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I just spent a little time composing a reply to a thought-provoking question by my cousin Gagan over on LinkedIn and thought it might be something valuable to blog about as well.

The question I responded to:

How often do you update your various statuses (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)? Why?
Interested in knowing your motivation of why you participate, and what motivates you to add / change / update your status.

My reply:

Facebook, usually a couple of times a day if I’m not busy. If busy and not at home, can go days in between updates right now. Facebook’s status is generally more interesting to update because it’s more of a one-way broadcast… you don’t necessarily need anyone to respond to what you post.

I’ve only recently started updating Twitter more than once a month, since I got a decent Adobe AIR-based desktop client for it (Twhirl, or Snitter.) Updated several times today, but Twitter’s appeal is directly related to the number of “followers” you have… if you don’t have many, there’s very little interaction, which makes it a little less interesting to use. If you have dozens (or in some cases, hundreds) of followers, you’re much more likely to generate interest with your updates, and initiate discussion, which is where Twitter really shines.

Pownce beat Twitter to the punch in getting a decent desktop client built (an AIR client, in this case.) Problem was, the client was pretty, but really  badly implemented and required you to actually visit the Pownce site to do anything meaningful. The newer AIR-based Twitter clients are major improvements over this and can replace your use of the main Twitter.com site entirely. This is important because Twitter/Pownce/Jaiku (etc.) are really more in line with IM clients like MSN Messenger, ICQ, or Yahoo’s IM client, even though they’re more communal in nature.

On top of that, Facebook’s UI is much more conducive to logging in regularly and updating, since there are so many other diversions to keep you “engaged” (gotta throw in the current buzzwords, right?) and returning regularly. Twitter is so spartan (and in general, visually boring, even compared to something like Pownce), it doesn’t really offer much to do that would cause you to actually visit your own profile more than once a day at most, unless you’re a hardcore user. I don’t consider myself a hardcore Facebook-er, but using the web interface alone, I found that I updated my Facebook status infinitely more frequently than I did my Twitter account, and I’ve only had the FB account for a few months longer. Now that there’s a few viable desktop/system tray interfaces to Twitter, I can use it much more like I’d use MSN Messenger, and update quickly (as well as see my friends’ updates immediately) without having to visit the main site.

I don’t really use any other social networks or microblogging platforms on a regular basis (aside from Protagonize, but the content generated there is a lot more meaningful than microblogging), so that’s all the insight I can provide…

I find that both UI and the engaging nature of a full-fledged social network (be it more general, like Facebook, or something more niche/specific in nature, like LinkedIn) will inherently create a more valuable environment for microblogging because:

1. The content isn’t necessarily completely human-generated — if you consider something like the Facebook news feed in addition to stand-alone status updates, a single user can generate much more content (though its value may be questionable, with respect to Facebook application spam.)
2. The user comes back to the site much more regularly and has many more opportunities to connect with other users and feel the need/desire to post updates.

In something like Twitter or Pownce, you really need to come back to the site with a single purpose in mind. If you can get away with using their API to handle all communications with the site and other users, you really have no other reason to actually visit the site in question — you can get away with doing everything remotely and still get just as much out of it.

When that method of interaction isn’t properly provided, I would assume usage drops down strictly to more hardcore community members. This is interesting it that in can be applied equally to other community site situations… the more streamlined and usable your communications interface in any kind of social network or community site, and the less barriers you have to entry, the more content you’ll have published and the more interest you’ll generate in the site. Not that barriers to entry are a bad thing in specific cases, but lowering them in the case of something like microblogging is probably in the best interest of the end user.

I’m curious if people agree with me on this or not… thoughts, suggestions, and criticism are more than welcome.

You may recall that I posted a tutorial about customizing the YUI TabView control to generate rounded tab corners a couple of months ago. Having spent some time recently tweaking the YUI Button widget, I thought I should post something about my experience customizing it for use on Protagonize.com.

First things first: the Button widget in the Yahoo! User Interface library can be both very simple to use and very difficult to figure out if you haven’t spent the time to read the documentation. The implementation and usage is not obvious unless you’ve taken the time to look at at the available examples. I learned this the hard way.

YUI buttons are actually quite handy and make for a really nice user experience if used in the right situations. On top of that, it saves you writing it yourself, and the YUI button sits on top of existing HTML button controls pretty transparently.
I’m not going to cover all of the varieties of YUI button types here (which range from simple push buttons to menu and split buttons for more advanced functionality.) The situation I had was that I was adding a new feature to Protagonize: linear stories. I wanted a quick way to toggle a new story from the existing format, the addventure, to the new linear story format. Logically, this would entail a radio button. Of course, as we all know, regular HTML radio buttons are pretty bland and boring, and I wanted something a little more legible and clear to the user.

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