The Effective CIO

I received an invite to Google Wave the other day.  Having heard lots of buzz, I was looking forward to learning more about it.  While Google Mail is not my primary mail platform, I already have an account and use lots of other Google stuff.

I accepted the invite, went through a few setup choices, and was dropped into the main Wave interface.  And stayed there.  Now what?

This is not an indictment of Google Wave; it’s too early to pass judgment.   My real concern is that every new tool we confront seems to have the same “now what?” moment.

Twitter is awash with people who never made it past “now what?”  You can see these abandoned accounts everywhere, with three tweets from six months ago.  The first is upbeat: “Trying out twitter!”  A bit later, an effort to fit in: “Meeting Harriet for dinner; we’re thinking Italian.”  Finally, their last tweet, a few weeks later: “Need to use twitter more often!”

Facebook, LinkedIn, Naymez, Ning, Xing, and all the rest: every collaboration platform has the same problem.  They make it easy to sign up, they promise to change your world, and they leave you high and dry, wondering how to unlock all that promised value.  This is a hard problem, and I’ve not seen too many good solutions.

Facebook tries.  When they aren’t annoying their entire user base with gratuitous attempts to be more like Twitter, they pop up little messages on behalf of the newbies: “Harriet has 7 friends. Help her find more!” Although inadvertently making Harriet the laughing-stock of her limited social world, the idea is that others would reach out and help Harriet use Facebook more effectively.

In most other platforms, there is little help for the new user.  Instead, users must work to get engaged, figure out the tools, figure out the culture, and find people to interact with.  It takes time and is not for the faint-of-heart.  Those not up to the challenge fade away, lamenting that they “never got much value out of it.”

That’s unfortunate, and it’s the fault of the platforms, not the users.  New users should be welcomed with open arms and drawn into some sort of quick start program that yields quick value.  Instead, people are confronted with creating a profile (again) and wrestling with CSV files to import their contact list.  Hardly a nice way to start out; it’s not so much a warm welcome as it is a hazing ritual.

I don’t have a ready answer for this.  Every platform is different, so each one needs a different solution.  But regardless of the details, having a Welcome Wagon for new users would go a long way to broadening the value of these systems to a big group of interested new users.