Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

I'm not really sure whether this qualifies as either social networking or aggregation - that really depends on your own interpretation of those terms - but its certainly a good example if how you can bring together all those loose ends of user-generated content you have lying around. I'm sure most people with a passing interest in next-generation web publishing environments will actively subscribe to, publish to, or regularly visit one or more of the streams of content that Ben Hammersely subscribes to, publishes to, and visits himself. Some of us, like Ben, might actually publish to pretty much all of them. Unlike Ben, most of us who do that don't really have much to add, but do it anyway, because its there.

What Ben and the BBC News Online team have done, however, is more interesting than just what Ben has to say - its how he says it, and how we consume it. Its no longer unusual to get your news, back stories, or inane chatter from various sources, such as blogs, twitter, flickr and youtube. You can even let others decide for you what might be actually worth reading/viewing, via del.icio.us, digg, tag clouds, etc. That experience is usually blighted by the 'multiple voices, multiple locations' problem. For any given topic of interest, I have to invest a reasonable amount of time simply researching where the items of interest are located, before going off and visiting, subscribing, evaluating and consuming. Worst of all, it takes me more time than I should reasonably be able to afford to simply find everything that I've said, created, or published in the last week or so. Wouldn't it be nice is all that stuff was in one place?

Which is where Ben and the BBC have piqued my interest. There are other aggregation sites out there, various attempts at mashing up social media and interminable tag-cranking sites cluttering up search engines, but nothing I've seen that comes close to matching the customer experience on Ben's Turkish Journey page. You might question whether seamlessly integrating various social media sources into one location is relevant, if all the content comes from the same author (I know there's external blogs on there), but from a design and deployment perspective, its a fine piece of work. We're just starting to integrate user-generated content on our own sites, and I think we're ahead of the game in many respects, but the design framework and usability of this page has to be admired, considering it doesn't really contain any content at all. If you've ever been involved in a customer experience project designing for content that actually exists somewhere outside of your control, then I'm sure you understand the challenges, and appreciate just how well they've presented it.

Kudos to the design and customer experience teams, of course. I mean, Ben is obviously a smart bloke (sickeningly young, smart and healthy, in fact), but someone, somewhere, decided that the twitter class needs to have a background-color of #900 and those rounded corners, right?