Social Life of Information

It’s been awhile since my last post, but constantly doing a catch-up on my life seems pretty dull, so instead I’ve queued up a few different topics for blog posts. I’m starting with my new favorite social media site, Ravelry, which is an online community for knitters and crocheters. What I love most about Ravelry is its design, which links together various online personal catalogs (for needles, “stash” yarn, books, and patterns) in a way that assists users, much like a hypermedia version of the now old-fashioned craft notebook that serious knitters would keep to record details about projects, patterns, and yarns.

Ravelry has the typical social network site user profile, but also a number of other tools, and the interaction paradigm learned much from the best of Web 2.0 and makes good use of the modern database and rich media elements available. Like Flickr, Ravelry has discussion threads, forums, groups, friends, favorites, commenting and user-to-user messaging. Stashed yarns and projects can be shared with groups, and there are groups of every flavor: swaps, knit-alongs, TV show afficionados, interest or location-based, and so on. Taking it up a notch, Ravelry also offers reputation management indicators (number of posts for a users, how many posts in a thread, etc.) and voting on posts with a variety of options: educational, interesting, funny, agree, disagree, and love.

Better yet are the audience-specific online catalogs and interlinking between them. Users can “stash” yarns they own with a wide variety of metadata, and can rate the yarns. Likewise, they can “queue” patterns in the order they’d like to make projects, including a metadata section that easily transforms the queued pattern into a “cast on” project. The project object again provides handy ways to record a variety of metadata about the project, and users can import blog posts related to the project as well as Flickr (and other photo sites) photos of their project. Each user also has a spot to catalog needles and hooks, with a widget to print off a little chart of the tools one already owns before going off to the store and buying yet another set of size 6 29″ circular needles . The stashed yarns can be linked to the projects for which they were used, and patterns are linked to the yarns that Ravelers have used to make the pattern. Users rate the patterns themselves by difficulty and “star” style rating to capture overall appeal, and the patterns also link to blog posts, projects, comments, and source details.

In short, everything is linked up as though there’s a nice tight ontology running behind excellent interface design and thoughtful feature implementation. Besides the amazing and extraordinarily useful functionality, the interfaces are easy to learn and provide a lot of drag-and-drop interactions. The interlinking of all of the craft-specific objects is what really makes it outstanding; it alleviates the effort required to organize knitting efforts by helping me keep track (simultaneously) of my materials, tools, finished objects, and future projects.

I have no doubt that I have gotten a lot more knitting projects finished in recent history as a result of using Ravelry; if nothing else, it reduces the downtime between projects because it’s so much easier to figure out what’s next.

And then there’s the community part. Like Flickr, Ravelry provides a way for people to meet over a common interest, with boundary objects such as projects and group membership to allow opportunities for trust to develop before meeting in person. Generally speaking, however, it seems most knitters and crocheters are friendly people, so I’ve seen little reluctance to meet up. I’ve gone to a few local Ravelry meetups, most recently this morning for World Wide Knit In Public Day. Four of us met up at the CNY Regional Market and knitted at a picnic table; other local Ravelers did their public knitting in alternate locations, tailgating in a yarn store parking lot and gathering at the Carousel Center mall. Most members of the CNY Raveling Knitters & Crocheters group did not know each other before Ravelry, and now there are weekly Saturday morning meetups at a local Freedom of Espresso coffee shop in Franklin Square, with a monthly “big” meetup for which some members will travel from outlying communities.

I’m not as involved in Ravelry as I would be if I weren’t more involved in grad school. Nonetheless, it has provided me a really useful service in the site functionality alone, and the opportunity to meet other people in the area with a similar interest. From an HCI perspective, I am constantly delighted by the great site functionality and ease of use; Casey and Matt (the site founders) have really created something special. Oh, and Bob (Casey and Matt’s funny-looking dog) is probably the coolest social media site mascot ever.