Earning users’ trust
Earlier tonight I posted to @flickr on Twitter, asking why they have not added Twitter integration of some sort. The whole tweet is a little tongue-in-cheek and I thought about deleting it afterwards. That train of thought led to a question: why did I care so much about Flickr adding Twitter integration anyway? Why not just use one of the services that exist that provide that functionality and can be found just by plugging “Flickr Twitter” into Google?
I decided that it boils down to trust. I trust Flickr with my photos, and I do not trust any of these third-party services with my Twitter account and password much less my Flickr information.
That said, it begs the question: why do I trust Flickr? I mean, I’ve never really read their terms of service, so I have no idea what kind of rights they’re claiming to my photos or video. However, there are a couple of key points that I believe make my ignorance of their TOS a non-issue.
First is the fact that at any time, I can pull my original photo files out of my Flickr RSS and destroy my account. I have ultimate control, and Flickr makes it easy an obvious; there are no hoops to jump through.
Second is the integration of Creative Commons. Again, control is in my hands. At least I feel like it is.
The point is that trust has to be earned, and it’s really not that hard to do. Users want to trust this new awesome service that they just started using and discovering all the cool things is allows them to do.
If you run or create services on the Internet, every time you make a change, add (or remove) a feature, ask yourself: could this change potentially damage the trust that my users have for me and my company/site/service?
I’ll finish this off with a story. In the summer of 2006, I went with some of my fellow blip.tv founders to Vloggercon in San Francisco. With some other folks we held an informal gathering we named “Video Vertigo”, the purpose of which was to come up with open standards for the web. (The timing of this post is rather coincidental considering the upcoming web video standards conference - more on that later.)
After a while the discussion turned to identity and OpenID and who should be a broker, etc. I don’t remember exactly how it came about, but the idea of blip.tv acting as a broker was raised and subsequently questioned.
It was then that Schlomo Rabinowitz, one of our first users, stood up and pointed at Mike and I. He said in a loud, clear voice, “I trust blip.tv.”
It was then I realized the awesome responsibility we have to all of our users, part of which is to listen to them carefully when they take the time to give us feedback.
Speaking of feedback, this is the first long-winded post I’ve made in a while, so I’m looking forward to hearing what you think.
