Swarm Effect
From Mugshot Developer Wiki
The Swarm Effect is the desired interaction we attempt to create for the Web Swarm activity. The snowballing or gaining of interest in an activity as interest is gained and visible in others.
A swarm is momentum, the genesis of a swarm is fueled by the momentum of a few who fuel the momentum of others. Right now our swarm effects are related to sharing links in the Web Swarm.
Contents |
Initial Swarm
When something is first shared we display the share to each person in the bubble. The bubble attempts to give a person just enough information to determine if they're interested in the share.
- Who it's from
- Link Title
- Short description
From this most people tend to quickly scan and evaluate if they're going to follow the link for a number of reasons including
- Some kind of admiration or respect of the person it's from
- Catching title or description
- Cliffhanger's of these only tend to work the first few times
- i.e "I didn't know you could do that with salad tongs..."
- Links of personal interest or where the person receiving believes to be knowledgable of the topic in some fashion
- Cliffhanger's of these only tend to work the first few times
- Bored and looking for something to do anyway :)
Buzz Effect
Once an initial share goes out if a link is going to gain momentum and have a swarm effect it usually takes place fairly quickly.
The goal of the system is to the relate the visibility of this momentum as it is created. We're trying to tread the line of being annoying (which is pretty easy to do) and allowing people to see that enough momentum is building to make something interesting.
Just having people look at a particular link often isn't enough to pique the interest of others to look at the link. This is why we added chat messages to the bubble as we noticed that often people will say something that antagonizes another person to join and adds to the swarm.
See Love and Hate Quips for our future ideas on how to provide a new light-weight method we're working on for enhancing swarms.
Insanity
As a swarm reaches a certain level group chat just breaks down as a useful tool. This is often when a swarm begins to break down. Groups of chatters that are too large will naturally break down, this is perhaps a time when the software could do better to allow people to continue.
After Shocks
Often after a swarm disipates people who were unavailable during the initial swarm visit the aftermath of it. Thanks to keeping the chat history around people are able to look over what was said previously. Often this stirs up the set of people who missed the initial swarm and other who are interested again for other reasons.
References
These are excellent references for understanding how the swarming behavior is related to other common psychological behaviors. (Please don't take the herd or bandwagon terms as insulting to your collective intelligence, it's just how people work)
