James explains Jumping the shark is when a TV show or film series goes too far in its efforts to change in order to draw in viewers. It is from an episode of Happy Days when the Fonz jumps over a confined shark while water skiing.

In the context of websites, we are asking how can you move things on and make changes without alienating your core users?

Is it about being open and transparent, giving the reason for your changes. Facebook didn’t do this when it made its homepage more like Twitter recently.

Follow Twitter’s example and don’t bundle together the interface with the underlying infrastructure. Let others build the interfaces.

How do you monetise your product if you have exposed your API?

You plug Twitter into your application but you plug your application into Facebook. The ‘pluggability’ of Twitter has meant that it can adapt easily to users. Facebook is a walled garden and has struggled to adapt.

People love to moan about change.

Is there anything to be learnt from the dissatisfaction that people express when a product goes mainstream?

People tend to stay registered with services even when their interest in them has cooled – although people stop updating, eg MySpace. People stay on Facebook but may be using it less and using Twitter more instead.

Customisable levels of privacy are crucial for social network sites to be a success. With Twitter, some people would like to have some tweets private and some public but this facility isn’t available.

A/B testing is one way of testing the behaviour of users with new versions of designs.

People at this conference are all early adopters and although we may not use Facebook as much now, the majority of people are still using it.

Tie your users in so they can’t be alienated by your changing interface – or do a Twitter.

Should the BBC let people build their own iPlayer?

James wraps the session up by saying that the original Fonz jumping the shark incident was inspired by Evil Kenevil. Did Facebook have its niche but decided to jump their Twitter shark?

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