It's been a few days now since we launched the new BBC iPlayer Beta site, and the feedback has been fascinating. Lots of people have been commenting on the new social features, in fact it's been one of the dominant themes in the new media and press coverage so far. So I thought it was time to give you a thorough run down of what we've done, how it works, and why we did what we did.
Why did BBC iPlayer go social?
Simple. People love TV and Radio. But they also love telling people about it. People want others to enjoy just as much as they did. Often, they might evangelise 'round the watercooler' or down the pub. But with iPlayer and other media-on-demand services, suddenly you can take links to these programmes and email them round, or post them to social networking sites.
Now that's great, but when you're on Facebook or reading your email, you're not always in the mood to watch a 60 minute TV show or listen to a 3 hour Zane Lowe show.
Many people's watching and listening habits are driven by recommendations from friends, so what if you could see what your friends have recommended right at the moment you want to watch or listen to something? Wouldn't that be cool? It'd mean the next time you say "I've got an hour spare. I wonder what's good on iPlayer", you don't just have to rely on the schedule to pick programmes from - you have a ready made selection of awesome programmes, recommended by your friends, right there.
Clearly it was something we should try and make happen - the question was, How?
The Challenge
Friends. More and more people are using social networks to communicate with their friends. Some networks are different to others. For example, Facebook tends to be about the friends you've actually met. People on Twitter often follow people they know, but also celebrities or notable people within a field of interest. I follow lots of web geeks for example.
So how do we get your friends into iPlayer? I mean right there on the homepage of iPlayer? We had a few options.
1: build our own social network
One way of doing this was to build a totally standalone social network - one where you can find people on the BBC, add them as friends, and voila! Well, why do that? People have got friends already - they're on Facebook, Twitter, and many other social networking sites. Building our own would have made it hard work to find your friends again, and hard work to keep it up to date. Not cool. Anyway, there are already too many social networks - the world doesn't need one more. In fact, the BBC in it's recent strategy review said we "should not create stand-alone social networking sites, with any social propositions on the BBC site only there to aid engagement with BBC content... [we] will also ensure that [our] social activity works with external social networks". Clearly, this option was a no-go.
2: just do Facebook
Facebook, and its Facebook Connect system for third-parties has been phenomenally successful - used by hundreds of thousands of sites and millions of users. It allows a site to not bother building its own login system or social network, and in effect, to outsource it all to Facebook. Users get a nearly-one-click sign in, and a ready made circle of friends. Simple. But for the BBC, it had one big drawback. What about people who don't use Facebook? Believe it or not, plenty of people don't. As a public service organisation, should we limit any social functionality in iPlayer to only those licence fee payers who use Facebook? No, we shouldn't. We'd really prefer something which lets people pick from a range of social networks, and something which is flexible enough to change and adapt as the popularity of social networks changes.
3: do Facebook AND other social networks
Another, simpler solution would be to let you pick just one social network from a range of social networks, and see just your friends from that social network in iPlayer. Sounds alright, but you'd only see recommendations from your friends who'd also chosen the same social network as you. Imagine if your mate Dave had picked Twitter, and you'd picked Facebook. You wouldn't see anything he'd recommended. Rubbish.
4: a hybrid solution
Looking at all the previous options, it was clear we needed to do something different. We wanted users to be able to choose from a range of social networks - and allow people to connect to multiple networks, not just one. We also wanted it to just work - set it up and off it goes. We didn't want people to have to go back to select new people to add every few days, or have to worry about where they came from. We just wanted all the recommendations, from all your friends, in one place.
What we eventually came up with allows you to get exactly that. You can connect your BBC iD to a range of social networks (currently two: Facebook and Twitter, but expandable over time) and our system will do all the clever stuff to bring your friends from all those social networks right into iPlayer.
For example, I'm pretty active on both Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is where most of my real friends are, but on Twitter I follow loads of really interesting people. With the technology we've built for BBC iPlayer, I get to see friends from both those sites right there in the Friends drawer, no segregation, no duplication. Superb.
Automagically, our system will find all your friends from all your networks who also use iPlayer. And as more of your friends connect their BBC iDs to Facebook and Twitter, they'll just start appearing on the iPlayer homepage as soon as they recommend some content. "But what if one of my friends keeps giving me rubbish recommendations?"... I hear you ask. Luckily, you've still got the option to remove people in your BBC iD Social Settings. Removing people just means you won't see them any more in iPlayer. Don't worry, they're still your friend on Facebook or Twitter, but you no longer have to be bombarded with their 'dodgy' recommendations.
The clever technology layer that makes this all work is something we call SNeS (officially 'Social Networking Services', but named in homage to the classic console). SNeS is actually our own implementation of OpenSocial, the Google-backed project which standardises social applications. Furthermore, SNeS is built around Shindig, the reference implementation of OpenSocial. It's SNeS that keeps track of who your friends are, and what they've been recommending - and serves it up to you, in real time right there in iPlayer. It's the social brain of the BBC website. SNeS is a proper heavyweight piece of engineering. It can deal with millions of users making millions of recommendations to millions of friends - something you need when you're working with one of the biggest video sites on the web. You'll be seeing more in-depth blog posts about how it all works over the coming months.
But why did you put all the social stuff behind your own BBC iD?
The plan for the next year is to roll out the full, social, personalised BBC iPlayer experience across nearly all the other platforms which currently support iPlayer. That includes mobiles, games consoles, set-top boxes and IP-connected TVs. We're going to bring Favourites and For You to those platforms too - and you're going to need BBC iD if you want your personal Favourites and suggestions to follow you across platforms. Given this, it would have been silly to make you connect to Twitter and Facebook directly on each of these platforms. Besides, iPlayer is available on many more diverse platforms that Facebook Connect is.
By putting our social connectivity behind BBC iD, it means all the great social features will be rolled out to all our other platforms over time. It means you only have to connect once to Facebook and Twitter on the web, and manage all your settings there. Then, when you're on your IP-connected TV or your mobile device - your Friends will be right there, recommending great content to you.
Broadcasting your Recommendations
Everything I've talked about so far is about getting recommendations from Friends - but for this to be of any use, we had to get people to make recommendations in the first place.
Again, we could have just added a few links on each programme page saying 'post to Facebook' or 'post to Twitter'. But as we discussed earlier, we wanted to show what people were recommending in iPlayer, not just in Facebook and Twitter. Only posting out to Facebook or Twitter would have meant we'd have to constantly monitor the whole of Facebook and Twitter to see what your Friends were recommending, and pull that into iPlayer. Not an easy task, and something which gets much harder the more people join. Even so, scouring Facebook and Twitter for direct recommendations is something we're actively looking at for the future.
In the meantime, our solution was to allow you to make public recommendations on the BBC website.
When you turn on the social features in BBC iPlayer, you're opting in to getting a public profile page on the BBC website. Here's mine for example. Any recommendations you make in iPlayer (or indeed elsewhere as we roll out the ability to Recommend across the rest of the BBC website) will appear on your public profile for others to see. This isn't new for the BBC at all - we've had public profiles and public spaces on the BBC website for years now.
These profiles also include some cool new data views - namely RSS and Atom (using ActivityStreams extensions). This means you can use these feeds on your site, your blog, on other social networks or your favourite feedreader. It makes it really easy to add what you recommend on the BBC into Google Buzz for example.
By allowing you to make public recommendations we're allowing you to say to the world "I think this is great!". It adds a whole new dimension to the way you can navigate the BBC site. Imagine seeing other people who've recommended similar things to you - and find even more great content through them. We call that Social Discovery - and we think its a fantastic new way of finding new stuff to watch, listen or read.
Having public recommendations is also key in allowing us to support social networks like Twitter which have what's called an asymmetric friendship model. This means its possible to 'follow' a user without them having to follow you back (Facebook on the other hand uses a symmetric friendship model - each of your Facebook friends has agreed to be your friend - so you both have each other as friends). Imagine if your recommendations were only visible to people who follow you - there'd be an odd scenario where someone who follows you on Twitter, that you don't follow, could see your BBC recommendations - effectively making them public anyway.
Other services like Spotify have taken exactly the same approach to this problem in their social integrations. And like Spotify, you have complete control over your Public Profile. You can delete individual recommendations, you can change or remove your public profile picture, and you can choose any BBC iD DisplayName you want if you prefer to keep your anonymity. We hope the benefits and simplicity of allowing you to make public recommendations is balanced by the control you have over what you recommend, and what you can remove.
What next?
It's very early days for the social features in iPlayer, but it's fair to say this is exciting new ground for us - and we're monitoring how people use these new features closely. We're actively asking for feedback at this stage (via the admittedly verbose #BBCiPlayerfeedback hashtag on Twitter or comments at the bottom of this entry).
We're looking at improvements we can make to the social features in BBC iPlayer, but we're also looking at other parts of the BBC site where this kind of deeply-embedded social functionality would make a real benefit to some of our users. If it goes down well, and people find it useful, expect to see the ability to Recommend content outwards, and see what your Facebook and Twitter friends have been recommending, spread through more parts of the BBC website.
Simon Cross is Executive Product Manager, BBC iD and Flow,
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