I’m feeling inspired, after ready Marty Cagan’s “Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love.“  Marty describes some clear best practices for success when creating a new product, or updating an existing product.  He references segmentation, and points out the importance of using personas when planning features and releases.  I finished the book last night, and I immediately started to think about whether or not I truly know my user base.  Truth be told, I don’t know as much as I need to about the users who come and quickly leave.  But new tools such as Twitter and Facebook make it possible to understand your users better than ever before.

Peter Steiner created a famous cartoon, captioned “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”  Well, this is simply not true anymore.

Copyright Image from New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner.

Take Facebook, for instance.  I know more about my real life friends than I ever did before.  Just the other day, on Facebook, I got notified with what must be quickest spreading Facebook content ever; “xxxx tagged you in the note 25 Random Things About Me.”  I read, in awe, that years after being the best man at his wedding, I still didn’t really know him.  And here I was, learning more about a real life friend.

Twitter has a tremendous amount of following.  People follow complete strangers to get them to follow back.  People follow others they think might be interesting, and yet others that are accepted thought-leaders.  If you analyze someone’s posts, you can quickly learn a great deal about them.  And some tweeple’s fingers are like loose cannons,  allowing you to even learn about their personalities.  Take this rant from a well-followed Tweep, for instance.  With some tools doing some basic analysis on a user’s tweets, you can learn an awful lot about this user.

This is where social media and social networking start to close the gap between a publisher and it’s users.  With new features such as Facebook Connect, site publishers are gaining a lot more access to this valuable insight available based on users’ contributions to your site, and to others as well.  This insight will really help to identify one or two of the personas you will undoubtedly need to create to ensure you’re building your product for the audience.

Truth be told, on the Internet, everyone knows exactly who I am.