I've just finished reading Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone.

This book is written by the creators of the Yahoo Pattern Library, following research into how people use modern social website interfaces. It is a catalogue of design patterns which are used by current social interfaces, and discusses how and where each should be used.

The book is full colour, and contains many screen shots as examples. Part 1 discusses what the book is about, and the kind of sites that the patterns are used for. Part 2 deals with user oriented patterns - how to present details about users. Part 3 is about "things", and what you can do with them. For example, this part looks at tagging pictures, and rating other user's things. Part 4 looks at relationships between users and deals with friending and unfriending. This part also looks at geolocation. Part 5 looks at open standards and mobile/enterprise use of social features.

I don't think I learned any new ideas or techniques from this book, but it certainly made me think about each one in turn, and consider the background of each. The interesting thing for me was the detail about each one, and thinking about why you should (or shouldn't!) use a particular pattern in a particular situation.

I recommend this book for anyone designing a website to build a community. I immediately followed some of the advice in terms of the voice to use ("Sign In" rather than "Log In" - the suggestion is to speak like a human), and it made me reconsider some ideas I had for an upcoming project.