For social features to be successful in shaping future versions of something, you need to have a process or lifecycle in place already that knows how to deal with listening to customers. A lot of companies out there like ABCNEWS.com are jumping to include these features without having a good lifecycle in place. Maybe the feedback itself will force companies to change their process. The famous tire swing cartoon comes to mind here.

I like what Paula mentioned here and feel we have to continue to tease this out to make sure we can consume this valuable data better.

“Gathering requirements results in opinion-based (solution-pre-defined) design rather than fact-based (or evidence-based) design (leveraging various design research methods — prior usability findings, contextual inquiry, feedback analysis, etc.). Requirements come out of the design process, where the evidences are worked through by a design team including the business and IT, but also an architectural body — representing process, data, function, services, security, UI/UX perspectives. It is only through conversations from these various perspectives that all impacts can be considered (high level) and resolved to end up with a ’sound’ set of requirements to move into the first phase of development (iterative cycles can take hold from here).”