Designing Social Interfaces is an impressive compilation of knowledge about what makes social media applications work. It covers the entire range of what you need to think about if you're designing a UI for a social app, from high-level "Why do this?" to screen-by-screen advice on words to put on your site -- or not. It's a kind of soup-to-nuts checklist for anyone involved in designing social media, a guide to doing it right at every level.
Of particular interest to UI writers (or anyone else with the job of deciding what words will appear in a social app's UI) are some of the patterns in Chapter 2, for example using "your" versus "my" (the choice "can reinforce either a social or a solipsistic state of mind"), how to label blank spaces for users to fill in (answer: with a question), and how to "talk like a person!" (use a conversational tone). But the book is peppered throughout with other patterns of functionality that have implications for text in a UI, such as these:
* Welcome area
* Sign-up or registration
* Social search (i.e., search on user-contributed tags)
* Forums: creating and facilitating discussion
* Collaborative editing
* Saving an item for later viewing, sharing, or discussion
* Terms of service and licenses
* Reminders
Authors Crumlish and Malone, respectively the curator and founder of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, have saved the rest of us lots and lots of time by compiling this important guide. If you write copy for a social UI, don't reinvent the wheel -- use this book.