Social software

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Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication. Many advocates of using these tools believe (and actively argue or assume) that these create actual community, and have adopted the term "online communities" to describe the social structures that they claim result.

The more specific term collaborative software applies to cooperative work systems and is usually narrowly applied to software that enables work functions. Distinctions between usage of the terms "social" and "collaborative" is in the applications not the tools, although there are some tools that are only rarely used for work collaboration.

[edit] Debates and design choices

Social software may be better understood as a set of debates or design choices than any particular list of tools. Broadly conceived, there are many older media such as mailing lists and Usenet that qualify as "social". Most users of this term however restrict its meaning to more recent software genres such as blogs and wikis. Others suggest that the term social software is best used not to refer to a single type of software, but rather to the use of two or more modes of computer-mediated communication that result in "community formation".^[1] In this view, people form online communities by combining one-to-one (e.g., email and instant messaging), one-to-many (Web pages and blogs), and many-to-many (wikis) communication modes.^[2] Some groups schedule real life meetings and so become clearly physically "real" communities of people that share physical lives.

Common to most definitions is the observation that some types of software seem to facilitate a more egalitarian and meritocratic "bottom-up" community development, in which membership is voluntary, reputations are earned by winning the trust of other members, and the community's mission and governance are defined by the communities' members themselves.^[3]

Communities formed by "bottom-up" processes are often contrasted to the less vibrant collectivities formed by "top-down" software, in which users' roles are determined by an external authority and circumscribed by rigidly conceived software mechanisms (such as access rights). Given small differences in policies, very similar software can produce radically different social outcomes. For instance, tikiwiki supports the gACL system of detailed access control, and most services using it exploit these to divide up the visibility and editability of pages so that few people can both edit and read a randomly chosen page By contrast, mediawiki avoids per-user controls to keep most pages editable by most users, and puts more information about users currently editing in its recent changes pages. The result is mediawiki being used by community groups more often and those features being more developed, while users who don't embrace the social paradigm and prefer tikiwiki having more content control, less social users.

Social software by design reflects the traits of social networks and is designed very consciously to let social network analysis work with a very compatible database. All social software systems create links between users, as persistent as the identity those users choose. Through these persistent links, a permanent community can be formed out of a formerly epistemic community. The ownership and control of these links - who is linked, and who isn't - is in the hands of the user. Thus, these links are asymmetrical - you might link to me, but I might not link to you. Also, these links are functional, not decorative - you can choose not to receive any content from people you are not connected to, for example. Wikipedia user pages are a very good example, and often contain extremely detailed information about the person who constructed them, including everything from mother tongue to their moral purchasing preferences.

[edit] Tools for online communication

The tools used in social software applications include communication tools and interaction tools. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing, and presentation of communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video also. Interaction tools handle mediated interactions between a pair or group of users. They differ from communication tools in their focus on establishing and maintaining a connection among users, facilitating the mechanics of conversation and talk.

Communication tools are generally asynchronous, interaction tools synchronous (phone, Net phone, video chat) or near-synchronous (IM, text chat).

We can add to this distinction one that describes the primary user experience of each: communication involves the content of talk, speech, or writing; interaction involves the interest users establish in one another as individuals. In other words, a communication tool may want to make access and searching of text both simple and powerful. An interaction tool may want to present as much of a user's expression, performance, and presence as possible. The organization of texts, and providing access to archived contributions differs from the facilitation of interpersonal interactions between contributors enough to warrant the distinction in media.

[edit] Instant Messaging

An instant messaging application or client allows one to communicate with another person over a network in relative privacy. Popular clients include Gtalk, Skype, Meetro, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger. One can add friends to a contact list or buddy list, by entering their email address or messenger ID. If they are online, their name will be listed as available for chat. Clicking on their name will activate a chat window with space to write to the other person, as well as read their reply.

[edit] Text chat

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and other online chat technologies allow users to join chat rooms and communicate with many people at once, publicly. Users may join a pre-existing chat room or create a chat room about any topic. Once inside, you may type messages that everyone else in the room can read, as well as respond to messages from others. Often there is a steady stream of people entering and leaving. Whether you are in another person's chat room, or one you've created yourself, you are generally free to invite others online to join you. When others accept the invitation, they are taken to the room containing the other members, similar to the way conference calling works with phones. This facilitates both one-to-one (communication) and many-to-many interaction.

[edit] Internet forums

Originally modeled after the real-world paradigm of electronic bulletin boards of the world before Internet was born, internet forums allow users to post a "topic" for others to review. Other users can view the topic and post their own comments in a linear fashion, one after the other. Most forums are public, allowing anybody to sign up at any time. A few are private, gated communities where new members must pay a small fee to join for example the Something Awful Forums.

Forums can contain many different categories in a hierarchy according to topics and subtopics. Other features include the ability to post images or files or the ability to quote another user's post with special formatting in ones post. Forums often grow in popularity until they can boast several thousand members posting replies to tens of thousands of topics continuously.

There are various standards and claimants for the market leaders of each software category. Various add-ons, including translation and spelling correction software, may sometimes be available, depending on the expertise of the operators of the bulletin board. In some industry areas, the BB has its own commercially successful achievements: free and paid hardcopy magazines, professional and amateurish sites.

[edit] Blogs or Weblogs

Blogs, short for web logs, are like online journals for a particular person. The owner will post a message periodically allowing others to comment. Topics often include the owner's daily life or views on politics or a particular subject important to them.

Blogs mean many things to different people, ranging from "online journal" to "easily updated personal website". While these definitions are technically correct, they fail to capture the power of blogs as social software. Beyond being a simple homepage or an online diary, some blogs allow comments on the entries, thereby creating a discussion forum. They also have blogrolls (i.e., links to other blogs which the owner reads or admires), and indicate their social relationship to those other bloggers using the XFN social relationship standard. Pingback and trackback allow one blog to notify another blog, creating an inter-blog conversation. In summary, blogs engage readers and build a virtual community around a particular person or interest. Examples include Slashdot, LiveJournal, BlogSpot

[edit] Wikis

A wiki is a webpage that can be easily edited using relatively easy to use wiki syntax. This means that everyone can edit, change or delete text. Examples include the original Portland Pattern Repository wiki, MeatballWiki, CommunityWiki, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, the Student Wiki and Wikisource. The most dominant data format is MediaWiki - which has more or less become the LaTeX or Microsoft Word of wiki; hard to ignore. For information on commerically available wiki systems see Comparison of wiki software.

[edit] Collaborative real-time editor

Simultaneous editing of a text or media file by different participants on a network was first demonstrated on research systems as early as the 1970s but is now practical on a global network. SubEthaEdit and Google Docs & Spreadsheets are examples of this.

[edit] Prediction markets

Many prediction market tools became available including some free software that made it easy to predict and bet on future events. This is a highly rigorized form of social interaction but it nonetheless qualifies as a robust type of social software.

[edit] Types of services

Given the basic building blocks above, many types of services can be constructed. While it was common in the early days of social software to see a service based only on one of the above tool types, today it's rare. The successful services have tended to combine new tools with the older newsgroup and mailing list paradigm to produce hybrids like yahoogroups. Also as a service catches on, it tends to adopt characteristics and tools of other services that compete. Over time, wiki user pages have become for instance very much better social portals for the individuals who write them than some of the services that focus specifically on this.

[edit] Social network services

Social network services allow people to come together online around shared interests or causes. For example, some sites provide dating services where users will post their personal profiles, location, age, gender, etc, and are able to search for a partner. Other shared goals or interests include business networking (Ryze, XING, Azoola, Ecademy and LinkedIn), emotionally supportive phone counseling (Phone Buddies), social event meetups (Meetup), or recreational hobbies.

Some large wikis effectively become social network services by encouraging user pages and portals.

[edit] Social network search engines

Social network search engines are a class of search engines that use social networks to organize, prioritize, or filter search results.

There are two subclasses of social network search engines: those that use explicit social networks, and those that use implicit social networks.

Explicit social network search engines allow people to find each other according to explicitly stated social relationships such as XFN social relationships. For example, XHTML Friends Network allows people to share their relationships on their own sites, thus forming a decentralized/distributed online social network, in contrast to centralized social network services listed in the previous section.

Implicit social network search engines allow people to filter search results based upon classes of social networks they trust, such as a shared political viewpoint. This was called an epistemic filter in a United Nations University report from 1993 which predicted that this would become the dominant means of search for most users.

Lacking trustworthy explicit information about such viewpoints, this type of social network search engine mines the web to infer the topology of online social networks. For example, the NewsTrove search engine infers social networks from content - sites, blogs, pods, and feeds - by examining (among other things) subject matter, link relationships, and grammatical features to infer social networks. The user may then employ the social networks as filters to their search results.

[edit] Social guides

Recommending places to visit in the real world such as coffee shops, restaurants, and wifi hotspots, etc. One such application is WikiTravel.

[edit] Social bookmarking

Some sites allow users to post their list of bookmarks—or favorite websites—for others to search and view. Such sites can be used to meet others sharing common interests. Examples include digg, del.icio.us, reddit, Netvouz, furl, and Connectedy.

[edit] Social citations

Much like social bookmarking, this software, aimed towards academics, allows the user to post a citation for an article found on the internet. These citations can be organized into predefined categories or a new category defined by the user. This will allow academics researching or interested in similar areas to connect and share resources. An example of this software is CiteULike or BibSonomy.

This simply extends existing services like citeseer which relied mostly on experts.

[edit] Social libraries

Sites that allow visitors to keep track of their collectibles, ranging from books, records and DVDs. Users can share their collections and recommendations are generated based on the ratings using statistical computation and network theory. Some sites offer a buddy system, as well as virtual checking out of items for borrowing among friends. Folksonomy is implemented on most sites. Examples include discogs.com, LibraryThing and lib.rario.us.

[edit] Virtual worlds and Massively-Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs)

Virtual Worlds and Massively-Multiplayer Online Games are services where it is possible to meet and interact with other people in a virtual world - which looks somewhat like reality.

Some popular commercial worlds are Second Life, ActiveWorlds, The Sims Online, and There. Some commercial MMOGs (or, more accurately, MMORPGs) include Everquest and World of Warcraft. The Dotsoul Cyberpark is one of the more innovative non-commercial worlds, with the look and feel of Second Life and Active Worlds but an adamantly anticorporate stance. Other open-source and experimental examples include Planeshift, Croquet project, VOS and Solipsis.

[edit] Game economies

Very often a game economy emerges in these worlds, extending the non-physical service economy within the world to service providers outside. Experts can design dresses or hairstyles for characters, go on routine missions for them, and so on, and be paid in game money to do so. This emergence has resulted in expanding social possibility and also in increased incentives to cheat.

[edit] Other specialized social applications

There are many other applications with social software characteristics that facilitate human connection and collaboration in specific contexts. Project management and e-learning applications are among these.

[edit] Politics and journalism

Use for politics has also expanded drastically especially over 2004-6 to include a wide range of social software, often closely integrated with services like phone trees and deliberative democracy forums and run by a candidate, party, or caucus.

Collective forms of online journalism have emerged more or less in parallel, in part to keep the political spin in check. The open politics theory emerged to counter the hype of the "open source politics" claims being made by very many politicians.

[edit] Emerging technologies

Emerging technical capabilities to more widely distribute hosting and support much higher bandwidth in real time are bypassing central content arbiters in some cases.

[edit] Peer-to-peer social networks

A hybrid of web-based social networks, instant messaging technologies and peer-to-peer connectivity and filesharing, peer-to-peer social networks generally allow users to share blogs, files (especially photographs) and instant messages. Some examples are imeem, SpinXpress,Bouillon, Wirehog, GigaTribe, and Soulseek. Also, Groove and WiredReach have similar functionality, but with more of a work-based, collaboration bias.

[edit] Virtual presence

Virtual presence means being present at virtual locations. In particular, the term virtual presence denotes presence on World Wide Web locations pages and Web sites which are identified by URLs. People who are browsing a Web site are considered to be virtually present at Web locations. Virtual presence is a social software in the sense that people meet on the Web by chance or intentionally. The ubiqitous (in the Web space) communication transfers behavior patterns from the real world and Virtual worlds to the Web. Research ^[4] has demonstrated effects ^[5] of online indicators

[edit] References

^ Stowe Boyd, "Are You Ready for Social Software?"
^ Clay Shirky, "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy".
^ Matt Webb, "On Social Software".
^ Sheizaf_Rafaeli & Noy, A. (2002), Online auctions, messaging, communication and social facilitation: a simulation and experimental evidence, European Journal of Information Systems, September 2002, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 196-207.
^ Sheizaf_Rafaeli and Noy, A. (2005). ["Social Presence: Influence on Bidders in Internet Auctions"]. EM-Electronic Markets, 15(2), 158-176.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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