overview

This profile looks at 'social software' and online 'social spaces', in particular internet dating services and 'virtual worlds'

It covers -

• wired flesh - internet matchmaking services
• virtual friends & foes - virtual community developments such as friendster.com, upmystreet.com and sixdegrees.com
• virtual worlds - online spaces such as EverQuest

    social software?

Consideration of claims about the significance or newness of 'social software' is impeded by the fuzziness of the concept and over-promotion by some vendors touting the next 'new new thing'.

Some observers characterise everything from blogs and email to wiki and the websites of advocacy groups as social software ... conducive of online/offline communities and the strengthening of social capital. That is a neat conceit, particularly for some of the woollier pundits about e-democracy, but is perhaps so broad as to be meaningless. Can we, for example, talk of the handwritten letter or the teletype as social software? Was Gutenberg or Morse the father of social software?

Others, more usefully, restrict discussion to tools that permit online social interaction in the form of matchmaking services, particularly those that feature automated profiling and partner selection.

Stowe Boyd in Are You Ready For Social Software identified it as -

1. Support for conversational interaction between individuals or groups including real time and "slow time" conversation, like instant messaging and collaborative teamwork spaces, respectively ...
2. Support for social feedback which allows a group to rate the contributions of others, perhaps implicitly, leading to the creation of digital reputation ...
3. Support for social networks to explicitly create and manage a digital expression of people's personal relationships, and to help them build new relationships ...

with an emphasis on 'bottom-up' voluntary association in contrast to 'top-down' corporate groupware.

Others emphasise the 'reputation' element, illustrated by the 'karma' ratings found in online fora such as Slashdot and Whirlpool (akin to offline citation rankings),

Particular issues are highlighted in the upbeat 2003 UK iSociety report You Don't Know Me, But ... Social Capital & Social Software', which argues that

Social software supports participation and face-to-face social networks. But rather than overcoming distance as originally anticipated, the true benefits of applications like email lie in the way that it helps us overcome the limitations of time: people can participate in an online discussion at a time of their choosing. The mobile internet will enhance this freedom further. For these reasons, groups can be coordinated with greater ease over the Internet, leading to more face-to-face contact. Communicating via social software can sometimes be more useful than meeting face-to-face for friends and colleagues. Social software helps manage and distribute knowledge, so as to support face-to-face discussion.

There is a somewhat less expansive view in Smarter, Simpler, Social: An introduction to online social software methodology, a 2003 paper by Lee Bryant that notes comments by provocateur Clay Shirky.








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