Social software
Encyclopedia
Social software applications include communication tools and interactive tools. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a pair or group of users. They focus on establishing and maintaining a connection among users, facilitating the mechanics of conversation and talk.

Instant messaging

An instant messaging
Instant messaging
Instant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...

application or client
Client (computing)
A client is an application or system that accesses a service made available by a server. The server is often on another computer system, in which case the client accesses the service by way of a network....

 allows one to communicate with another person over a network in real time, in relative privacy. Popular, consumer-oriented clients include AOL Instant Messenger
AOL Instant Messenger
AOL Instant Messenger is an instant messaging and presence computer program which uses the proprietary OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC protocol to allow registered users to communicate in real time. It was released by AOL in May 1997...

, Google speech, ICQ
ICQ
ICQ is an instant messaging computer program, which was first developed and popularized by the Israeli company Mirabilis, then bought by America Online, and since April 2010 owned by Mail.ru Group. The name ICQ is a homophone for the phrase "I seek you"...

, Meebo
Meebo
Meebo is a social platform connecting users with their friends across the web. It began in 2005 as a browser based instant messaging program which supported multiple IM services, including Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AIM, ICQ, MySpaceIM, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, CafeMom and...

, MSN Messenger, Pidgin (formerly maig), and Yahoo! Messenger
Yahoo! Messenger
Yahoo! Messenger is an advertisement-supported instant messaging client and associated protocol provided by Yahoo!...

. Instant messaging software designed for use in business includes IBM Lotus Sametime
IBM Lotus Sametime
IBM Sametime is a client–server application and middleware platform that provides real-time, unified communications and collaboration for enterprises. Those capabilities include presence information, enterprise instant messaging, web conferencing, community collaboration, and telephony capabilities...

, XMPP
Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol
Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol is an open-standard communications protocol for message-oriented middleware based on XML . The protocol was originally named Jabber, and was developed by the Jabber open-source community in 1999 for near-real-time, extensible instant messaging , presence...

 and Microsoft Messenger.

One can add friends to a contact or buddy list by entering the person's email address or messenger ID. If the person is online, their name will typically 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.

Text chat

Internet Relay Chat
Internet Relay Chat
Internet Relay Chat is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file...

 (IRC) and other online chat
Online chat
Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, that offers an instantaneous transmission of text-based messages from sender to receiver, hence the delay for visual access to the sent message shall not hamper the flow of communications in any of the directions...

 technologies allow users to join and communicate with many people at once, publicly. Users may join a pre-existing chat room or create a new one about any topic. Once inside, you may type messages that everyone else in the room can read, as well as respond tofrom 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 in that room. Instant messaging facilitates both and interaction.

Groupware

The goal of groupware software such as Moodle, Landing pages, Enterprise Architecture, and sharepoint, is to allow subjects to share data – such as files, photos, text, etc for the purpose of project work or school work. The intent is to first form a group and then have them collaborate among each other. Clay Shirky defines social software as “software that supports group interaction”. Since groupware supports group interaction (once the group is formed), it would consider it to be social software.

Internet forums

Originally modeled after the real-world paradigm of electronic bulletin boards
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...

 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, like 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 to quote another user's post with special formatting in one's own 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 may be available, including translation and spelling correction software, depending on the expertise of the operators of the bulletin board. In some industry areas, the bulletin board has its own commercially successful achievements: free and paid hardcopy magazines as well as professional and amateur sites.

Current successful services have combined new tools with the older newsgroup
Newsgroup
A usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on...

 and mailing list
Mailing list
A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as "the mailing list", or simply "the...

 paradigm to produce hybrids like Yahoo! Groups
Yahoo! Groups
Yahoo! Groups is one of the world’s largest collections of online discussion boards. The term Groups refers to Internet communication which is a hybrid between an electronic mailing list and a threaded Internet forum, in other words, Group messages can be read and posted by e-mail or on the Group's...

 and Google Groups
Google Groups
Google Groups is a service from Google Inc. that supports discussion groups, including many Usenet newsgroups, based on common interests. The service was started in 1995 as Deja News, and was transitioned to Google Groups after a February 2001 buyout....

. Also as a service catches on, it tends to adopt characteristics and tools of other services that compete. Over time, for example, wiki user pages have become social portals for individual users and may be used in place of other portal applications.

Wikis

A wiki is a web page whose content can be edited by its visitors. Examples include Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

, Wiktionary
Wiktionary
Wiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in 158 languages...

, the original Portland Pattern Repository
Portland Pattern Repository
The Portland Pattern Repository is a repository for computer programming design patterns. It was accompanied by a companion website, WikiWikiWeb, which was the world's first wiki....

 wiki, MeatballWiki
MeatballWiki
MeatballWiki is a wiki dedicated to online communities, network culture, and hypermedia.Founded in 2000, its original goal was to focus on collaborative hypermedia, but current topics range from intellectual property to cyberpunk to the confusion of URIs....

, CommunityWiki and Wikisource
Wikisource
Wikisource is an online digital library of free content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aims are to host all forms of free text, in many languages, and translations. Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, it has...

. For more detail on free and commercially available wiki systems see Comparison of wiki software
Comparison of wiki software
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of wiki software packages.-General information:-Target audience:-Features 1:-Features 2:-Installation:-See also:* List of wiki software* List of wikis* Wiki farm...

.

Blogs

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, 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
XHTML Friends Network
XHTML Friends Network is an HTML microformat developed by Global Multimedia Protocols Group that provides a simple way to represent human relationships using links. XFN enables web authors to indicate relationships to the people in their blogrolls by adding one or more keywords as the rel...

 social relationship standard. Pingback
Pingback
A pingback is one of three types of linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles...

 and trackback
TrackBack
A trackback is one of three types of linkback methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to their articles...

 allow one blog to notify another blog, creating an inter-blog conversation. Blogs engage readers and can build a virtual community around a particular person or interest. Examples include Slashdot
Slashdot
Slashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...

, LiveJournal
LiveJournal
LiveJournal is a virtual community where Internet users can keep a blog, journal or diary. LiveJournal is also the name of the free and open source server software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community....

, BlogSpot
Blogger (service)
Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish...

. Blogging has also become fashionable in business settings by companies who use software such as IBM Lotus Connections
IBM Lotus Connections
IBM Connections is a proprietary Web 2.0 social software application developed by the Lotus Software division of IBM. The goal of Lotus Connections is to empower companies to be more innovative and help them execute more quickly by using dynamic networks of co-workers, partners and customers...

.

Collaborative real-time editors

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. Collaborative real-time editing is now utilized, for example, in film editing and on services such as Google Docs.

Prediction markets

Many prediction market tools have become available (including some free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

) that make it easy to predict and bet on future events. This a more formal version of social interaction, although it qualifies as a robust type of social software.

Social network services

Social network services allow people to come together online around shared interests, hobbies or causes. For example, some sites provide meeting organization facilities for people who practice the same sports. Other services enable business networking (Ryze
Ryze
Ryze.com is a free social networking website designed to link business professionals, particularly new entrepreneurs. The site claims to have over 500,000 members in 200 countries, with over 1,000 external organizations hosting sub-networks on the site. Both paid and unpaid membership levels are...

, XING
Xing
Xing may refer to:* an abbreviation for crossing, primarily used in North America* Qiao Xing Universal Telephone Inc. * XING, a social network platform* Xing County, in Shanxi, China* Xing - A Korean boyband...

 and LinkedIn
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. , LinkedIn reports more than 120 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site is available in English, French,...

) and social event meetups (Meetup).

Some large wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...

s have effectively become social network services by encouraging user pages and portals.

Anyone can create their own social networking service using hosted offerings like Ning, grou.ps or rSitez or more flexible, installable software like Elgg Social Networking Engine
Elgg (software)
Elgg is open source social networking software that provides individuals and organizations with the components needed to create an online social environment. It offers blogging, microblogging, file sharing, networking, groups and a number of other features....

, Anahita Social Networking Engine, Jcow, BuddyPress
BuddyPress
BuddyPress is an open source social networking software package owned by Automattic since 2008. It is a plugin that can be installed on WordPress to transform it into a social network platform...

, SocialEngine
SocialEngine
SocialEngine is a PHP-based white-label social networking service platform, that provides features similar to a social network on a user's website. Main features include administration of small-to-mid scale social networks, some customization abilities, unencrypted code, multilingual capability,...

, Oxwall
Oxwall
Oxwall is free and open source community software distributed under the Common Public Attribution License. It is written in PHP and is used as a platform for social networking and community sites....

, phpFox, Status.net or Concursive's ConcourseConnect
ConcourseConnect
ConcourseConnect was developed by Concursive Corporation and is a platform for deploying large scale web-based communities...

.

Social Engine

The shortened version of the term Social Networking Engine. It is referred to a web based framework and platform for developing custom social apps as well as hosting them. A social engine acts as a web operating system for developing all kinds of social networking services and projects.

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
    XHTML Friends Network
    XHTML Friends Network is an HTML microformat developed by Global Multimedia Protocols Group that provides a simple way to represent human relationships using links. XFN enables web authors to indicate relationships to the people in their blogrolls by adding one or more keywords as the rel...

     social relationships. XHTML Friends Network
    XHTML Friends Network
    XHTML Friends Network is an HTML microformat developed by Global Multimedia Protocols Group that provides a simple way to represent human relationships using links. XFN enables web authors to indicate relationships to the people in their blogrolls by adding one or more keywords as the rel...

    , for example, 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 the 1993 "State of the Future Report" from the American Committee for the United Nations University 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.

Deliberative social networks

Deliberative social networks are webs of discussion and debate for decision-making purposes. They are built for the purpose of establishing sustained relationships between individuals and their government. They rely upon informed opinion and advice that is given with a clear expectation of outcomes.

Commercial social networks

Commercial social networks are designed to support business transaction and to build a trust between an individual and a brand, which relies on opinion of product, ideas to make the product better, enabling customers to participate with the brands in promoting development, service delivery and a better customer experience.. An example of these networks is Dell IdeaStorm
Dell IdeaStorm
Dell IdeaStorm is a website launched by Dell on February 16, 2007 to allow Dell "to gauge which ideas are most important and most relevant to" the public....

.

Social guides

A social guide recommending places to visit or contains information about places in the real world such as coffee shops, restaurants and wifi hotspots, etc. One such application is wikitravel
Wikitravel
-External links:* *...

.

Social bookmarking

Some web sites allow users to post their list of bookmarks or favorites websites for others to search and view them. These sites can also be used to meet others sharing common interests. Examples include digg
Digg
Digg is a social news website. Prior to Digg v4, its cornerstone function consisted of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems...

, Delicious, StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles.Toolbar versions exist for...

, reddit
Reddit
reddit is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text "self" post. Other users then vote the submission "up" or "down," which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages and front page.Reddit was originally...

, and furl
Furl
Furl was a free social bookmarking website that allowed members to store searchable copies of webpages and share them with others. Every member received 5 gigabytes of storage space. The site was founded by Mike Giles in 2003 and purchased by LookSmart in 2004...

.

Enterprise bookmarking
Enterprise bookmarking
Enterprise bookmarking is a method for Enterprise 2.0 users to tag, organize, store, and search bookmarks of both web pages on the Internet and data resources stored in a distributed database or fileserver...

 is a method of tagging and linking any information using an expanded set of tags to capture knowledge about data. It collects and indexes these tags in a web-infrastructure server residing behind the firewall. Users can share knowledge tags with specified people or groups, shared only inside specific networks, typically within an organization. Examples of this software are Knowledge Plaza
Knowledge Plaza
Knowledge Plaza, also referred to as KP, is an Enterprise 2.0 and knowledge management tool which provides a balance between social bookmarking, document management, wikis and an internal social network...

, Jumper 2.0
Jumper 2.0
Jumper 2.0, is an open source web application script for collaborative search and knowledge management powered by a shared enterprise bookmarking engine that is a fork of KnowledgebasePublisher[]. It was publicly announced on 29 September 2008,...

, IBM Dogear, and Connectbeam
Connectbeam
Connectbeam was a company based in Mountain View, California that provided enterprise social software. The company provided two core services: social bookmarking and aggregation of links and metadata for content from other social software applications...

.

Social viewing

Social viewing
Social viewing
Social viewing describes a recently developed practice revolving around the ability for multiple users to aggregate from multiple sources and view online videos together in a synchronized viewing experience....

 allows multiple users to aggregate from multiple sources and view online videos together in a synchronized viewing experience.

Social cataloging

In Social cataloging much like social bookmarking, this software is aimed towards academics. It allows the user to post a citation for an article found on the internet or a website, online database like Academic Search Premier or LexisNexis Academic University, a book found in a library catalog and so on. These citations can be organized into predefined categories or a new category defined by the user through the use of tags
Tag (metadata)
In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching...

. This allows academics researching or interested in similar areas to connect and share resources.

Social libraries

This applications allows visitors to keep track of their collectibles, books, records and DVDs. Users can share their collections. Recommendations can be generated based on user ratings, using statistical computation and network theory
Network theory
Network theory is an area of computer science and network science and part of graph theory. It has application in many disciplines including statistical physics, particle physics, computer science, biology, economics, operations research, and sociology...

. Some sites offer a buddy system, as well as virtual "check outs" of items for borrowing among friends. Folksonomy
Folksonomy
A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging...

 or tagging
Tag (metadata)
In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching...

 is implemented on most of these sites.

Social online storage

Social online storage applications allow their users to collaboratively create file archives containing files of any type. Files can either be edited online or from a local computer which has access to the storage system. Such systems can be built upon existing server infrastructure (e.g. GDrive) or leverage idle resources by applying P2P technology (e.g. Wuala
Wuala
Wuala is a secure online storage, file synchronization, versioning and backup, service, originally developed and run by Caleido Inc., which is now part of LaCie. Service is a combination of:...

). Such systems are social because they allow public file distribution and direct file sharing
File sharing
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multimedia , documents, or electronic books. It may be implemented through a variety of ways...

 with friends.

Virtual worlds

Virtual Worlds are services where it is possible to meet and interact with other people in a virtual environment reminiscent of the real world. Thus the term virtual reality
Virtual reality
Virtual reality , also known as virtuality, is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds...

. Typically, the user manipulates an avatar
Avatar (computing)
In computing, an avatar is the graphical representation of the user or the user's alter ego or character. It may take either a three-dimensional form, as in games or virtual worlds, or a two-dimensional form as an icon in Internet forums and other online communities. It can also refer to a text...

 through the world, interacting with others using chat
Online chat
Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, that offers an instantaneous transmission of text-based messages from sender to receiver, hence the delay for visual access to the sent message shall not hamper the flow of communications in any of the directions...

 or voice chat
Voice chat
Voice chat is a modern form of communication used on the Internet. The means of communicating with voice chat is through any of the messengers, mainly Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, inSpeak Communicator or Windows Live Messenger...

.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs)

MMOGs are virtual worlds (also known as virtual environments) that add various sorts of point systems, levels, competition and winners and losers to virtual world simulation. Commercial MMOGs (or, more accurately, massively multiplayer online role-playing games or MMORPG
MMORPG
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game is a genre of role-playing video games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world....

s,) include Everquest
EverQuest
EverQuest, often shortened to EQ, is a 3D fantasy-themed massively multiplayer online role-playing game that was released on the 16th of March, 1999. The original design is credited to Brad McQuaid, Steve Clover, and Bill Trost...

 and World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe, which was first introduced by Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994...

.

Non-game worlds

Another development are the worlds that are less game-like or not game
Game
A game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements...

s at all. Games have points, winners and losers. Instead, some virtual worlds are more like social networking services like MySpace and Facebook, but with 3D simulation features. Examples include Second Life, ActiveWorlds, The Sims Online
The Sims Online
The Sims Online was a massively multiplayer online variation on Maxis's highly popular computer game The Sims. It was published by Electronic Arts and released on December 17, 2002 for Microsoft Windows. In March 2007, EA announced that the product would be re-branded as EA-Land and major...

 and There
There (internet service)
There is a 3D online virtual world created by Will Harvey and Jeffrey Ventrella. There Inc. was founded in the spring of 1998. Closed beta began in July 2001, with various stages of beta following, and ending with an October 2003 launch date...

.

Economies

Very often a real economy emerges in these worlds, extending the non-physical service economy
Service economy
Service economy can refer to one or both of two recent economic developments. One is the increased importance of the service sector in industrialized economies. Services account for a higher percentage of US GDP than 20 years ago...

 within the world to service providers in the real world. 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. In the case of Second Life
Second Life
Second Life is an online virtual world developed by Linden Lab. It was launched on June 23, 2003. A number of free client programs, or Viewers, enable Second Life users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars...

, the in-world economy is one of the primary features of the world. Some MMOG companies even have economists employed full-time (for example, CCP Games with Eve Online
EVE Online
Eve Online is a video game by CCP Games. It is a player-driven, persistent-world MMORPG set in a science fiction space setting. Characters pilot customizable ships through a galaxy of over 7,500 star systems. Most star systems are connected to one or more other star systems by means of stargates...

) to monitor their in-game economic systems.

Other specialized social applications

There are many other applications with social software characteristics that facilitate human connection and collaboration in specific contexts. Social Project Management
Social Project Management
Social project management is a non-traditional way of organizing projects and performing project management. It is, in its simplest form, the outcome of the application of the social networking paradigm to the context of project ecosystems, as a continued response to the movement toward...

 and e-learning
E-learning
E-learning comprises all forms of electronically supported learning and teaching. The information and communication systems, whether networked learning or not, serve as specific media to implement the learning process...

 applications are among these.

Social software vendor lists

Various analyst firms have attempted to list and categorize the major social software vendors in the marketplace. Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research
Forrester Research
Forrester Research is an independent technology and market research company that provides its clients with advice about technology's impact on business and consumers. Forrester Research has five research centers in the US: Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York, New York; San Francisco, California;...

 has listed fifty "community software" platforms. Independent analyst firm Real Story Group has categorized what it calls "the 30 most significant" Social Software vendors, which it evaluates head-to-head.

Politics and journalism

Use of social software for politics
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...

 has also expanded drastically especially over 2004~2006 to include a wide range of social software, often closely integrated with services like phone trees and deliberative democracy
Deliberative democracy
Deliberative democracy is a form of democracy in which public deliberation is central to legitimate lawmaking. It adopts elements of both consensus decision-making and majority rule. Deliberative democracy differs from traditional democratic theory in that authentic deliberation, not mere...

 forums and run by a candidate, party or caucus
Caucus
A caucus is a meeting of supporters or members of a political party or movement, especially in the United States and Canada. As the use of the term has been expanded the exact definition has come to vary among political cultures.-Origin of the term:...

.

Collective forms of online journalism
Online journalism
Online journalism is defined as the reporting of facts when produced and distributed via the Internet.As of 2009, audiences for online journalism continue to grow...

 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.

Comparison of communication and interactive tools

Communication tools are generally asynchronous. By contrast, interactive tools are generally synchronous
Synchronization (computer science)
In computer science, synchronization refers to one of two distinct but related concepts: synchronization of processes, and synchronization of data. Process synchronization refers to the idea that multiple processes are to join up or handshake at a certain point, so as to reach an agreement or...

, allowing users to communicate in real time (phone, net phone, video chat) or near-synchronous (IM, text chat).

Communication involve the content of talk, speech or writing, whereas 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 interactive 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.

Emerging technologies

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

Virtual presence

Widely viewed, virtual presence or telepresence
Telepresence
Telepresence refers to a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they were present, to give the appearance of being present, or to have an effect, via telerobotics, at a place other than their true location....

 means being present via intermediate technologies, usually radio, telephone, television or the internet. In addition, it can denote apparent physical appearance, such as voice, face and body language.

More narrowly, the term virtual presence denotes presence on World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

 locations which are identified by URL
Uniform Resource Locator
In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....

s. 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 ubiquitous (in the web space) communication transfers behavior patterns from the real world and virtual world
Virtual world
A virtual world is an online community that takes the form of a computer-based simulated environment through which users can interact with one another and use and create objects. The term has become largely synonymous with interactive 3D virtual environments, where the users take the form of...

s to the web. Research has demonstrated effects
of online indicators

Debates or design choices

Social software may be better understood as a set of debates or design choices, rather than any particular list of tools. Broadly conceived, there are many older media such as mailing list
Mailing list
A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as "the mailing list", or simply "the...

s and Usenet
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...

 fora that qualify as "social". However, most users of this term restrict its meaning to more recent software genres such as blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

s and wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...

s. 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." In this view, people form online communities by combining one-to-one (e.g. email
Email
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

 and instant messaging
Instant messaging
Instant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...

), one-to-many (Web pages and blogs) and many-to-many (wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...

s) communication modes. Some groups schedule real life
Real life
Real life is a term usually used to denote actual human life lived by real people in contrast with the lives of fictional or fantasy characters.-Usage online and in fiction:On the Internet, "real life" refers to life in the real world...

 meetings and so become "real" communities of people that share physical lives.

Most definers of social software agree that they seem to facilitate "bottom-up" community development. The system is classless and promotes those with abilities. Membership is voluntary, reputation
Reputation
Reputation of a social entity is an opinion about that entity, typically a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria...

s are earned by winning the trust
Trust (sociology)
In a social context, trust has several connotations. Definitions of trust typically refer to a situation characterised by the following aspects: One party is willing to rely on the actions of another party ; the situation is directed to the future. In addition, the trustor abandons control over...

 of other members and the community’s missions and governance are defined by the members themselves.

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
Access rights
Access rights can refer to:*Access to Information Act, a Canadian act that allows public access to government information*Disability rights movement, disabled access to public and private locations is a key issue...

). Given small differences in policies, the same type of software can produce radically different social outcomes. For instance, Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware has a fine-grained permission system of detailed access control so the site administrator can, on a page-by-page basis, determine which groups can view, edit or view the history. By contrast, mediawiki
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...

 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 that Tiki can be used both by community groups who embrace the social paradigm of mediawiki and by groups who prefer to have more content control.

By design, social software reflects the traits of social network
Social network
A social network is a social structure made up of individuals called "nodes", which are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.Social...

s 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
Epistemic community
An epistemic community is a transnational network of knowledge-based experts who help decision-makers to define the problems they face, identify various policy solutions and assess the policy outcomes. The definitive conceptual framework of an epistemic community is widely accepted as that of Peter...

. 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 their mother tongue to their moral purchasing preferences.

In late 2008, independent analyst firm CMS Watch
CMS Watch
Real Story Group is a content technology analyst firm, based in Silver Spring, USA. Previously known as CMS Watch, the company announced a name change to Real Story Group in February, 2010. The company publishes reports on various areas, including web content management, enterprise content...

 argued that a scenario-based (use-case) approach to examining social software would provide a useful way to evaluate tools and align business and technology needs.

Methods and tools for the development of social software are sometimes summarized under the term Social Software Engineering
Social Software Engineering
Social Software Engineering is a branch of software engineering that is concerned with the social aspects of software development. Whereas it is difficult to give an exact definition for the field, the participants of the 1st International Workshop on Social Software Engineering and Applications ...

. However, this term is also used to describe lightweight and community-oriented development practices.

Theory

Constructivist learning theorists such as Vygotsky, Leidner and Jarvenpaa have theorized that the process of expressing knowledge aids its creation and that conversations benefit the refinement of knowledge. Conversational knowledge management software fulfills this purpose because conversations, e.g. questions and answers, become the source of relevant knowledge in the organization. Conversational technologies are also seen as tools to support both individual knowledge workers and work units.

Many advocates of Social Software assume, and even actively argue, that users create actual communities. They have adopted the term "online communities" to describe the resulting social structures.

History

Christopher Allen
Christopher Allen
| country = England| fullname = Christopher Allen| living = true| dayofbirth = 20| monthofbirth = 8| yearofbirth = 1984| placeofbirth = Ormskirk| countryofbirth = England...

 supported this definition and traced the core ideas of this concept back through Computer Supported Cooperative or Collaborative Work (CSCW) in the 1990s, Groupware in the 1970s and 1980s, to Englebart’s "augmentation" (1960s) and Bush’s "Memex" (1940s). Although he identifies a "lifecycle" to this terminology that appears to reemerge each decade in a different form, this does not necessarily mean that social software is simply old wine in new bottles.

The augmentation capabilities of social software were demonstrated in early internet applications for communication such as e-mail, newsgroups, groupware, virtual communities etc. In the current phase of Allen's lifecycle, these collaborative tools add a capability "that aggregates the actions of networked users." This points to a powerful dynamic that distinguishes social software from other group collaboration tools and as a component of Web 2.0 technology. Capabilities for content and behavior aggregation and redistribution present some of the more important potentials of this media. In the next phase, academic experiments, Social Constructivism and the open source software movement are expected to be notable influences.

Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He has a joint appointment at New York University as a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Assistant Arts Professor in the New...

 traces the origin of the term "social software" to Eric Drexler's 1987 discussion of "hypertext publishing systems" like the subsequent World Wide Web, and how systems of this kind could support software for public critical discussion, collaborative development, group commitment
Group decision making
Group decision making is a situation faced when individuals are brought together in a group to solve problems. According to the idea of synergy, decisions made collectively tend to be more effective than decisions made by a single individual...

, and collaborative filtering
Collaborative filtering
Collaborative filtering is the process of filtering for information or patterns using techniques involving collaboration among multiple agents, viewpoints, data sources, etc. Applications of collaborative filtering typically involve very large data sets...

 of content based on voting and rating.http://many.corante.com/20030501.shtml#33811http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/Hypertext/HPEK0.html

Social technologies (or conversational technologies) is a term used by organizations (particularly network-centric organization
Network-centric organization
A network-centric organization is a network governance pattern emerging in many progressive 21st century enterprises. This implies new ways of working, with consequences for the enterprise’s infrastructure, processes, people and culture.- Overview :...

s
). It describes the technology that allows the storage and creation of knowledge through collaborative writing.

Timeline

In 1945, Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, the founding of Raytheon, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer...

 described a hypertext
Hypertext
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...

-like device called the "memex
Memex
The memex is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the hypothetical proto-hypertext system he described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think...

" in his The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic is an American magazine founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. It quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets,...

article As We May Think
As We May Think
As We May Think is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, and republished again as an abridged version in September 1945 — before and after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan...

.

In 1962, Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Carl Engelbart is an American inventor, and an early computer and internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human-computer interaction, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs...

 published his seminal work, "Augmenting Human Intellect: a conceptual framework." In this paper, he proposed using computers to augment training. With his colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute, Engelbart started to develop a computer system to augment human abilities, including learning. Debuting in 1968, the system was simply called the oNLine System (NLS
NLS (computer system)
NLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary computer collaboration system designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute during the 1960s...

).

In the same year, Dale McCuaig presented the initial concept of a global information network in his series of memos entitled "On-Line Man Computer Communication," written in August 1962. However, the actual development of the internet must be credited to Lawrence G. Roberts
Lawrence Roberts (scientist)
Lawrence G. Roberts received the Draper Prize in 2001 and the Principe de Asturias Award in 2002 "for the development of the Internet" along with Leonard Kleinrock, Robert Kahn, and Vinton Cerf....

 of MIT, along with Leonard Kleinrock
Leonard Kleinrock
Leonard Kleinrock is an American engineer and computer scientist. A computer science professor at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, he made several important contributions to the field of computer networking, in particular to the theoretical side of computer networking...

, Robert Kahn
Bob Kahn
Robert Elliot Kahn is an American Internet pioneer, engineer and computer scientist, who, along with Vinton G. Cerf, invented the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol , the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.-Career:After receiving a B.E.E...

 and Vinton Cerf.

In 1971,Jenna Imrie began a year-long demonstration of the TICCIT
TICCIT
TICCIT is an acronym for Time-shared, Interactive, Computer-Controlled Information Television, first developed by the MITRE Corporation in 1968 as an interactive cable television system....

 system among Reston, Virginia cable television subscribers. Interactive television services included informational and educational demonstrations using a touch-tone telephone. The National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

 re-funded the PLATO project and also funded MITRE's proposal to modify its TICCIT technology as a computer-assisted instruction (CAI) system to support English and algebra at community colleges. MITRE subcontracted instructional design and courseware authoring tasks to the University of Texas at Austin
University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin...

 and Brigham Young University
Brigham Young University
Brigham Young University is a private university located in Provo, Utah. It is owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , and is the United States' largest religious university and third-largest private university.Approximately 98% of the university's 34,000 students...

. Also during this year, Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich was an Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and "maverick social critic" of the institutions of contemporary western culture and their effects on the provenance and practice of education, medicine, work, energy use, transportation, and economic development.- Personal life...

 described computer-based "learning webs" in his book Deschooling Society.

In 1980, Seymour Papert
Seymour Papert
Seymour Papert is an MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and educator. He is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, as well as an inventor of the Logo programming language....

 at MIT published "Mindstorms: children, computers, and powerful ideas" (New York: Basic Books). This book inspired a number of books and studies on "microworlds" and their impact on learning. BITNET
BITNET
BITNET was a cooperative USA university network founded in 1981 by Ira Fuchs at the City University of New York and Greydon Freeman at Yale University...

 was founded by a consortium of US and Canadian universities. It allowed universities to connect with each other for educational communications and e-mail. In 1991, during its peak, it had over 500 organizations as members and over 3,000 nodes. Its use declined as the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

 grew.

In 1986, Tony Bates
Tony Bates
Tony Bates is President of the Skype Division at Microsoft. He is responsible for overseeing the company’s direction, strategy and overall mission to become a global communications platform that will eventually reach billions of users....

 published "The Role of Technology in Distance Education", reflecting (in 1986!) on ways forward for e-learning. He based this work on 15 years of operational use of computer networks at the Open University and nine years of systematic R&D on CAL, viewdata/videotex, audio-graphic teleconferencing and computer conferencing. Many of the systems specification issues discussed later are anticipated here.

Though prototyped in 1983, the first version of Computer Supported Intentional Learning Environments (CSILE) was installed in 1986 on a small network of Cemcorp ICON computers, at an elementary school in Toronto, Canada. CSILE included text and graphical notes authored by different user levels (students, teachers, others) with attributes such as comments and thinking types which reflect the role of the note in the author's thinking. Thinking types included "my theory", "new information", and "I need to understand." CSILE later evolved into Knowledge Forum
Knowledge Forum
Knowledge Forum is an educational software designed to help and support knowledge building communities. Previously, the product was called Computer Supported Intentional Learning Environments...

.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...

, then a young British engineer working at CERN in Switzerland, circulated a proposal for an in-house online document sharing system which he described as a "web of notes with links." After the proposal was grudgingly approved by his superiors, he called the new system the World Wide Web.

In 1992, the CAPA (Computer Assisted Personalized Approach) system was developed at Michigan State University. It was first used in a 92-student physics class in the fall of 1992. Students accessed random personalized homework problems through Telnet
TELNET
Telnet is a network protocol used on the Internet or local area networks to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communications facility using a virtual terminal connection...

.

In 2001, Adrian Scott founded Ryze
Ryze
Ryze.com is a free social networking website designed to link business professionals, particularly new entrepreneurs. The site claims to have over 500,000 members in 200 countries, with over 1,000 external organizations hosting sub-networks on the site. Both paid and unpaid membership levels are...

, a free social networking website designed to link business professionals, particularly new entrepreneurs.

In February 2002, the suvi.org Addressbook started its service. It was the first service that connected people together. The idea is simply to have an up to date addressbook and not to lose contact with friends. Other people on the globe had the same idea. Friendster, Faceboook and many other se{Bottom}}

In April 2002, Jonathan Abrams created his profile on Friendster
Friendster
Friendster is a social gaming site that is based in Malaysia, KL. The company now operates mainly from the three Asian countries namely in the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore....

.

In 2003, Hi5, LinkedIn
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. , LinkedIn reports more than 120 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site is available in English, French,...

, MySpace
MySpace
Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....

, and XING
Xing
Xing may refer to:* an abbreviation for crossing, primarily used in North America* Qiao Xing Universal Telephone Inc. * XING, a social network platform* Xing County, in Shanxi, China* Xing - A Korean boyband...

 were launched.

In February 2004, Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

 was launched.

In 2004, Levin (in Allen 2004, sec. 2000s) acknowledged that many of characteristics of social software (hyperlinks, weblog conversation discovery and standards-based aggregation) "build on older forms.". Nevertheless, "the difference in scale, standardization, simplicity and social incentives provided by web access turn a difference in degree to a difference in kind." Key technological factors underlying this difference in kind in the computer, network and information technologies are: filtered hypertext, ubiquitous web/computing, continuous internet connectivity, cheap, efficient and small electronics, content syndication strategies (RSS) and others. Additionally, the convergence of several major information technology systems for voice, data and video into a single system makes for expansive computing environments with far reaching effects.

In October 2005, Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, software engineer, and multi-millionaire best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard...

 (after Netscape and Opsware) and Gina Bianchini
Gina Bianchini
Gina Bianchini was CEO of Ning, which she co-founded with Marc Andreessen. Since leaving Ning in March 2010, she has been an executive in residence at the Andreesen Horowitz venture firm....

 co-founded Ning, an online platform where users can create their own social websites and networks. Ning means "peace" in Chinese, as explained by Gina Bianchini on the company blog and is now running more than 275,000 networks. Ning is part of what is called "white label social networking providers" and it is often compared to Kickapps
KickApps
KickApps is a hosted platform for creating social networks and adding social software features, video players and widgets to websites. More than 100,000 sites use KickApps, including major media companies KickApps is a hosted platform for creating social networks and adding social software...

, Brightcove
Brightcove
Brightcove is a Cambridge, MA based company that produces an Online Video Platform .- History :Brightcove was founded in 2004 by Jeremy Allaire, who now serves as CEO. In March 2006, Brightcove acquired Seattle-based Metastories, makers of StoryMaker, a publishing tool for video, audio, images, and...

, rSitez and Flux. StudiVZ
StudiVZ
StudiVZ is a social networking platform for students and is based in Berlin, Germany. The name is an abbreviation of the German expression Studentenverzeichnis, which means students' directory.The service is largely comparable to other social networking sites...

 was launched in November 2005.

In 2009, the Army's Program Executive Office - Command, Control, and Communications Tactical (PEO-C3T)
Program Executive Office Command Control Communications Tactical
Program Executive Office: Command, Control and Communications Tactical is a United States Army procurement office.- Overview :Headquartered at Aberdeen, MD., the Army’s Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications Tactical’s capabilities and support staff reach Warfighters at...

 founded milSuite capturing the concepts of Wiki, YouTube, Blogging, and connecting with other members of the DOD behind a secure firewall. This platform engages the premise of social networking while also facilitating open source software
Open-source software
Open-source software is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software.Open...

 with its purchase of JIVE.

Exponential generation of resource consuming negative externalities

When a person or business sends a message to a network of people this generates an
exponential process
Exponential growth
Exponential growth occurs when the growth rate of a mathematical function is proportional to the function's current value...

 that can consume considerable amounts of resources - most importantly human time.
This can have a beneficial effect on those interested in the message, but can also consume time of people not interested in the message. It can also create in many a social obligation to look - albeit briefly - at the message - particularly when it is from someone you know or consider to be a friend.

When a message is completely unwanted and unsolicited, this is a form of information pollution
Information pollution
Information pollution is the contamination of information supply with irrelevant, redundant, unsolicited and low-value information. The spread of useless and undesirable information can have a detrimental effect on human activities...

 and is often known as spam
Spam (electronic)
Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately...

. When a message is from a network of friends, and wanted by some but not all, it generates negative externalities in that it consumes valuable resources (time).

Some examples :
Bill sends an email or social message to 20 friends. Of these 2 are very interested, 8 become interested,
the rest aren't interested but may read all or part of the message anyway, spending their time.
Some of these 20 people will forward the message to their friends. The process repeats - resulting
in an exponentially increasing consumption of time by those uninterested in the message (as well
as an exponentially increasing consumption of time by people who are or become interested - which may
distract them from other more productive tasks). Eventually, when the expected number of people forwarding
a message drops below 1, the process dies out, but in the interim it may circulate widely - resulting
in a potentially massive waste of resources. Much of the time wasted will be due to a sense
of social obligation to at least scan or check on the title of the message.

Social networking in a work environment

Bill works for ACME company and sends out an email memo or network message to 20 coworkers.
Some have to read the message (for example if Bill is their boss or a senior person in the hierarchy), others will just scan it - even if they are uninterested. Some may comment on it - sharing the response with multiple recipients, others may forward it to others. Some may not want to read the message, but may feel obligated to read and respond. The outgoing process of sharing or forwarding takes very little time, but may produce exponentially growing time demands on others. Over time, employees may find more of their time devoted to social networking demands at work - including scanning, reading, commenting upon, forwarding, and responding to messages. These social work-obligations may crowd out more productive activities resulting in longer hours with less efficiency.

In a sense, social networking at work is similar to a large ongoing group meeting
Dilbert
Dilbert is an American comic strip written and drawn by Scott Adams. First published on April 16, 1989, Dilbert is known for its satirical office humor about a white-collar, micromanaged office featuring the engineer Dilbert as the title character...

.
Sometimes excellent results occur, but other times major amounts of time are wasted.
Sometimes output benefits from everyone's input and ongoing consultation, other times,
individual work without constant obligation to check in and gain consensus may be more
productive. The output of a "committee"
Camel
A camel is an even-toed ungulate within the genus Camelus, bearing distinctive fatty deposits known as humps on its back. There are two species of camels: the dromedary or Arabian camel has a single hump, and the bactrian has two humps. Dromedaries are native to the dry desert areas of West Asia,...

 is sometimes worse than that of an individual or small team.

Information overload and arbitrary filtering of communication

As information supply increases, the average time spent evaluating individual content
has to decrease. Eventually, much communication is summarily ignored - based on
very arbitrary and rapid heuristics that will filter out the information for example by category. Bad information crowds out the good - much the way SPAM often crowds out
potentially useful unsolicited communications.

See also

  • Commons-based peer production
    Commons-based peer production
    Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler to describe a new model of socio-economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated into large, meaningful projects mostly without traditional hierarchical...

  • Comparison of wiki software
    Comparison of wiki software
    The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of wiki software packages.-General information:-Target audience:-Features 1:-Features 2:-Installation:-See also:* List of wiki software* List of wikis* Wiki farm...

  • Customer engagement
    Customer engagement
    Customer engagement refers to the engagement of customers with one another, with a company or a brand. The initiative for engagement can be either consumer- or company-led and the medium of engagement can be on or offline....

  • Enterprise bookmarking
    Enterprise bookmarking
    Enterprise bookmarking is a method for Enterprise 2.0 users to tag, organize, store, and search bookmarks of both web pages on the Internet and data resources stored in a distributed database or fileserver...

  • Folksonomy
    Folksonomy
    A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging...

  • List of social software
  • List of membership software
    Membership software
    The following is a list of membership software that can be used for managing a Membership Site.Membership software is used to either manage free membership to a website and restrict access to certain parts of the site to those that have signed up, or manage paid membership, allowing access to...

  • Knowledge management
    Knowledge management
    Knowledge management comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences...

  • Online identity
    Online identity
    An online identity, internet identity, or internet persona is a social identity that an Internet user establishes in online communities and websites...

  • Online deliberation
    Online deliberation
    Online deliberation is a term associated with an emerging body of practice, research, and software dedicated to fostering serious, purposive discussion over the Internet...

  • Online web community
  • Participatory media
    Participatory media
    Participatory media include community media, blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging and social bookmarking, music-photo-video sharing, mashups, podcasts, participatory video projects and videoblogs...


  • Personal Network
    Personal Network
    A Personal Network is a set of human contacts known to an individual, with whom that individual would expect to interact at intervals to support a given set of activities....

  • Pseudonymity
    Pseudonymity
    Pseudonymity is a word derived from pseudonym, meaning 'false name', and anonymity, meaning unknown or undeclared source, describing a state of disguised identity. The pseudonym identifies a holder, that is, one or more human beings who possess but do not disclose their true names...

  • Social bookmarking
    Social bookmarking
    Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them....

  • Social media
    Social media
    The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...

  • Social Mobile Application
    Social mobile application
    A social mobile application is defined as social software that runs on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.- Social forms :Social mobile applications take many social forms depending on a particular application...

  • Social software in education
    Social software in education
    Social software is used in education. This use of social software is discussed here, with an emphasis on how research results can inform the practice of teachers and learners.-Software for Learning Becoming Social:...

  • Social web
    Social Web
    The social Web is a set of social relations that link people through the World Wide Web. The Social web encompasses how websites and software are designed and developed in order to support and foster social interaction. These online social interactions form the basis of much online activity...

  • The WELL
  • Usenet
    Usenet
    Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...

  • Virtual community
    Virtual community
    A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals...

  • Wiki software
    Wiki software
    Wiki software is collaborative software that runs a wiki, i.e., a website that allows users to create and collaboratively edit web pages via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application that runs on one or more web servers...

  • Social hardware
    Social hardware
    Social Hardware is a branch of Social Technology and related in a natural way to the branch called Social Software. It may be said to have begun with the most primitive writing implements, but the most conspicuous examples are the telegraph and telephone, especially these systems before they used...



External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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