Learning Objectives
- Explain the basic, overlapping definitions of “Social Software.”
- Identify essential elements of why social software is important in general.
- Differentiate between social software, social networks, traditional social networks (YASNS) and social networking.
- Sign up for and explore LinkedIn.
- Analyze how different passive activities like television watching compare to active activities on the Internet like creating a MIME
What is Social Software
Here’s one of the definitions of social software: applications which allow people — who may initially be unknown to one another —to communicate or share resources with each other.
From the first discussion boards and email to the most sophisticated tools for collaboration, social networking, and — yes — dating sites… all are examples of social software. Social software has always been important, but in the last few years, it has become center-stage in the evolution of the web.
Discussion forums and mailing lists are maintained by everyone from 10-year-olds to full professors and their 90+-year-old grandparents. Blogs have made web publishing possible for anyone with no technical skills whatsoever using any internet access they can find. Wikis have created perhaps the most extensive individual collaborative resource in the history of mankind. More importantly, as the tools have evolved, all kinds of automatic connections between them have been created allowing interconnections, uses and re-uses ranging from the basic to hardly imaginable.
Whether you are “just” a user or an aspiring web designer, an educator or a storyteller, a parent or a programmer — the evolution of social software and all of its accompanying technologies will be among the most important (and useful) technological changes you will ever be part of.
Social software is an umbrella term for a range of software applications centered around communication and sharing of information and resources. It has been variously characterized as:
[Software that] enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. —Wikipedia
…a particular sub-class of software-prosthesis that concerns itself with the augmentation of human social and/or collaborative abilities through structured mediation (this mediation may be distributed or centralized, top-down or bottom-up/emergent). —Tom Coates
Any arbitrary collection of algorithms, protocols, and metadata that allows friendless agoraphobics to pretend otherwise. —Clay Shirky
Stuff that can get spammed. —Clay Shirky
Simply put, social software is that which not only allows communication but also outside contributions, all in service of creating and sustaining a community. Those contributions must matter or there’d be no point in “spamming” the site or service (nor anyone reading it to care).