As an example of what I am talking about, watch this Common Craft video that explains the concept of “social networking”.
Social Software is not just Social Networking
Let’s clarify a few terms as I will be using them:Social Software is sites and applications that allow people to connect to one another through shared ideas, resources, objects, and activities. This is a large term that includes many different kinds of sites for business, information, and personal uses. If I say “use a piece of social software to share a video” you might go to a piece of social software like YouTube.
A Social Network is a collection of people who are connected to one another through social software… for instance, you and all your friends/contacts on Facebook or MySpace, or you and all the people who read and comment on your blog, etc. If I said “share a site with your social network” you might write about it in a blog, share it on Facebook or MySpace, or post it to a social service.
Social Networking is the process of communicating with, within, and to your social network and can happen in any kind of social software. When you write in a blog, post a YouTube video, update your Facebook or MySpace profile, share a picture or bookmark you are engaging in social networking. You will be doing a lot of this.
But here is where things get confusing– sometimes people use the term “social network” to mean a very specific thing: applications whose primary purpose is sharing social information rather than objects… I call these Yet Another Social Network Services (YASNS) and examples include: Orkut and Friendster. This was the first generation of modern social software. You will check these out, but I don’t expect you will spend a lot of time there.
These kinds of sites have grown, however, and so have grown more useful. For example, Facebook and MySpace– along with sites that have an even more specific purpose like LinkedIn– can be purely social or information-based (or both). You might find that these are valuable applications for a meeting, connecting with, and staying up to date about, groups with shared interests.
Why Should You Care?
As opposed to the old days when the web was primarily made up of static web pages and e-commerce shopping cards, interacting with others (creating a social network) has become the online standard. In addition to enhancing common browsing tasks, creating your own social network is a significant part of learning… and an essential part of business. The rest of this course will be about participating in social networks to achieve particular goals, whether something as simple as storing bookmarks and images or as sophisticated as publishing and marketing. Your web presence– and so the strength of your connection to online friends and family, your work as a student, the efficiency of your business– relies on your ability to understand and use social software.
Watch this short documentary that elaborates on how social networks have changed the world: