Social software

Draft

Definition

• Social software (also called social networking software) enables social computing, i.e. it enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities.

See social computing for conceptual issues.

Types of social software

In a way, any sort of CMC can be called social software since communication is inheritantly social, e.g. any sort of groupware (e.g. simple forums, project-management software), educational webservices like LMSs, virtual environments, MMORPG-like games, ....

However, we prefer a more narrow definition of social software that includes applications that add an "extra touch" in the spirit of what some interpret as "web 2.0".

Sharing of links and feeds

Often such systems feature tag clouds (or weighted list) that can be used as a visual depiction of content tags used on a website.

• Social bookmarking like del.icio.us

• RSS-based (or other) syndication systems enhanced with social navigation like RSS4You

Sharing of digital artifacts

Such applications are not just indexed uploads/downloads (e.g. like in more traditional portals). There are also tagging mechanisms.

Examples

• Picture sharing like FlickR

• Social libraries like Folksomy

• File sharing like Furl

• Noteboook applications like Google NoteBook

Social citations

This is huge and fast growing area of use to researchers.

• E.g. Citeseer
• E.g. vendor sites

Social shopping

Examples are:

• Amazon, various add-ons like reviews, X who bought A also bought B (see social navigation), Person X has a good rating, ...
• Kadboodle
• Epinions (reviews and ratings)

Social network construction and maintenance

Relation web services and sofware like

• FOAF
• frienster,
• Tribe
• LinkedIn
• Orkut.

These website usually specialize on some kind of relations (professional, interests, dating, ..)

There are also associated social network search engines.

Blogspheres

• blogs (under the condition that they make use of networking features like RSS feeds, backtracking, etc.

Large Wikis

• Projects like [Wikipedia] that involve a few hundreds of people, that have features to categorize information etc. could be considered (to be discussed).

(DSchneider doesn't consider this wiki to be social software).

Links

• The Wikipedia Social Software article provides a good overview.
• On Social Sofware
• Stowe Boyd, Are you read for social software ? (good introduction too).

Web Sites, blogs, etc.

• Many to many blog
• Pasta and vinegar blog. Lots of interesing news !

References

See the social computing article for conceptual issues. Regarding the interest of social software for education you could start with a piece from Riina Vuorikari.