Social software

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.

• Social software = (tools + services + aggregation)^scale: “Social software is not just about new applications. echnically, it can be described as a combination of various lightweight social tools within a growing ecosystem of online data and services, all joined together (aggregated) using common protocols, micro-formats and API (Application Programming Interface) methods. But it is also underpinned by some general principles about how to engage people as active participants in networks and communities to achieve new and exciting network effects5 through distributed collaboration, co-production and sharing in online social networks. Central to this is the idea of scale: the notion that the tools become more useful as more people use them.” (Lee Bryant, 2007: 10)

See social computing for conceptual issues.

History

According to Christopher Allan in tracing the evolution of Social Software:

• The idea can be traced back to Vannevar Bush's Memex (see Hypertext)
• Licklider's 1960's ideas on networked computing are quite amazing predictions (see Networking history). Licklider is one of the founders of Internet.
• Groupware of the 80s and 90s
• Eric Drexler may have invented the word in the late eighties: “Filtered vs. bare hypertext: A system that shows users all local links (no matter how numerous or irrelevant) is bare hypertext. A system that enables users to automatically display some links and hide others (based on user-selected criteria) is filtered hypertext. This implies support for what may be termed social software, including voting and evaluation schemes that provide criteria for later filtering.” (Drexler, 1995).
• In 2002 the term social software came into more common usage, probably due to the efforts of Clay Shirky who organized a "Social Software Summit".
• In 2005 it appears more frequently in the educational technology literature (e.g. Dalsgard, 2006 or Vuorikari, 2005). E.g. people start wondering whether we still need local monolithic systems like [[LMS]s.

Types of social software

In a way, any sort of CMC can be called social software since communication is inherently social, e.g. any sort of groupware (e.g. simple forums, project management software), educational web-services 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".

Below is first attempt to list various kinds of software. I certainly will have to go over this and separate types of Internet applications from various components that can constitute such applications.

Sharing of links and feeds

Often such systems feature folksonomy tagging and sometimes tag clouds, i.e. 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

• Hybrid systems like NewsVine that allow to read, discuss and vote for news stories. Also allows to write article like in News engines à la slashdot.

• User powered content like Digg. Everything is submitted and voted on by the digg community.

• Social navigation systems like Trailfire, that let's users build trails of web resources and share them

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

• Video sharing like YouTube

• File sharing like Furl

• Notebook applications like Google Notebook

• Note taking like stu.dicio.us

• Any sort of writing tool that can be shared and has a social flavor

Social citations and reference managers

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

• Citation indexes like CiteSeer.

• Collaborative reference managers like Connotea

Social shopping

Such systems include reviews, recommendation systems (including social navigation elements) and can include reputation systems

Examples are:

• Amazon, various add-ons like reviews, X who bought A also bought, 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
• Elgg.net - education community
• Elgg.org - open-source software used by elgg.net: this social network software supports a number of open standards including RSS, LDAP, FOAF, and XML-RPC
• LiveJournal - online-blog-plattform with community-building fonctionnalities

These website usually specialize on some kind of relations (professional, interests, dating, ..). There exist also associated social network search engines.

Groupware

Most groupware is rather limited to coordinate work within a well defined community. But there are some applications that are more open potentially.

• E.g. Google calendar that allows to merge personal and public calendars.

Reputations systems

According to Wikipedia, a reputation system is a type of collaborative filtering algorithm which attempts to determine ratings for a collection of entities, given a collection of opinions that those entities hold about each other. This is similar to a recommendation system, but with the purpose of entities recommending each other, rather than some external set of entities (such as books, movies, or music).

Reputation systems can used in conjunction with other systems.

Collaborative filtering

According to Wikipedia, Collaborative filtering (CF) is the method of making automatic predictions (filtering) about the interests of a user by collecting taste information from many users (collaborating). The underlying assumption of CF approach is that: Those who agreed in the past tend to agree again in the future. For example, a collaborative filtering or recommendation system for music tastes could make predictions about which music a user should like given a partial list of that user's tastes (likes or dislikes). Note that these predictions are specific to the user, but use information gleaned from many users.

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).

Note: (DSchneider doesn't consider this wiki to be social software since there are not enough participants. It's more like a cognitive tool for the authors of articles and for our users it's more like a tool for finding definitions and links. Sometimes, it may evolve into a simple form of cognitive flexibility hypertext).

Integrated systems

Given technical progress in the area of web services and service-oriented architectures, one can imagine systems that syndicate several social software services into a single environment. In education, interesting examples are:

• personal learning environment
• e-framework

Social software in education

DSchneider believes that this will be one of the big trends in coming years. Some applications are already being used, in particular in higher education. See social computing for more in depth discussion.

• To share pointers (links, references, etc.): social bookmarking, social navigation (trails), citation indexes, reference managers
• To exchange ideas and to work collaboratively on texts: blogs and wikis and other shared writing tools.
• To network: social network tools (see above)
• To share and organized digital artifacts: Picture and file sharing tools.

As an alternative to "heavy and not flexible" Learning management systems, new providers may offer "light weight" services that individual teachers could used for the classroom or blended teaching. There are examples that somewhat push into this direction:

• Google for educators
• OpenAcademic A company that sells integrateed Moodle, Drupal, Elgg, OpenId, MediaWiki solutions to schools.

Problems and dangers of social software

• There is concern that social software may add yet another layer on top of what Google will tell about you.
  • E.g. Big Brothers, Big Facebook: Your Orwellian Community

• An other concern is links and relations overflow. Even if most social software does include voting and reputation mechanism where appropriate, it is not sure that one can find information. Information is not just links to information and even just links between information. Even for very small place like this wiki information organization is not an easy problem - Daniel K. Schneider 14:40, 2 March 2007 (MET)

Links

• The Wikipedia Social Software article provides a good overview.
• On Social Software
• Stowe Boyd, Are you read for social software ? (good introduction too).
• The Horizon report wiki and The Horzon 2007 report (PDF).
• Social Software (Beats Biblionetz)

Web Sites, blogs, etc.

• Many to many blog
• Pasta and vinegar blog. Lots of interesting 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.

• Allen, C. 2004. Tracing the evolution of social software. HTML, retrieved 18:38, 20 October 2006 (MEST). (This is a very good history)

• Dalsgard, Christian, (2006). Social software: E-learning beyond learning management systems, European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning. HTML

• Drexler, Eric K. (1995) Hypertext Publishing and the Evolution of Knowledge, Social Intelligence, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp.87-120. HTML Reprint (originally submitted to Hypertext 87).