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.
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, pictures, videos
Such applications are not just indexed uploads/downloads (e.g. like in more traditional portals. Included are features like:
- A tag cloud (or weighted list) that can be used as a visual depiction of content tags used on a website.
- Examples
- Social bookmarking like del.icio.us or
- Picture sharing like FlickR
- Social libraries like Folksomy
- File sharing like Furl
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 (sales, reviews, who buys what, etc.)
- Kadboodle
- Epinions (reviews and ratings)
Social web construction and maintenance
Relation web services and sofware like
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