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 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 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

• Notebook applications like Google Notebook

• 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.

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

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

There are also associated social network search engines.

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 cognitive flexibility hypertext

Links

• The Wikipedia Social Software article provides a good overview.
• On Social Software
• 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 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.