Your assertions are very interesting and insightful. I made some observations that I’d like to ask you about.

1mThere is a difference between social software and software for socialization. As I read your work you seem to focus on the social software that is designed to support publicly available networks. Is my assumption correct? If not, then could you provide some examples other than blogging type software?

2. What is your position on developing networks for socialization and the challenges associated with developing a framework that allows any community of interest to interact with that network to establish a social eco-system?

Lastly, (this is not a question), I truly appreciate your work and have been spending the last several week reading yours and others works. I sent you an email asking if you have some time to share some of your most recent insights on interfaces for socialization that bridge the gap between the information and cognitive domains some of your discoveries and challenges in your journey.

Regards -

Rick

Le post précédent me rappelle que nombre de ressources existent sur la notion d’identité numérique dans des réseaux sociaux. L’un des meilleurs exemples est peut être la thèse de Danah Boyd sur la problématique de la représentation de son (ses…

Le post précédent me rappelle que nombre de ressources existent sur la notion d’identité numérique dans des réseaux sociaux. L’un des meilleurs exemples est peut être la thèse de Danah Boyd sur la problématique de la représentation de son (ses…

1) Schumpeter, the quintessential innovation theorist, wrote two books. The former in his early years, where he wrote about how radical innovators would, solely by entrepreneurial drive and a grandiose idea, be able to break large, established corporations.
In contrast, his latter work spoke about how large corporations would – to counteract the danger of the “omnipotent innovation” – internalise new innovations and that they would quickly realise that the most efficient way to embed innovations into their production process would be to pool all resources nationwide. Result: socialism.

WHILE all of the above is debatable, there is one interesting thought I’d like to point out: innovation can lead not only to social changes, but to changes of socio-economic systems.
In consequence, another question surfaces: Can social software – which is built on a collaboration/sharing/synergy paradigm – thrive in an evironment that is chiefly reliant on the possession and protection of knowledge as a market good. In a limited view, this is mirrored in the neverending “opensource vs. prop. software” debate. In a larger context, social software – as it is an innovation in the Schumpeterian sense – is a challenge to all those economies and social orders, that are realiant on protecting individual rights to own information to the same degree that one can own houses or cars.

Social software is thus a mutation of traditional corp-to-market software, because it reverses the mechanism. Viewed from a technological standpoint, it forms a networked organisation on “market/consumer” level and grows in importance, so as to rival other software products. In a sociological sense, it enables grassroots coordination, therefore strengthening the influence of all the Joe Bloggs out there, thus putting into question the whole idea of a hierarchical society.

There will be somebody, who – reading my ramblings – will inevitably call me a Communist. I have heard that argument before.
Regardless of whatever “vibe” you are getting from my post, I just want to put across one idea: there is the link you have discovered, between technological innovation and social innovation (which strongly manifests itself in social software), but there is a third component in that equation: that of political change and societal evolution, which may eventually outgrow the limitations of an order that no longer serves the purpose of supporting new things, new thoughts, new cultural innovations.

danah boyd (as in e.e. cummings) is a PhD student at Berkeley and is to the social software world what Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette) is to the blogosphere. Everyone loves her because she’s eccentric, outspoken, wicked smart, and emphatically…danah. This

On the significance of social software

I added a few things about sociology and metrics…

“The insight of such quotes is about the fluidity of the communities in this modern life of ours. They presage a notion of social networks with sometimes implicit rather than explicit webs of relationships. The kind of thinking required for networks needs to be flexible in order to deal with the diffuseness of our evolving patterns of discovery and social interaction. Handwaving a little, it is like the kind of shift in thinking that we have gone through in the move from desktop productivity applications (like the traditional office suites) to web applications that need to keep the network abstraction and usage patterns in mind.”

Great insights. I wonder why organizations have been so slow to adopt any of these “social software”? We have developed an inexpensive product/service – Ideascape – built around open source software that gives businesses incredible opportunities to learn “stumble upon” ideas and information from everywhere. Do you think the technology is too new or that organizations are simply afraid to really know what is going on with the lives of their employees, cutomers, et al? they are

I totally agree with your sentence “Social software represents a new generation of social technology development – a generation that is dependent on moving beyond the laboratory and into mass culture.”
I’m PhDing about Recommender Systems (and their augmentation using trust relationships between users) and I see that it is at least 10 years that we researchers speculate about algorithms able to increase performances of 1% but we were not able to create a deployable system in which to gather a real and vibrant community on which to test hypothesis. Usually, people that are not researchers are not interested in filling unuseful, nobody-will-read papers but are interested in deploying for real something useful. And I don’t think there is lack of “thinking” about such projects: usually developers wander around in chats, mailing lists, forum, so if people want there is a big amount of “research” (I think we researchers usually consider speaking with non-researchers as a waste of time and hence, in general, we don’t spend time “researching” in chats, mailing lists, … This is very bad)
Social Software is nothing but, as you said, “doing the research on the wild”.
Del.icio.us, from a technical point of view, is very very simple. But you can easily see the difference it made! If you compare it with the thousands of iper-funded academic projects that, often, just produce a totally-unusable buggy prototype nobody will ever play with and heard of, then I think you have the definition of social software.

A possible suggestion for academic projects could be: “always create an open system, always release you software as free software, always expose open APIs, always try to find other researchers/people involved in similar projects and interact with them, in order to target a big community and not laying your project in a closed closet, always create a project chat channel and presidiate it, always create mailing lists, always create a blog and post thoughts about your projects on it, from the very very beginning, don’t fear someone else will steal our work)…
I’m really looking forward for your paper.

The second point is a suggestion to look at http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging/, where there is a great ongoing discussion of how students and teachers interact through the use of blogs. Again, all stuff you may already have, but for me at least a valid and intelligent discussion on any topic is a welcome addition to my bookmarks.

Looking at the core argument of your paper, are you arguing that “tagging, audience management [...] and articulated social networks” are epiphenomenal to the nature of the technologies that you are investigating – in short, that there is a self-organizing level to this behaviour? Complexity theory in all its glory?