Comments on: what is “social software”?

By: Helen, software developer

Helen, software developer — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 11:21:19 +0000

Techno-centric development of tools is in the past. Nowadays the technical part is used to serve the goal of making human being feel comfortable in the new world.

By: clivado

clivado — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 12:51:53 +0000

Hehe that’s funny, but near the truth

dear Danah, i read your blog for a long time, keep a good work.

regards Clivado

By: Stephanie_B

Stephanie_B — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 05:22:50 +0000

“Software that gets its users laid”. That’s actually more insightfull than meets the eye. The industry’s complete overlook of this simple notion precisely describes the reason why social software fails to amaze or excite me: no new relation resulting from its use.

For instance, as far as I’m concerned, Orkut, Multiply, Tribe and similar sites are a failure; lot of noise and no significant new contact. By contrast LinkedIn is the only one I find remotely usefull and enjoyable: it brought me interesting new contacts leading to further opportunities.

By: Valdis

Valdis — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 09:03:01 +0000

LOL! That is soooo funny… and true, IMHO. I have seen that played out in many places.

Yes, the technology is easy, but the sociology is damn difficult!

By: linkage

linkage — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 16:34:37 +0000

http://www.abstractdynamics.org/linkage/archives/006760.html

“A lot of programmers, seem to me to think that the whole point of social software is to replace the social with software. Which is not really what you want to do, right? Social Software should exist to empower us…

By: zephoria

zephoria — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 07:56:19 +0000

OMG – i’m so sorry and thank you for the feedback in the comments – i didn’t realize how badly this would be misinterpreted out of context. I pulled out the “programmers think” part because i was thinking of it as redundant, not because i wanted to rail on Jimmy – i was trying to get at the fact that he made a funny. By and large (much to Clay’s chagrin), that term refers to a set of software that was built in the last few years from a programmer’s mindset. It is not a universal term and the array of folks interested in sociable technologies use so many different terms. I was thinking of this quote in the same way that i think of “autistic social software” – it is not that social software couldn’t or shouldn’t be actually about the social, but that the actual development has been about the software because it comes from a programmer’s mindset. Thus, i pulled out the part where i heard him laughing at the creation of the evolution of “social software” as a framework for discussing new software bent on helping people be social in absurdly awkward ways. It was not meant to be prescriptive, but mockingly descriptive. I didn’t realize how weird it must’ve sounded until i read the comments, so *thank you* and i’m soooo sorry.

By: sarah bluehouse

sarah bluehouse — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 06:26:49 +0000

Laurie Anderson’s observation is that “technology today is the campfire around which we tell our stories.

I would believe this to be more true… and some are only able to tell those stories with flashlights under thier chins. In daylight, in “real” interaction, they aren’t more than human… and this internet campfire, gives us a dose of the superhuman, as we turn on the flashlights, take the spotlight, and say what the sun has never seen.

As for it is a replacement or an augmentor… if you are already social.. it augments.. if you aren’t it most definately pacifies — it gives you something to suck on, to replace a need to not feel alone in the world.

I remember back in the day, I was pretty adicted to this internet thing… and I was listening to right wing radio at the time, where they were going on and on about internet addiction didn’t happen… and so I called in, and they said that there was no such thing, and at that moment I knew how far outside thier realms of experience I was… because for whatever reason, they could interact with their world, and there was all this cotton in my mouth.

By: martin

martin — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 00:05:51 +0000

but the quote in its isolated form is much more to think about, when you get over the comic-strip-geek associations. link to the classical essay from Joel,
“building”>“building”>http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html“>”building communities by software —
and then to foucault
http://foucault.info/documents/foucault.authorFunction.en.html —

By: mediatope II

mediatope II — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 23:45:05 +0000

“The whole point of social software …

… is to replace the social with software” — Jimmy Wales (meant as a criticism, of course) (found via many-to-many) The whole point of social software is … … to build a semantic machine that feeds back the random…

By: Liz

Liz — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 21:27:16 +0000

That’s a pretty serious out-of-context misrepresentation; by removing the surrounding text, it really puts Jimmy in a poor light. And since many people will read this post via an aggregator they won’t see the clarification unless you update the post itself.