[From OM]

I’ve never enjoyed coming up with pithy terms, labels or titles. While i loathe this form of production, i recognize that articles need a title and a phenomenon needs a label. We need common language to talk particular issues or sites. For this reason, i have acquiesced to the term “social tools” even though my deconstructionist tendencies cringe at the limitations of this particular term.

Instead of deconstructing the term, which will inevitably lead to dismissal, i think that it would be proper to begin this project by scoping what i believe we are addressing. I would like to begin by scoping “social tools” in the context of this blog’s intentions. Perhaps doing so will provide a framework for future discussions or at least articulate the boundaries that i will use in constructing my posts.

Let me begin by acknowledging that this term has striking parallels in intention and consideration to “social software.” For this reason, i think that it might be prudent to consider Christopher Allen’s attempt to trace the evolution of the term, my concerns with the term, and Clay’s disagreement with me. This should provide the right amount of angst and echo-chamber behavior to begin. Now let’s add the positivist spin.

When one is social, one is inevitably interacting with other people, whether they are intimate friends or strangers. Sociability may include (non)verbal communication, shared behaviors, movements towards community creation or productions that lead to the creation and maintenance of a society. To be social is not simply to communicate, but to engage in practices dedicated that will affect the relationship between people.

Social tools (or software, technologies) are fundamentally the tools dedicated to helping people be social. Tools for instant messaging, blogging, emailing, social networking, photo-sharing are all tools to help people be social. One could argue that tools that help people create content generally may help them in sociability. For example, if emacs helps me build software that … I respectfully disagree with this approach. In scoping social tools, i am only interested in the tools that not only allow for and encourage sociability, but are designed for such. Furthermore, social tools are seen by their participants as first about sociability and second about content production. Of course, there are always exceptions – there are certainly bloggers who have no intention of being sociable. For this reason, i see social tools as a radial category and i am only interested in the prototypical tools and behaviors. When appropriate, i will address the non-prototypical cases, but that is not going to be my emphasis.

There are a series of features that many prototypical social tools have: – textual, audio or visual communication capabilities – opportunity for identity formation and projection (not limited to profiles) – social networking (exposed or unexposed, articulated or behavioral) – “speaker”/audience relationships (and thus, power dynamics)

In most social tools, the content might be the most visible production, but for most participants, it is these features that motivate participation, as these allow for sociable interaction. These are also the features that signify the context in which content production is occurring. For this reason, my posts will be centered on these features first, the social tools’ participants second and the actual technologies third.

I’m still cranky that Microsquish squashed e-quill upon purchasing it (even if Matt went on to do a good thing). I loved that program, absolutely loved it. I used it for lots of different things, including turning in class assignments, commenting on sites, taking notes. I beta-tested that puppy like you wouldn’t believe because i truly thought it was a fantastic step forward. And then MS went and brutally murdered it, with no trace left behind but a sad website.

So, when Mary posted about this cross between a blog and a wiki, i was overjoyed. I know that one day e-quill will have to come back in some form… it really is the answer to comments and collective voices. It is digital graffiti and the opportunity to focus on the collection before the individual, offering a perspective of collective action instead of linear narratives. It makes every hypertext bone in my body quiver with excitement. Please, please bring back e-quill soon.

Update: ::gulp:: I didn’t realize that when i found Will’s page (pictured above), i was writing graffiti on someone’s page and starting it as a trend (tx Mary). I was just trying to point out a new tool. So, i explored further, made my own webnote so that readers can graffiti me.

Christopher Allen does an excellent job of tracing the history of the term ‘social software’ – a resource for us all.

Of course, i still despise the term (sorry Clay) and its (ab)usage.

The term bothers me because the software is helping the hardware mediate between two people engaged in a social interaction. I’ve always loved ‘computer mediated communication’ (CMC) because it describes the action and then we can talk about CMC hardware/software and CMC behavior. In CMC, the focus is on the communication with the computer and its role as mediator being a description to the primary activity: communication. With social software, the adjective is describing our focus: software. I know that the term is used by technologists who build things instead of dealing with social interaction, communication or even hardware, but it still bothers me. I feel as though the term allows us to emphasize the technology instead of the behavior that it supports.

Its usage has grated me because folks use it as though a revolution has happened. We’ve been building software that can be labeled as social software for a long long long time. Why are we acting like giddy children who just found a new toy? Worse: it’s either far to inclusive or exclusive. Is SMS social software? What about MMORPGs? I guess retrospecticely, we’d call them that, but for the most part, we just focus on YASNS, blogging, wikis, social bookmarking and other recent developments.

Anyhow, it’s not like i have a better term. I tend to talk about social technologies or social media and i tend to use the term CMC. The problem is that CMC isn’t describing the new wave of behaviors which aren’t always about communication. Perhaps i need to use computer-mediated social interaction.

As i wrote before, i quit using RSS/syndication readers. Sitting in at Web2.0 for 20 seconds, i was intrigued by the ongoing hype of RSS – how everything is going to be syndicated and how everyone is going to access data that way. For this audience, i think that it is certainly true. But i’m wondering if that’s really true beyond the info-nerds.

Syndication is based on an email model, relatively close to a mailing list model. You subscribe to a set number of things and the program informs you of updates. Like email, updates come in the form of a new item. If you leave your syndication tool alone for too long, those new items build up and you’re faced with an INBOX-esque situation, an eternal queue waiting to be checked off. Of course, there’s also a morbid pleasure in keeping that number at zero, motivating most digital control freaks to obsessively and compulsively check off the items as read. Syndication readers are the modern day whack-a-mole.

I will fully admit that my digital OCD runs deep. Mixed with digital materialism, a penchant for collecting things and a fetish for information, i found that my addiction to RSS wrecked my world, making it impossible for me to go to bed at night until everything was checked off. While email has long since weighed on me by having an INBOX full of reminders that i’m a bad friend, syndication brought out my voyeuristic tendencies, letting me feel safe lurking without feeling compelled to respond. Reading was enough; reading was everything. If only that were the case in email.

What gets me about syndication is not my personal neuroses around it (although i fear that others will be pushed over the edge with the continuous increase in feeds). What gets me about syndication is that i can’t resolve the proposed models with the usage patterns i see in youth culture.

Melora Zaner did some great research into why youth are throwing away email for IM. In my blogging research, i was only able to validate her findings. Youth use email to talk with parents and authorities (including corporate emails like from Xanga); it’s where they get the functional stuff. They check email once a day. They get notices there, but they’re mostly disregarded. IM is where the action is. Youth see this as their digital centerpiece, where they communicate with their friends, thereby maintaining their intimate community. They use the Profiles in IM to find out if their friends updated their LJs or Xangas, even though they are subscribed by email as well. The only feed they use is the LJ friends list and hyper LJ users have figured out how to syndicate Xangas into LJ. [Remember: blog is not a meaningful term to youth culture.]

LJ Friends Feeds look a lot more like IM than email, unlike most feed readers. Posts are just aggregated in a reverse-chronological ordering and you page through the various posts. There are no checkboxes, no little red numbers that tell you you didn’t read everything. You can easily scan. Unlike their adult counterparts who seem to add and never delete, youth talk about removing people from their LJ friends list if they’re annoying, if they don’t talk much anymore, etc. Because of the overhead of reading LJ friends’ lists, there is a desire to only retain those who are of actual interest. Youth are not grabbing institutional feeds; they’re not reading name-brand journalists just for show; things like Kottke and Boing Boing mean nothing to them. The only strangers they seek are those of genuine interest, those who are like them. Youth use LJ/Xanga like they use IM – to keep in constant touch with their intimate community.

This is quite interesting because the current generation of youth is more brand-conscious, more advertising-aware than any previous generation. Branding is part of their identity, yet their communication technologies are not how they see themselves keeping tabs on their brands.

Whenever i hear about syndication madness, i hear how everything will be syndicated. This mostly means that every company wants to syndicate their material so that the consumers will keep pace. Usually, this references the info-nerds (like myself). Yet, i can also imagine that the goal is for brands to shove info down the throats of everyone and anyone. That said, i cannot imagine youth syndicating non-intimate feeds unless the benefit is exceptionally large, or the feed plays into that culture already. When my generation signed up for mailing list after mailing list just to get access to a particular site, we often used one of a million throw-away addresses, but once we were on the list, it was hard to get off. With feeds, the user doesn’t have to ask the company to be removed; they can simply stop accessing the feed. The question then becomes: why start accessing the feed unless you’re exceptionally motivated?

Of course, there are going to be consumption feeds that are of interest to youth culture. I can certainly imagine the local rag shooting out a feed of what’s going on that night and this being of interest to youth culture. But, for youth culture, news access and social access are very distinct. Google is for information; LJ/Xanga are for friends and social lives.

The future of syndication that folks at Web2.0 are professing is really structured around information organization and access. It’s about people who are addicted to content, people who want to be peripherally aware of some discussions that are happening. It is not about people who use these tools to maintain an always-on intimate community. There is a huge cultural divide occurring between generations, even as they use the same tools. Yet, i fear that many of the toolmakers aren’t aware of this usage divide and they’re only accounting for one segment of the population.

I know that i haven’t completely sussed out my thoughts on this issue, but i wanted to throw this out there for those who are interested in where RSS is going. And i would love to hear a reaction to my thoughts here.

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I keep beta-testing software the crashes this, that or the other on my Mac. [Given, i’m really really really good at crashing everything.] Worse: i’m often asked to beta test things that don’t work on the Mac. I want to scream.

You can build enterprise software that doesn’t work on a Mac but you CANNOT build social technologies that don’t work on the Mac. Who are key driving forces behind sociable technology? Freaks, (independent) geeks, academics and other marginalized populations. What do marginalized groups use when it comes to technology? Surprise – they use subversive tools. Conferences organized by geeks, freaks and academics are like walking into an Apple distribution warehouse. If you only lived in this world, you would think that Apple makes up 70% of the market share.

It doesn’t. But it does matter, particularly if you’re building sociable technologies and you want the attention of the geeks, freaks and academics. This includes the bloggers, who are often bleeding edge geeky freaky academically-minded folks.

Sociable technologies are not enterprise technologies nor are they low-end consumer technologies. They require connecting clusters of people. And to do that, you start with the “mavens” to get to the hubs. Mavens are not mainstream users; they don’t play by mainstream rules. They value their position as outsider, alternative. They love new gadgets that have cultural value. This is the type that Apple has done a fantastic job at attracting and maintaining.

In a sociable technology economy, it is no longer acceptable to treat Mac users as second-class citizens.

Have i told you how much i love Flickr? Well, it’s true. And over and over again, they impress me with new features that are brilliant for both the voyeur and the everyday user.

Today, i finally sat down and looked at slideshows. Slideshows let you take a tag and just slideshow through all images with that tag on it. Stewart loves the sleeping slideshow. I’m partial to the Burning Man slideshow… of course. [If you’re a Burner, add your images to Flickr!]

While i was off galavanting in the desert, Joel on Software wrote a stunning article called It’s Not Just Usability. In a nutshell:

When you’re writing software that mediates between people, after you get the usability right, you have to get the social interface right. And the social interface is more important. The best UI in the world won’t save software with an awkward social interface.

Of course, i may be completely biased on this topic since i’ve spent the last n years focused on the importance of the social interface in computer-mediated-communication (broadly speaking). Anyhow, read the article – he’s dead-on.

Flickr color tags like orange or green or blue are sooo beautiful. Sophie Calle would be proud!

[For those who aren’t familiar with Calle’s work, she is fantastic. Read Double Game. But in reference to this, Calle ate only one color of food each day and took photos of that food. What a beautiful exhibit.]

At Supernova, i gave a talk entitled “Autistic Social Software.” For those who couldn’t attend, i uploaded a crib of my talk. The premise of this talk emerged from my post from MPD to Asperger’s.

I reflected on the connection between sociable media, science fiction’s human psychology and the mainstream media discussion around mental illness. I also discuss why it is essential for developers to understand what their (potential) users do. Finally, i channel Douglas Adams’ How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet.

It’s an imperfect talk, but i’d love feedback.

You are who you know is a great article on the current state of social software, framed by Marc Canter’s collecting of friends. Of course, apparently, i’m a ubiquitous pundit. Not sure how i feel about that.