A few months ago I wrote a couple of journal entries (
Social Networking is Not
Broken and
Fixing Social
Networking) in which I stated that the phrase “social networking” is terribly
vague as it can represent a ton of different things. However, as nebulous a
term as that is, it is just a subset of an even more nebulous expression…”social
software”.
According to
Wikipedia,
social software
lets people rendezvous, connect or collaborate
through a computer network or networks. Gee, that limits things. The
wikipedia entry then lists some examples of social software including wikis,
blogs, internet forums, social bookmarking, social networks, instant messaging,
and even multiplayer online games.
Too often software is considered social not because it
encourages socialization, as per the broad definition above, but rather because
it serves as a platform for sociology. To elaborate, compare match.com - a dating site where people
rendezvous in an effort to
connect in the
most social of ways - to a site like del.icio.us, which lets people
tag, share,
and browse bookmarks publicly. By aggregating links via tags,
del.icio.us does
provide interesting insight into what society is thinking. But the only
socializing
with del.icio.us is among those that study social trends and social
software. If del.icio.us is considered social software then
so should Excel and MySQL because they, likewise, are just tools for
storing, reporting,
and analyzing data.
Despite the fact that a dating site encourages socialization
more than a social bookmarking site, dating sites are not listed as examples of
social software on the wikipedia entry. The list of examples more puzzlingly
doesn’t include the granddaddy of social software, e-mail. More people probably
rendezvous,
connect or collaborate via plain old e-mail than all the other
examples of social software combined. The reason that e-mail and dating sites aren’t
listed is not because they don’t encourage socializing, but rather they are
simply not en vogue with those that study social behavior or write about social
software. E-mail communication is, for the most part, private. There’s no place
for someone to log in and see what hot topics people are e-mailing each other
about today. A site like del.icio.us lets anyone login and see what a million
strangers are bookmarking. Unlike e-mail, del.icio.us provides great fodder for
Many 2 Many: A group weblog on
social software or
the social software
weblog and the ability for software to provide this fodder is
seemingly a more important consideration than the ability to facilitate
socialization.
In the article
The
Road Ahead in the10/24 issue of Time Magazine, Esther Dyson, the
editor of the Release 1.0 newsletter for CNET Networks, was quoted as saying sharing photos on Flickr
has brought her family closer. Flickr, like del.icio.us, lets you check out what strangers
are doing (in Flickr’s case, you can see what photos they are sharing). It’s a
little exhibitionist, a little voyeuristic, but most importantly sociological.
The ability to see popular tags at a global level provides great fodder and,
indirectly, provides a platform for the development of interesting analytical
tools… thus providing more fodder for the social software bloggers and other
sociologists. Those valuable merits, however, do not mean it is the best photo
sharing tool in terms of bringing your family closer.
At Multiply, our goal was not to design an application that
provides data for sociologists to analyze; it was to encourage socialization
among your family and friends. Our
proprietary convergence of content-sharing
tools with a true message board encourages ongoing discussion, not just a random
comment or two, but real conversations…socializing in the truest sense of the
word. Likewise the social networking component allows me, for example, to
mutually share photos with my mom’s cousins and my wife’s distant relatives….family
I previously didn’t keep in touch with or even know. Multiply brings families
closer in ways no other site can approach.
If you had a half hour of extra leisure time and were given
the choice to look through new photos taken by friends and family or new photos
taken by strangers, which would you pick?
The former is the more social response.
Sites like Flickr and del.icio.us are great for analyzing what a million
strangers are up to. That’s just sociology.
