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About this site
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Social software blends tools and modes for richer online social environments and experiences. Some examples of social software are weblogs, wikis, forums, chat environments, or instant messaging, and related tools and data structures for identity, integration, interchange and analysis. For more, see Liz's primer on what we're up to.
This group weblog is authored by Elizabeth Lane Lawley,
Ross Mayfield,
Sébastien Paquet,
Jessica Hammer and
Clay Shirky.
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MANY-TO-MANY: social software
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By Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Clay Shirky, Ross Mayfield, Sébastien Paquet & Jessica Hammer
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Wikis are Beautiful
By
Ross Mayfield
With respect to Liz, I have to argue the point that wikis are beautiful, not ugly. Their beauty is in not trying to be pretty. They emphasize function over form over aesthetics.
Joi Ito had some great comments on the difference between looking and reading.
...McLuhan talks a lot about how "looking" at TV is different from "reading" text. When you read a book, your eyes are focused a bit above the text and the text sort of just goes into your head to create symbols. With TV, you actually LOOK. You really care if the font on the TV is ugly, but you rarely remember the font of a good book you just read.
So, maybe this is the difference. When I am on a Wiki, the way it looks really doesn't concern me as much as trying imagine and understand all of the context that is captured in the web of pages linking to and from the page. I imaging all of the people from all kinds of places and what they must be thinking. It's less about user interface and more about code...
Its actually more about the text. Context is gained from the page's revisions, links and how it is referenced by and navigated from other pages. Wikis excel at logical context whereas blog excel at temporal context.
Blogs, emphasize form over function over aesthetics. The form of posts in reverse chronological order and blogrolls constricts possible uses and design. Sure many a blogger has tweaked their template and design to achieve superior ascetics, but they are bound to constraints that if surpassed looses recognition as a blog.
Wiki's aren't pretty, but that's the point. Except in rare instances where design creates function, the more you design the more user functionality you sacrifice.
Wikis emphasize both reading and writing. Sure they could be a little more readable, but that would come at a cost for writing. Costs to be carefully considered for a tool that enables a writable web.
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The More Things Change
By
Jessica Hammer
Wendy Mackay documents Xerox EuroPARC's now-defunct experiments with embedded social software, in which easily-available multimedia connections were spread through both the public and private areas of the workspace.
The goal was to foster casual workplace social connections by creating a sense of shared presence and making audio-visual communication easy. However, while they may have intended to break down existing social barriers, the system continued to reflect the real-world social roles and hierarchies of the group. Long-time users tended to have more access to others' private spaces than new ones; administrative assistants used the system very differently from the researchers; members' real-world networks of trust affected how much they trusted information this system gave.
While the focus of the paper is on the technical and interface details of their system, I'm always interested to see more of this kind of research about how real-world roles and rules carry over into the technological arena.
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Google's Exponential Returns
By
Ross Mayfield
There is more to Google than useful, simple and powerful products. In the end there will be less Harvard business school cases about its product than its organization. At Etech, first employee Craig Silverstein discussed Google's product development process and the systems that support it. What's different is the use of smaller organizational units (groups of 3 on average) supported by lightweight inter-group communication with a culture of sharing.
The danger of smaller organizational grouping is the potential redundancy or splintering; and the difficulty of realizing economies of scale. The danger and difficulty is overcome through systems, but not the typical enterprise systems that seek to automate processes. The benefit is greater speed and agility (scope).
But in such knowledge intensive work you can't automate what is largely practice. Instead, light weight tools like wikis and weblogs support what people need to get things done and in scale the system yields emergent properties.
Google uses product much like a wiki called Sparrow Web to develop community-shared pages. Originally developed by Xerox PARC it offers lightweight editing without knowing HTML. Its less flexible than a wiki, but works well for functions like submitting great product ideas, launch process forms, reporting and weekly snippets to a common knowledge base. Craig said its "suprisingly good for communication."
It also helps that they acquired the leading blogging software company and they are eating their own dog food. When Pyra's first move when they joined the company was to set up Intranet blogging, "they knew they hired the right people." Blogger serves a relatively older tradition of having people contribute snippets of what they worked on during the past week. But now their software, widely adopted, is giving different people their own voice in the system.
Unlike other organizations they have more people freely communicating about what they are up to and sharing what they learn. Allowing teams to be smaller, yet effective as a whole. And because each communication creates linkages, stays with the organization and builds upon the past -- there are exponential returns to sharing.
What happens when these simple tools are combined with Google's search engine is fairly obvious. The best content and experts emerge.
When an organization scales, its systems and organization are a key component of its competitive advantage. Knowledge intensive companies have struggled to find a mix of both for leverage. Google's greatest innovation may prove to be within and seductively simple.
Without formalized information flows imposed by many enterprise systems, Google has been able to let its employees make their own associations. The right systems and organizational openness fosters social capital within the organization -- which decreases risk and is foundation of intellectual capital.
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Weinberger on Why Now
By
Ross Mayfield
David Weinberger offers his thoughts on the why now? of social software:
...First, I consider social software actually to be emergent social software. That narrows the field to software that enables groups to form and organize themselves. Yes, it's still broad but at least it's not coextensive with any software that has a user interface.
Second, it doesn't much matter to me whether the software is new or old. I'm excited about the fact that that type of software is now being recognized (i.e., "hyped") as important. And my question is: Given that most of the software is old, why is this category now becoming hot?...
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DHTML Makes the Man
By
Clay Shirky
interesting MIT thesis on cultural dispersion of virtual fashion in the adornment of websites, by Ta-gang Chiou, which attempts to take co-citation analysis from the world of academic publishing and apply it to Geocities et al. to look at social spread of design ideas.
The paper focusses on personal expression of the personal home page variety, with its badly scanned photo of cats and rainbow-hued HR tags, rather than on the (possibly faster moving) fashion statements made by weblogs. The methods Chio uses, however, might provide a way to look at the cultural difussion of shared objects on weblogs, such as those "Which My Dinner With Andre? character are you?" quizzes that seem to rip through LiveJournal in a matter of hours. (Thanks Amber.)
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Disastrous Decisionmaking by Whole Societies
By
Clay Shirky
Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel and never one to ask small questions, has a piece on EDGE about why groups make bad decisions, and the ways those group decisions are different than bad individual decisions.
Diamond begins: "What I'm going to suggest is a road map of factors in failures of group decision making. I'll divide the answers into a sequence of four somewhat fuzzily delineated categories. First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Secondly, when the problem arrives, the group may fail to perceive the problem. Then, after they perceive the problem, they may fail even to try to solve the problem. Finally, they may try to solve it but may fail in their attempts to do so."
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Hydra: Social editing at ETech
By
Clay Shirky
My brain is still spinning from ETech, where we were eating our own dog food all week trying out social software during the show. Though the #etcon irc channel was fascinating (my favorite use: Rael finding people on the conference floor by asking people on the irc channel to look for them), that was just a magnification of the irc effects we saw last year. The winner of the New Kid on the Block award was Hydra, the "7 brains are smarter than one" group text editor.
Hydra was designed for programmer collaboration but instantly pressed into use as a group annotation tool for talks, in a pattern Carl Beeth likes to an IM Wiki. There were lots of session notes created as Hydra documents, including one for Eric Bonabeau's talk on ants as a model for decentralized problem solving, written jointly by between 7 and 10 people (Kottke's estimate). Tom Coates also posted an image of the doc with Hydra formatting intact. (Many users said they wish the resulting doc could be saved with color-coding intact as well as in plain text.)
There was also a Hydra doc for Matt Jones and James Cronin's Social Software and Social Capital talk about the BBC's use of social software (impeccably annotated by the inestimable Tom Coates, who posted an earlier review of Hydra.)
Notable for its "Anything you can do, I can do meta" nature was the Hydra doc on David Weinberger's "What Groups Will Be" talk, which includes the group inventing a template for Hydra docs as group note-taking tools during the session, as well as a lot of good feature requests at the end. And then there were Richard Gayle's notes on what happens when Hydra hits a wall with too many users logged in at once.
As an aside, the sharing of Hydra docs by people in the same room, mostly via Rendezvous, all points to the important shift in ubiquity brought about by WiFi. Not just "You can get to the internet everywhere" ubiquity, but "Whoever you are with, you can be online and offline with them at the same time" ubiquity.
UPDATE: Robert Kaye has some interesting notes on Hydra use, including one of my personal obsessions, problems with scale.
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The Church of Kuro5hin
By
Clay Shirky
An interesting post about the communal experience on Kuro5hin, which the author likens to a church. He says "There is an implicit, unwritten guidebook to K5 that is only accessible through experience," including traditions like only posting one diary entry a day.
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Games and Groups
By
Jessica Hammer
People have been forming communities and groups long before the advent of social software, computers and even written records. Yes, technology helps us surmount the barriers of time and space. It helps us manage more and larger groups than we could handle alone. It provides new tools - but at bottom, social software is just a technology that addresses very old, very human and very messy needs.
At a recent talk sponsored by the Information Law Institute and NYU's Center for Advanced Technology, Lee Sproull discussed this human aspect of computer-mediated communities - why people join, why they stay, and what they get out of it. Part of how she defines these groups is that they involve people with a common interest. Online, people aren't limited by geography, age or other real-life factors that provide the coherence factor for real-world groups to form. Instead, the groups that form online are more explicitly purposeful than those influenced by real life. In the absence of accident, people find reasons to get together.
While Sproull explicitly excludes games from her definition of community, I would argue that games are a key form of social software. As Sproull explains, online groups don't form without a reason. Games, however, provide an immediate reason for people to interact with each other as well as an obvious set of topics to discuss - insta-sticky, if you will.
Some games make their social content and innovation explicit, like Game Neverending. Some are almost entirely centered around emergent social interaction, like There and the rest of the upcoming crop of open-ended shared spaces. Others don't include any built-in support for social interaction - but when there are not one but ninety-eight Cribbage discussion groups on Yahoo alone, games are doing something right at getting people to talk to each other.
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Why I Don't Like Wikis
By
Elizabeth Lane Lawley
I’ve tried. I really have. I installed phpWiki on my own server, and used it for a curriculum development project that it was well suited to. I’ve participated in the wiki-based development of content hosted at Socialtext for the emergent democracy and social software groups.
I love their functionality. I really do. It’s very very cool to be able to do “ridiculously easy” collaborative document editing.
But…let’s face it. They’re ugly.
I’m not a shallow person. Really. (Well, maybe a little shallow. But that’s not the point.) I do, however, respond better to web pages that are well designed and pleasant to look at. And wiki pages aren’t. Even with phpWiki, which lets me choose from a variety of layout schemes, I can’t do anything to make them better without changing everything on every page. I can’t apply styles selectively. I can’t put things in fixed-size divs so that they don’t spread all the way out across the page.
You can spot a wiki page a mile a way. They all look exactly like the pages that my students used to turn out in basic HTML classes back in 1995. All they’re missing are the rainbow-colored bars to replace the ubiquitous horizontal rules.
I had somewhat high hopes for Hydra when I first heard about it, but the documents I’ve seen output from it this week (like the notes Tom Coates et al created at EtCon) lose all the lovely color-coding and connection to people that the screen shots of the application show. (I wonder…does it work like iChat, which lets me save a chat and then reopen it as an iChat document with all the originally formatting intact? If I open a Hydra-generated document using Hydra, days after the shared editing is over, will it still show me the authors who participated?)
I’ve seen a sneak preview of an edit-this-page type of outliner that Marc Canter is working on, and I like it a lot better. Why? It doesn’t hurt to look at it, mostly. Silly? Maybe. But I know I’m not alone.
In fact, I’ve been thinking a lot about visuals in the context of social software lately, due in large part to Adam Greenfield’s recent post on Friendster. I’d been trying to figure out why I like Friendster, despite the many many things about it that I find problematic (a user interface that’s driven away several of my friends, the often obscene bbs messages that I’m forced to look at on the main page, the fact that I can’t see the last name of people who want me to acknowledge that we’re “really friends”, etc). Greenfield nails it: “Friendster’s ‘killer app’? The swelling joy that fills my heart every time I look at the pictures of these, my good friends. (Awwwwwww…).”
Such a little thing, right? Pictures of your friends on the main page? Surely he can’t be right. But then I thought about how much more I like iChat than any other IM client I’ve used. Pictures of my friends, again. In a clean, aesthetically pleasing window. And I thought, too, about the fact that I regularly return to Friendster’s main page, and look at my friends. (Twenty-three, at last count. And there’s even a smiling picture of the elusive burningbird in there!)
There’s a lesson in there for developers, I think. A theme that’s emerging. It’s not just about the software-enabled connections. It’s about the visualization of those connections, the personalization of those connections—and faces are an important piece of that.
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The Tyranny of Structurelessness
By
Clay Shirky
A strong entry in the category of "The Single Best Thing Anyone Has Ever Written on Group Dynamics", Jo Freeman's The Tyranny of Structurelessness (PDF version here), written in 1970, is still phenomenal reading. Rather than characterize it, here's a sample:
"Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a 'structureless' group. Any group of people of whatever nature coming together for any length of time, for any purpose, will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible, it may vary over time, it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities and intentions of the people involved."
This is one of those documents we should make sure never goes out of scope.
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Social Capital of Blogspace
By
Ross Mayfield
Perhaps we are in the Network Age [Ming], following modernism and post-modernism. After obsessing about construction, then deconstruction, we now value the links between deconstructed bits. When those links are between people, they can be valued as social capital.
Robert Putnam, in Bowling Alone, popularized the role of social capital. Francis Fukayama, in Trust, principally discusses the correlation between social capital and the prosperity of nations. He defines social capital as the ease in which people in a culture can form new associations.
| Network Layer |
Unit Size |
Distribution of Links |
Social Capital |
Weblog Mode |
| Political Network |
1000s |
Power Law/Scale-free |
Sarnoff's Law (N) |
Publishing |
| Social Network |
150 |
Random/Bell Curve |
Metcalfe's Law (N2) |
Communication |
| Creative Network |
12 |
Even/Flat |
Reed's Law (2n) |
Collaboration |
As previously described in the Ecosystem of Networks, people use weblogs in different modes: Publishing, Communication and Collaboration. By dramatically lowering the cost for these modes on the public internet -- they are rapidly increasing the value of social capital. Each mode provides different valuation methods:
Now Sarnoff + Metcalfe + Reed does not equal a valuation methodology, but centering on the value of different kinds of relationships reveals where investment would provide greater return. Enhancing communication and ties between collaborative groups enables exponential growth of social capital.
The above image also recasts the Ecosystem of Networks with the individual as the center, as preferred by many...
From Zack Lynch's forthcoming book:
...Unlike many of his contemporaries, the insightful UC Berkeley sociologist Manuel Castells in his ambitious two thousand page trilogy, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture [retitled the Rise of the Network Society] provided a comprehensive assessment of the impact of information technologies have on culture and global society at large. Castells’ extensive analysis of how "our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self” will remain an important perspective for some time to come. Here, the “Net” stands for the new organizational formations, social and cultural, based on the pervasive use of networked communication media...
Perhaps we are living in a Network Age, building a Network Society. Perhaps Emergent Democracy is as significant as a Second Superpower. But at the least, we are building new relationships-- a connectedness that we should value.
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Welcome to Many-to-Many
By
Elizabeth Lane Lawley
Why the name? Two reasons. First, it's a good descriptor for the group writing this. We felt a multi-authored weblog was an ideal environment to talk about a medium that is defined by its multiple voices. Second, it's a key characteristic of many (if not most) of the technologies we'll be talking about.
So, what will we be talking about? The term "social software" has been getting a lot of attention in technology circles these days. From the Social Software track at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference to the newly-formed Social Software Alliance, people involved with developing and deploying new technologies are increasingly interested in this topic. (Stay tuned for a post--or a few posts--on definitional issues.)
The growing popularity of blogging as a tool for ad-hoc journalism, academic discourse, and just plain thinking-out-loud has been one of the drivers of this trend. So has the development of new P2P and group-forming technologies--IM clients like Jabber, group-forming web sites like Friendster and Ryze, collaborative document editing tools like Wikis, multiplayer games, and old stand-bys like mailing lists and usenet groups.
The emphasis on communication and collaboration inherent in social software led us to the idea of a group-authored weblog on the topic. Each of us brings a long history of participation in social software environments, and an interest in both the development of tools and the understanding of their uses. Liz, Ross, and Seb are all active bloggers, and while sans blog (until now!), Clay is a well-known thinker and writer in the field.
We plan to use this blog to highlight new developments in the social software field, and also to provide commentary and conversation on the uses of social software in varying contexts. We welcome your participation in these conversations, through the use of comments--a first on a Corante blog.
Got a pet project you want us to look at? Tell us about it! A wish list for a new kind of social software? Let us help you find kindred spirits who'll help develop it. Experiences with a tool or site we talk about? Share them.
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