Not the software itself, but why the name? Do we even need a phrase for software that supports group interaction?

One perennial worry is hype; people are rightly suspicious of grandiose claims of novelty. I can't speak for everyone talking about social software -- someone out there may indeed be hyping it as NEW NEW NEW -- but here we're all excited to bring insights from years ago into the conversation, as are most people I know thinking hard about group interaction. My first Many-to-Many post was about an essay from 1970, Jessica's posted something titled "The More Things Change..." about Wendy Mackay's research, and Ross managed to refer to Robert Putnam and Frank Fukayama's work in a single paragraph -- hardly a hotbed of ahistoricism.

The more important question is whether using the phrase social software gets us anything? Is it just a new synonym for an old stuff? I'll argue that the phrase is useful, on the grounds of taxonomy.

I first started using it about a year and a half ago -- I got it from Doc Searls, who used it to refer to Google's divination of social value from link structure. (I don't know if Doc used it before that, or if he was the first to use the phrase.) I adopted it because I wanted a phrase that worked as an category umbrella for classes of group-supporting software I didn't have other words for.

There are phrases like groupware and online community, of course, but Joi Ito's Happenings don't seem to fit into those classes of software, nor do my own experiments on in-room use of chat, nor did the Hydra group-editing exercises at ETech. The experience of being online and offline with a group at the same time is different from the online-only experiences we're used to describing, and we will need a phrase to describe them. (Social prosthetics is the best I've come up with, an even more infelicitous phrase than social software, alas.) "Weblog" is the most obvious example of this phenomenon -- the pattern of part publishing, part conversation likewise wasn't described by online community or groupware, and needed its own label.

Using the phrase social software is in part a bet that more such classes of interaction are going to arise, sometimes from new software, sometimes from combining existing tools.

But if there are classes of use that aren't described by existing phrases, isn't social software as an umbrella term just a synonym for computer-mediated communications (CMC)? CMC seems over-broad to me. It covers use of software for interacting groups -- two-way, many-to-many communications -- but it also covers point-to-point and publishing or broadcast patterns. Prior to the net, we had other point-to-point tools (telephone, telegraph) and other publishing and broadcast tools (TV, radio, printing press) but prior the net, we had no widespread technology for group conversation. Social software denominates a category of use that is larger than the individual classes of software, but smaller than all the ways people use computers to communicate.

The phrase is frustrating, of course, because it describes a usecase, not a technology. Mailing lists are email-as-social software, but spam is not. LiveJournal is social software, but Instapundit is not (this last point is contentious, I know, but I maintain that using a weblog in an outbound-only pattern is little different from having a personal MSNBC -- valuable, but not one that involves interacting groups.)

One of the things we know from history is that social and technological issues cannot be separated from one another when dealing with many-to-many interaction. Group use of technology is different from personal use, and the phrase social software provides way of viewing interesting effects, from mailing lists to SMS groups to Happenings, as part of a larger a category that reflects the importance (and oddities) of that many-to-many pattern.