When people say "face-to-face" communication in the context of social software, they're usually talking about in-person as opposed to computer-mediated interactions. But given the direction that tools like Friendster and Apple's iChat are taking us, I'm increasingly convinced that face-to-face communication is an important part of new social software technologies.

Everyone--really, everyone--I've shown iChat to has liked it. It's immediately appealing. Why? I suspect it's the faces. When I'm chatting with my friends, I see their faces. It makes me smile. The context for the words is real, is connected to my sense of them as real people as opposed to disembodied words on a screen. (Think about that word, even. "Disembodied." It immediately has a negative connotation associated with it.)

Similarly, there's been a lot of discussion lately about Friendster. From TerboTed's rant (which Clay pointed to recently) to the discussion by Adam Greenfield that I mentioned, one of the things that seems to come across over and over again is the fact that people using Friendster really like seeing their friends' faces.

Hydra is a good example, too. Because it uses Apple's Rendezvous networking functionality, it gives you the same thumbnail photos that iChat offers. That's part of its appeal. You can see who's working on the document with you, you can visually connect content of the collaboratively edited document with the person's name--and face--in the sidebar.

I've gotten a bit of flak regarding my complaints about the visual appeal of wikis. But I continue to believe that how things look has a not insignificant impact on how people feel about them. The argument that how it looks is a trivial aspect of a software's functionality is not what I'm seeing in the behavior of users. We can dismiss those users' concerns as "shallow" and "trivial," or we can acknowledge those concerns as legitimate and try to build software that works for the users. Modifying underlying code and demanding that users learn arcane editing conventions doesn't lead to software with broad appeal. That's fine if we're only designing communication tools for power users. But if we want things for "the rest of us," I think we have to stop denying the power of the visual interface. Me, I want more "face time"--online and off.