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January 6, 2005
Coates' new shorthand definition of social software
Posted by Clay Shirky
Tom glosses himself, coming up with a pithier and more example-driven definition of social software:
Social Software can be loosely defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message-boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking.
Comments (6)
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1. barce on January 6, 2005 6:29 PM writes...
If economic behavior is human social behavior, then on-line banking websites are social software. But most people don't call on-line banking social software & rightly so. To make the definition a bit tighter, we should ask, "What sort of human social behavior?' Cheers, barce
Permalink to Comment2. Steve on January 6, 2005 7:28 PM writes...
That is a very interesting definition, mainly because me some friends have been searching all over the web for example of a site allowing "musical taste-sharing". And so we've been working on a project called WhatchaRockin.com . Clay, your an expert on this topic do you think we are on the right path and if not where can we improve??
Steve
Permalink to Comment3. Tom Coates on January 6, 2005 8:00 PM writes...
Musical taste sharing happens at http://www.audioscrobbler.com
Permalink to Comment4. JamesB on January 7, 2005 8:56 AM writes...
To follow from barce's comments - why should we define what is of value to people and what is not? Surely the definition could could be be stated really simply as "software which supports relationships that people value". That way it could be a one-to-one relationship or many-to-many, networked, relationships between human and even 'non-human' actors - but relationships that 'users' define as valuable, not 'us'. No?
Permalink to Comment5. Tom Coates on January 11, 2005 8:31 AM writes...
The derives added value from part of the definition is about harnessing individual actions to create something bigger than the individual people concerned. Wikipedia would be a good example here. It's not just that it extends human social behaviour, but that it also helps the generation of something of singular and distinct value to other people.
Permalink to Comment6. lolita on January 19, 2005 10:44 PM writes...
Hello folks nice blog youre running
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