Social software - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Social software may be better understood as a set of debates or design choices than any particular list of tools. Broadly conceived, there are many older media such as mailing lists and Usenet fora that qualify as "social". Most users of this term, however, restrict its meaning to more recent software genres such as blogs and wikis. Others suggest that the term social software is best used not to refer to a single type of software, but rather to the use of two or more modes of computer-mediated communication that result in "community formation".^[5] In this view, people form online communities by combining one-to-one (e.g., email and instant messaging), one-to-many (Web pages and blogs), and many-to-many (wikis) communication modes.^[6]. Some groups schedule real life meetings and so become physically "real" communities of people that share physical lives.

Common to most definitions of social software, is the observation that some types of software seem to facilitate a more egalitarian and meritocratic "bottom-up" community development, in which membership is voluntary, reputations are earned by winning the trust of other members, and the community's mission and governance are defined by the communities' members themselves^[7].

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Social software (including Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0) is normally defined as a range of web-based software programs. The software allows users to interact and share data with other users. This computer-mediated communication has become very popular with social sites like MySpace and Facebook, media sites like Flickr and YouTube, and commercial sites like Amazon.com and eBay. Many of these applications share characteristics like open APIs, service oriented design, and the ability to upload data and media.

The more specific term collaborative software applies to cooperative information sharing systems, and is usually narrowly applied to the software that enables collaborative work functions. Distinctions among usage of the terms "social", "trusted", and "collaborative" are in the applications or uses, not the tools themselves, although there are some tools that are only rarely used for work collaboration.

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