Social software enables people to connect, interact, converse and cluster in communities online -- whether they are actual organized communities or ad hoc collections of people. While many of the concepts and features in social software applications were already well thought out and implemented within bulletin board services, Usenet, mailing listserv’s and other early Internet communication methods, today’s social software is less left-brain, linear and serial in nature. It is also more graphically rich, intuitive and replete with features that allow people to interact online in compelling, fun and innovative ways.
 
As a consequence, many of these offerings have become much more accessible to savvy yet non-technical users that just happen to have broadband connections, a variety of tools and a strong desire to connect with other like-minded people.
 
Features abound. Customizing one’s space in a social hub like Facebook is fun and simple. Adding music, YouTube videos or custom graphics is even more so. Inserting oneself in to a directory liked LinkedIn, or populating a profile in any of these hubs, allows people to be found, to find others, and to build both reputation and trust as were as an online, virtual method currently allows.
 
Consider how ubiquitous instant messaging (IM) became, first with the technical but free Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and later commercial offerings (e.g., AOL IM, MSN, Yahoo). IM was a thin, lightweight application that sent tiny amounts of data across modems (and later broadband, which allowed multiple, simultaneous conversations over IM to occur) and became de rigueur for the teenagers who initially embraced it. Others followed rapidly. This kind of groundswell communications ubiquity was a pretty good indicator of today’s more efficient social hubs and connection software (e.g., blogs) and is now a built-in feature of many of them.
 
It is possible to visit these hubs without participating, yet doing so is not socially acceptable. The look-only visitor becomes a “lurker” in a voyeuristic way that turns people off. Only by signing up for membership, adding a profile and participating can someone build trust, engage with others, and tap into the value of being a member.
 
BLOGS
No examination or discussion of social software would be complete without starting with the ever-present weblog or “blog”.
 
Begun as a way to create a personal journal online in reverse chronological order (so the most recent post is the first one on the page...and older posts roll off into an archive), they’ve evolved to become political and social change-agents (Michelle Malkin, DailyKos, BoingBoing) to technology pundit and gadget showcases (TechCrunch, Engadget) to entertainment (ZeFrank) to the poignant (PostSecret) and about anything else you could imagine.
 
When thinking about blogging as social software, many people’s reaction is to be puzzled as to why blogs would be considered as social software. Blogs are considered social since the core capabilities of blogging encourage participation, connection and conversation.
 
Permalinks (permanent links to a specific post) allow a blogger linking to some other bloggers post to ensure that their reader can find that exact post when they click on the link. If permalinks didn’t exist, the blogger linking would be sending readers to another blog with little hope of finding where the post is located. Trackbacks alert a blogger when another blogger has linked to them in a post. Comments below any given post (if turned on by the blogger) allow readers to engage in the conversation presented by the post: differing, agreeing, pointing out other articles and more. All of these are powerful catalysts within what’s called the blogosphere and they encourage conversations between bloggers and those who read and comments. It’s a fluid, dynamic and rich medium.
 
Memetrackers (e.g., Techmeme, Tailrank) have become an important way for readers, bloggers and interested others to tap into these conversations going on within the blogosphere. These Internet tracking applications have complex algorithms that watch the most-linked-to thought leading bloggers and those who’ve connected to them through their own posts.
 
With these mechanisms and the energy, effort and enthusiasm of bloggers themselves, the blogosphere has become a truly fabulous method of connections socially (though it should be noted that spam blogs have proliferated placing much noise in to the blogosphere).
 
This page about Social Software (Community) will take a brief look at the top Participation Applications in the social networking space with a focus on what is available today:
 
SOCIAL NETWORKS OR “HUBS”
After being acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for an unheard of $580M, MySpace has become a much talked about and analyzed Web application offering. Like others where the network effect has been realized, MySpace is only as good as the number of people involved and participating -- and there are many!
 
According to a post by a senior executive at the public relations firm Edelman (Steve Rubel), a colleague sent over some staggering statistics about MySpace that got his head spinning:
 
  1. •It is the largest online social networking portal on the web
  2. •It has 61 + million registered users with 21+ million unique visitors (Media Metrix)
  3. •It's the second largest destination on the web, by page views
  4. •It splits 50.2% male, 49.8% female
  5. •They reach more men online than ESPN and reach more females than iVillage.
  6. •The primary age demo is 16-34
  7. •They have 1.4 million registered bands, 350,000 band blogs
  8. •The site attracts 220,000 new registrants daily
  9. •There are 50,000 groups including fashion, health, wellness & fitness, sports and recreation, music, film, TV, etc.
  10. •And last but not least it costs $35,000 to launch a profile for marketing purposes.
 
There are literally dozens of social networking sites whose sole mission is to discover ways to connect, link or otherwise engage people. A few notable ones are (some descriptions courtesy of Wikipedia):
 
  1. • Classmates: started in the mid-Nineties to link together high school and college alumni
 
  1. • Ecademy:  partly used for the building of contacts between people in business, but also used to advertise products and services
 
  1. • Facebook: a social networking service for high school, college, university, corporate, non-profit, military and geographic communities primarily in English-speaking countries. As of December 2005, it had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites (at over 7.5 million US college student accounts created with an additional 20,000 new accounts being created daily). According to this Wall Street Journal article (and lots of buzz in the blogosphere about it), Facebook is the next site to be sold and the price being discussed is US $1B.
 
  1. • Gaia Online: more along the lines of traditional community bulletin board(BB)-like services (1,865 BB services are tracked by Big-Boards) there are nearly 5M registered users and a very active community having logged nearly 850M posts.
 
  1. • Imeem: is a social media service where users interact with each other by watching, posting, and sharing content of all media types, including blogs, photos, audio, and video. In one sense, imeem is a media-centric social network service, and in another sense, it is also a user participation service for online content. The website has both a social network structure as well as a content browsing/filtering structure similar to that of flickr and YouTube.
 
  1. • Last.fm: Last.fm is an Internet radio station and music recommendation system that merged with sister site Audioscrobbler in August 2005. The system builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste, showing their favourite artists and songs on a customizable profile webpage, comprising the songs played on its stations selected via a collaborative filter, or optionally, recorded by a Last.fm plugin installed into its users' music playing application.
 
  1. • LinkedIn: is a business oriented social networking site, mainly used for professional networking. As of September 2006, it had more than 7 million registered users, representing 130 industries.
 
  1. • OpenBC: (short for "Open Business Club" (Note: new name XING to become effective soon) is a social software platform for enabling a small-world network for professionals. It is used by people from over 160 countries, albeit the majority of users are Germans. openBC is the only multilingual social business network allowing professionals to establish networks internationally. Languages currently available include English, German, Spanish, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Chinese, Finnish, Swedish, Japanese, Turkish and many more. By displaying how each member is connected to any other member, it visualizes the small-world phenomenon.
 
  1. • Playahead: Playahead is a large Internet community mainly aimed at Swedish teenagers. The site was founded in Helsingborg in 1998 and claims to have 1 million members, making an average of around 10 million logins per month. As of September 2005 the site had an Alexa rank of around 2,000.
 
  1. • Tagworld: is an Internet start-up competing directly with MySpace. It advertises greater customization than MySpace, and tagging support for most of its content. Tagworld has a notable feature of being able to upload 1 GB of music, pictures and videos to the site for later playback from anywhere with an internet connection. Some other features include blogging, uploading pictures and videos, and seeing who has viewed a users page. The web site launched November 2005 and by June 2006, it had passed the 2M member mark.
 
  1. • Vox: is an Internet blogging service run by blogging company Six Apart, which launched on October 26, 2006 (SixApart was founded by Ben and Mena Trott, creators of the blogging software Movable Type, as well as the company that owns the Typepad and LiveJournal services). The service is more focussed on social networking features than other blogging platforms, such as Wordpress and Blogger.
 
  1. • Yahoo360: is a personal communication portal similar to orkut and MySpace, currently in beta testing. It integrates features of social networking, blogging, and photo sharing sites. It’s mentioned here since it’s offered by Yahoo.
 
  1. • Windows Live Spaces: (formerly MSN and WLSpaces for short) is Microsoft's Social Networking platform. The site was launched in early December 2004 as MSN Spaces, with the aim of allowing its users to reach out to others by publishing their thoughts, photos and interests. With this goal, Windows Live Spaces finds itself competing with similar services like MySpace and Yahoo!'s 360°
 
  1. • Zaadz: Though the Wikipedia article currently has several red flags on it (quality standard concerns; doesn’t comply with Wikipedia’s neutrality approach; sources cited are self published), this is worth mentioning as a service since it’s one of the first, large, socially conscious social networking sites (though other forums have existed...none were explicitly geared to online, participative users).  “Zaadz sets itself apart from other social networking services by its high ideals, great deal of transparency, and unique features which are not found in other social networks. Zaadz is also very explicit in its mission of "changing the world."
 
Wow. Those are a lot of Participation Applications vying for participants! So what happens when people join multiple social sites?
 
NETWORKS OF NETWORKS
Every one of us has multiple identities, affinities and interests. We might be a parent, an employee, a scout leader or coach, member of a religious organization, affiliated with a political party or part of a knitting club. Each of us are already connected to clusters of groups in many different ways.
 
Since many of us have entered the Participation Culture and are actively taking part in online networks and communities, managing multiple profiles, interactions online, keeping track of each of them is becoming as difficult as staying on top of industry or general news...there’s just too much information coming at us at all times.
 
It’s the same challenge Josiah Gulden had (see Introduction) and he is writing software to manage it. There are, however, companies looking specifically at how to manage networks-of-networks. Two of them are:
 
PeopleAggregator (PeepAgg): For users, this hub can aggregate their friends, all their stuff (like music, videos, links, etc.); for network operators they can setup their own network/hub/community; for other Web developers to tap into PeepAgg or for PeepAgg to consume their services. It’s a problem solver for the multiple-affinity issue we all face and which is only going to accelerate going forward.
 
CollectiveX: states that they are a “...web-based service that enables members of organized groups -- such as alumni associations, non-profits, membership and social groups -- to maximize return on involvement through private, secure communication and social networking.
 
CollectiveX was designed with simplicity and ease-of-use in mind. Features include: member profiles with objectives and key connections, group calendars, discussions, email blasts and file sharing.”
 
 
The market will continue to see an acceleration in networks, hubs, memetracking and other tools to assist with keeping tabs on:
  1. • Groups or activities an individual is associated with
  2. •  All of that person’s friends
  3. •  The things that interest each person.
 
Participation Applications:  Main, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
 
Participation Applications
1. Social Software
Social “hubs” like Facebook, MySpace and the clever PeopleAggregator, have engaged tens of millions of users and connected people across geographies, ethnicities, class and other social barriers while simultaneously accelerating the coming together of people in tight, like-minded clusters.
Blogs have gone beyond simple personal publishing. Memetrackers (e.g., Techmeme) ‘watch’ the conversations in the blogosphere and blog search (e.g., Technorati) does some memetracking and much more.
Participation Applications:  Main, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Technorati CEO, Dave Sifry, releases an annual analysis of the State of the Blogosphere with the most recent one from October, 2006 tracking 57+ million blogs
CollectiveX provides the ability to set up groups, join other CollectiveX groups, and access any of them from a popup menu after logging in (as well as manage a single profile and other streamlining of handling multiple group affiliations.