Dissertation for MA Degree
The Rise of Social Software: What Makes Software “Social”?
Moodthy Al-Ghorairi
Student No: 04146106
15th August 2005
MA in Electronic Media
School of Humanities, Oxford Brookes University
Contents
Abstract 1
Introduction
What is Social Software 2
The History of Social Software 4
What differentiates Social Software From Previous Tools? 8
What Makes Good Social Software 10
Popularity vs Technical Ability
What Makes Some Social Software fail: Object Centred Usability as a Key to Success 20
Conclusions 24
Bibliography 26
The Rise of Social Software: What Makes Software ‘Social’?
Moodthy Al-Ghorairi
Keywords
Social Software, Social Media, Social Bookmarkig, Blogs, blogging Systems, Social Interfaces.
Abstract
The term social software includes Instant Messaging, internet forums, wikis, blogs and blogging systems, group project management software, peer to peer networking and file-sharing applications, collaborative real time editing and social bookmarking to name a few. What distinguishes today’s social software from those of the past is the degree of integration between other social software, the ability to index and search them through the use of tagging and the degree to which the users themselves power and influence the display of content. Today’s social software developers face challenges such as design of the social interface behind the software, which is much more critical in than that of the user interface. To be successful, it would seem that the best strategy when building such software to incorporate flexible software architecture that allows user participation and development later on, while bearing in mind the object, or goal entered nature of human usage of such software.
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Introduction
In the last two years, the term ‘social software’, has become a sort of buzzword within the online community and online businesses. Even in the past year there has been explosive growth and rapid adoption of social media: There are currently over 13.6 million blogs, with about 100,000 new ones being created daily.
Even businesses are embracing blogs: from General Motors to Sun Microsystems, companies are using blogs both internally and externally to create dialogues and generate new ideas. That was the original idea behind Blogger
(https://www.doczj.com/doc/0411510804.html,), originally created by Pyra Labs to be a project management, to-do-list, contact manager and group communication tool, before being released to the general public in 1999 while still in beta.
Sun Microsystems even uses its employees blogs as a form of public communication tool, in the hope that their blogs help bring a more human face to and show the enthusiasm behind what would otherwise be perceived to be just another giant technology corporation. ["Are You Ready for the Next Step?", 2005]
This article talks about the features of social software and what makes some social software successful while others fail. It will highlight the timeline of technologies and applications that have contributed and lead to social software as we know it today and discuss the importance of social interface in the design of these applications.
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What is Social Software?
Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, defines social software as software that “lets people rendezvous, connect or collaborate by use of a computer network” and “results in the creation of shared, interactive spaces.”
The term includes communications software such as:
?Instant Messaging
?Internet Relay Chat
?Internet forums
?Blogs or Weblogs
?Wikis
?Social network services
?Social network search engines
?Social guides
?Social bookmarking
?Peer-to-peer social networks
?Collaborative real-time editing
?Virtual worlds and Massively-Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG’s)
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The History of Social Software
Group Interaction through the use of software is not new. Indeed email has been around since 1971, two decades before the World Wide Web came on the scene. The following timeline highlights the developments that contributed in the evolution of social software today. [many-2-many, "Social Software Timeline”, 2005]
The first software to allow group interaction was first seen in 1973, when the first Talkomatic group chat program was invented to the PLATO system. In 1975, the first mailing list was created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) of the U.S. Department of Defence, enabling multiple emails to be sent at once across a network. In 1979, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis create USENET newsgroups, a system that exchanged messages electronically around the world in a standard format. This enabled people to post queries and share information from people they didn’t know in a way that had never been heard of before. In1984 the first Bulletin Board (BBS) system was created, and for the first time people could chat in groups in real time. The first group chat program came in 1988 in the form of IRC. This needed a client to be installed on the end users computer, but allowed people from different locations to chat in a similar manner to the BBS systems, but to a much wider audience.
1995 - The first wiki is launched. The first open access multi user collaborative information page.
1997 - Rob Malda's Slashdot is launched. It is the first weblog to enable reader comments under it’s articles. Up until now, articles were presented online like
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mini magazine clippings online and users could only comment through email to the author. This opens up the web to debate in the mind of users.
1998 Google is launched. What sets it apart from other search engines it’s unique search algorithm which bases the relevance of webpages on the number of incoming links the webpage has. In other words, Google deemed webpages as ‘important’ if other users seemed to think so to. This single paradigm will become revolutionary in the evolution of social software later on. Despite this, what users initially like google for it’s inclusion of spell check for search entries. The usefulness of the search engine only becoming more apparent with useage.
1999 was a big year for the explosion of blogging and social tools: Brad Fitzpatrick's https://www.doczj.com/doc/0411510804.html, goes live, allowing users to post journal or news type entries online to be shared with their friends, to be filtered to certain, user picked groups of friends, or made entirely private to the author only. The structure also allows users to search for and register with group journals in addition to keeping their own journal, as well as read digests of their friends and group postings from a single page.
July - RSS 0.91 specification is released. This markup allows information and data to be shared freely among applications, such as newsreaders, other websites, or software. It will become fundamental in how social software is able to syndicate and collaborate with other social software, and how useful it is to people, but for now it simply allows readers to access many new sources from a news aggregator. In August - Pyra Labs' Blogger launches. It’s easy, colourful interface, free hosting, and the fact that users can customize their blogs freely with html make it a hit. Between this and livejournal blogging takes off. Other tools such as pitas and manila also launch that year.
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In December that same year Rusty Foster creates kuro5hin, a weblog where users vote for what goes to the front page. This is the first time user votes seem to be the driving force of the page layout.
Later that year, Shawn Fanning creates Napster: the first file sharing software. Users can send messages to other users on the file sharing network as well as browse others shared content folder.
2000- August - RSS 1.0 specification is released. Blog tools begin incorporating RSS feeds into them for syndication with newsreaders.
October - James Hong founds https://www.doczj.com/doc/0411510804.html, with zero capital. The premise of this is entirely user powered: People submit photographs to be reviewed by other users and rated on a scale of 1-10. The ability to send instant messages to the owner of the photograph is also allowed. It becomes one of the most addictive sites that year and goes on to add more interactive features allowing users to meet like minded people through it. Following the success of this site, many photo sharing communities today still have user ratings systems to vote for images.
2001- January - Larry Sanger and Jimbo Wales create Wikipedia, the first wiki encyclopaedia.
July - Cameron Marlow's Blogdex launches, designed to show the current most blogged about topics.
2002- with the success of blogs established there is a market for greater social networking tools. In April Jonathan Abrams' Friendster launches. By June it
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passed 1 million accounts. In September Sharman Networks releases Skype, the first Voice over IP (VOIP) program, allowing users to make internet calls for very cheap.
2004 January- Flickr photo sharing application is released in its first public beta, unlike other existing photo sharing tools at the time, it does not exist as a means of selling photo printing. A unique feature is the ability to ‘tag’ a photo with keywords, and using those keywords to search and index the users photos. This appears to be the first usage of tagging in public software, an invention that at first seems like a convenient alternative to file structures, this will form a huge part of social software later on. Later that year,
https://www.doczj.com/doc/0411510804.html, is also launched. Like Flickr it uses tags as a means of organization and indexing the links it stores.
In December, Microsoft release MSN spaces for MSN users to share blog posts, photos and lists with others, there is strong integration of the latest posts from this with their MSN Messenger chat program.
2005 Skype incorporates secure file sharing and instant messaging features to their VOIP program, while Yahoo Messenger incorporates VOIP features to it’s chat program to maintain hold of it’s user base. Technorati allows weblogs to be indexed by use of tags, and extensions are added to blogging systems to allow bloggers to add these keywords to their blogpopst while composing them. The incorporation of tags into technorati allows syndication with other systems that use tagging, like Flickr, delicious and Buzznet, another image sharing social network. [many-2-many, "Social Software Timeline”, 2005]
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What differentiates Social Software from Previous Tools?
The main difference between todays social software and previous
technologies such as usenet and message board systems is integration: The systems aim to incorporate and bring together information and syndication with the users other online experiences and make them prominent:
For example, in https://www.doczj.com/doc/0411510804.html,, the photo sharing and moblogging
community, there is the ability to Instant Message (IM) any photo on the network via America On-Line’s (AOL) messenger. Since the communities launch in late 2003, this feature has been adjusted to allow the photos to be emailed so that it can be enjoyed by more than just AOL. Users to wish to share they IM detals and client with the system can be contacted by other users through filling out an online form after clicking the appropriate link in the contact box: this enables users to be contacted easily should they wish without publishing their online details for webspiders to trawkl and spam. A private messaging feature is also included in the interface for people who would prefer their contact details not be published allowing users a choice in how they communicate with others, and how they wish to be communicated with.
In Buzznet, another photo sharing and moblog community, these features also allow XML syndication with Friend of a Friend, the social networking project that aims to describe the relations people have with other online. In both communities the ability to add other users as contacts that appear on as links on the users private page are encouraged. In Buzznet this is in the form of a blogroll, while in Textamerica (TA) this is in the form of an updating panel of
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images, syndicated through RSS. Both Services offer javascript to embed the users own photostream into another blogging service, such as blogger, or typepad. Another feature is Coordination: this includes calendaring, task and project management, contact management, and related technologies. Often this uses RSS feeds and email as a means of communicating to other members of a team or social group, but some applications allow for text messaging. Another four factors are also deeply ingrained in social software [Boyd, Stowe. "The State of Social Tools."]:
Collaboration: this a key feature in social software: group chats, group
blogs, wikis, white boarding through MSN messenger or even the ability to allow someone access of your computer to demonstrate how to use software or achieves something on a PC (another feature MSN messenger allows, with the use of a easy to hit “quit” button to end the session) allow people to collaborate on projects from great distances almost as effectively as if they were in the same room.
Community: In TA, the role of community is deeply encouraged throughout the design of the software. Visitors to the site are shown a dynamic flash banner of the most recent photos uploaded to the system, and lists appear on the front page showing the photos that have received the most
comments. When a user adds a comment to a photograph, a random photo appears as a linked thumbnail, and a link back to the homepage of the
photo is also provided, This is designed to encourage exploration within the community.
Other community features include making blog (or indeed photo visibiluy as in flcikr) posts private to members of a group only. This is something many blogging systems are offering to their users, as is the ability to allow
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different posting and editing privileges to different members.
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What makes good social software?
Popularity and uptake vs technical ability
Since the point of social software is to allow users to integrate their internet experiences, share them with others, as well as meeting like-minded or interesting individuals throughout their use of the software, then to an extent, the size of the it’s user following is a factor in determining if it’s truly effective and successful. Thus, in many cases, ‘good’ social software is as much about a piece of software’s technical capabilities, as much as it is about it’s appeal to a large consumer base: after all, it’s hardly ‘social’ to upload all ones photos on the Best Photo Sharing Network of All Time, if all of your existing friends are firm members of another service with no wish to sign up to a new one.
Having said that, it’s often the case that users are reluctant to leave an old, familiar system, to a newer one until there are enough existing users they know such that they feel the need to ‘catch up’ by changing to the new system. In addition, a brave early adopter of a system who shuns his or her existing friend network to venture into a new system, may well meet new individuals on this system that prove valuable to them, and there is also the incentive that early adopters can sometimes gain a kind of reverence in online communities as they develop, as is the case in Livejournal (https://www.doczj.com/doc/0411510804.html,), and Text America (https://www.doczj.com/doc/0411510804.html,), much like early bloggers (e.g., Rebecca blood) have in the hearts –and bookshelves- of many bloggers today.
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The following, while by no means a definitive list, are features that common in the more popular online social software tools as of the time of writing, so can be said to be factors that influence the uptake of such software:
1. Ease of use:
Ease of installation, if required: For example, the simple online blogging system Blogger originally lacked many of even the standard features of blogging today, such a commenting, spell check, and the ability to modify the date and time of a post. It didn’t, and doesn’t yet have, the ability to password protect posts or make them private. Yet, even in the early days, many users saw the then also free, but much more fully featured Moveable Type (https://www.doczj.com/doc/0411510804.html,) as being too difficult to set up: Moveable Type required installation on server running perl and needed many of its installation files edited accordingly by hand before it could be run. For many users this was a daunting task, requiring in some cases the user to email their webhosting provider for information about the perl version and file locations before they can install the system correctly. Even with this information at hand, installation could well take hours. Today, Moveable Type is still free for personal use, but the availability of much easier to install, and equally fully featured, free blogging tools (wordpress, B2 Evolution and the newly arrived Textpattern, for example) limits it’s uptake to a degree. Wordpress is typical of the these free, easy to install systems systems, in that it requires a php enabled web server and a mySQL database for it to be installed on, which although more costly in terms of website hosting, boasts an automated install time of 5 minutes, with upgrades to newer versions often taking less than three minutes. This, and the number of plug-in available, makes it a very strong rival for Moveable Type.
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Such is the demand for quick, immediate usage of the software that Six Apart, the company that owns Moveable Type, launched an intermediate service, called TypePad which was hosted on their own serves. TypePad is not free, but offers tiered service packages with advanced features such as might be found in Moveable Type, and has proved so far to be a big success.
Interface design:
This can be divided into two aspects: the first being the User Interface: certainly this needs to be clear and easy to use to an extent, although in a unique and useful tool this is not so critical; Joel Spolsky notes in a 2004 review on usability, that at the very beginning of the file sharing era, when Napster was a pioneer, that it’s interface suffered a number of flaws, yet these did not deter from it’s popularity, since it was providing a service that was immensely useful to people. Likewise, the early BBS systems were hardly user friendly, with a huge library of key-combination commands that needed to be learned before people could change rooms, send messages or search for another member, but again, the usefulness, large user base, and relative lack of alternatives at this time meant they were non-the-less popular. Today’s social software faces stiffer competition, as ideas are not unique for long online; there exist hundreds of free webmail services, numerous competitive blogging services, photo sharing applications, as well as specific media sharing ones, social bookmarking sites, podcasting sites, and more. In a climate such as this, interface needs to be clear and attractive. Innovations in user interface are in fact risky, since they require the user to accustomize themselves with something new and unfamiliar. One site that has managed to break away from conventions with much success has been the photo sharing site Fllickr, where most photo sharing and photo uploading tools would typically have a set of
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buttons either at the side of a photo or at the top of the page giving the user the ability to edit information about their photo, including the title and description, flickr took a bold move and made it so clicking on the title and description area made them editable. The downside was that the for some this was confusing and counter intuitive to the standard set by previous photo sharing applications, but this simple innovation has proved to be one of many features that generated enough buzz and excitement to make them a strong leader in photo sharing social media networks.
The more difficult aspect to design is the Social Interface:
Where the user interface is the design of the software while taking into account the end user or users who will be using it, The social Interface is the design of the groupware anticipating the social situations it creates. While the user interface focuses on the human-to –computer aspect of interaction, the social interface is about how the software allows and influences human-to-human interaction. [Spolsky, Joel. "What is the "social interface"?]
Examples of Social Interface features include, as a few basic examples:
The inclusion of an email and url field alongside a comment entry textbox in most blogging systems. The inclusion of these fields anticipates that a blog owner might want to get to know the person who left a comment, and perhaps email them.
Another example is offered by Joel Spolsky on the numbers of purchases of the collaborative project management program FogBugz despite the free open source Bugzilla being freely available and well known. Joel credits this popularity partly to the fact that his software, unlike the free and capable Bugzilla, is not designed to provide statistics on “which programmers create
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the most bugs”, since this ultimately results in people reporting fewer bugs and submitting less developments for fear of arguments and blame. This is part of the kind of foresight into human and social nature that designing social interfaces requires. It’s a foresight that is hard to anticipate the uses and usage of new and innovative systems, and is best understood through close correspondence with the systems users and listening to user demands. [Spolsky, Joel. "It's not just usability]
When designing social software, it’s the social interface that needs to be designed the most carefully. No matter how well designed the User Interface is, if the product does not fit in with the way the user wishes to interact with others, he or she will eventually move on to another product. [Spolsky, Joel. "It's not just usability]
As an example of some differences between social interface design we will look at a comparison of two of the more prominent social bookmarking sites and how they perceive that theirs users might want to use them. The systems under comparison will be https://www.doczj.com/doc/0411510804.html,, and the newly arrived Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 beta.
What they do:
The idea behind all social bookmarking tools is that they allow the user to share his or her favourite web content: pages they would normally bookmark. One of the prime advantages of storing the bookmarks into a system other than a web-browsers bookmarking system is that the user can access these bookmarks regardless of whether they are at home on their desktop, at work or at college. These services then become much more useful by then aggregating these links- and the links of others- in a central location accessible to all and
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updated continually with the most recently saved links, and by adding tools to allow the links to be indexed according to tags, or by popularity of the links being saved.
The social aspect comes from being able to share these links with others and allowing the links to be syndicated via RSS feeds. Users are also able to add like-minded members as contacts, and discover user recommended content. In all services there is the ability to search ones own list of links for given keywords and content, in effect, searching ones own ‘web’ for keywords and content’
https://www.doczj.com/doc/0411510804.html, (aka. Delicious):
In addition to the above, https://www.doczj.com/doc/0411510804.html, creates RSS feeds for every possible category of links. This allows people to be specific if they wish, and monitor only pages tagged with certain keywords from users of the site, or all links saved by a given user whose interests they feel match their own. The search keywords can even include filetypes so, for example, a person can search for mp3’s tagged with ‘ringtone’. The premise behind the social interface is that it’s a service that allows users to store, index, and subscribe to content they find interesting as easily as they do to RSS enabled blogs or newschannels, and share these links with the world, resulting in an index of pages that have been collaborated on by multiple users adding tags to give the pages more symantic meaning. https://www.doczj.com/doc/0411510804.html, also has an inbox feature which acts like a mini aggregator for its own content. ["Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 vs. https://www.doczj.com/doc/0411510804.html,.", The Republic of Geektronica.]
The release of the https://www.doczj.com/doc/0411510804.html, Api has lead to further developments
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and has given an insight into how the user population feels the social interface of the application should function: tools have been developed to allow user to publish their links alongside their blogs, to add delicious tags to each blogpost, to import the bookmarks to and from other social bookmarking and online bookmarking sites, add the ability to search their bookmark list from within the mozilla browser, filter links to only show unseen ones, sync or import tags into the users browser, or even automatically email the links to a gmail account as urls, so as to create a cache of the links, should the websites go down or change.
To this end, it seems apparent that one of the most productive things a social software developer can do is make the API for the product available for none commercial use, and allow the users themselves to build extensions and functionally for their software. As of yet, there is no way to protect a url from being open to the public in https://www.doczj.com/doc/0411510804.html,.
MyWeb 2.0: Yahoo’s my web operates on a different premise from delicious. Instead of making each bookmark available to everyone on the service, it divides the web into categories, allowing people to share certain links with different categories of people from within their own ”trust network”. Links can be made private, shared to within a specific group, or groups, or available to the web at large. Its aim, and indeed architectural structure (“myrank” the algoritm behind it’s search engine for the service is designed to search across thousands of nodes and millions of pages inside the users network and work out a page’s relevance based on the pages the user and his or her community have saved to MyWeb 2.0) [Sherman, Chris. "Yahoo Integrates Personal & Social Search with MyWeb 2.0."], is to build an information sharing system equivalent to eBay [Sullivan, Danny. "Yahoo My Web: An eBay For Knowledge."], built on
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trust between people, rather than an open access, anonymous RSS syndicated system. As such, members of it’s service can only subscribe to another members feeds by inviting them to be part of their network, similar to invitations one might send another person to be part of an Instant Messaging network. This does seem discouraging at first, given the open access of
https://www.doczj.com/doc/0411510804.html,, and the accustomed open access of the web- we do not for example, ask permission from a web author to link to them or subscribe to their RSS feed- but the privacy options are appealing, and yahoo gives the user the option to cache each saved page without any space limits, which is highly appealing given the volatile nature of the web. Should a valued online resource go down, the user can rely of the saved cashed site to still be there. The service also allows users to block pages they deem objectionable or irrelevant from appearing in their searches. It should be noted that at this stage there is no feature to allow users to search “everyone’s” web for content, but yahoo promises this is a feature they will include in the future. [Sherman, Chris. "Yahoo Integrates Personal & Social Search with MyWeb 2.0."]
Since it’s a new service the success of it’s by-invitation-only premise is yet to be tested, but it has to be remembered that a large part of the design effectiveness of the search engine requires the user to designate another as being significant to return accurate and valid results, in which case, the cumbersome aspect of inviting users to your network might be acceptable if it proves truly useful over other systems.
It will definitely be interesting to see how this model of a social interface will be received over time. In addition, the release of the Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 API should result in further extensions to the social interface being developed.
Browser and OS integration/compatibility:
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