A Definition of Social Software
Howard Greenstein loves John Smith’s definition of social software:
“Social software is software that is no fun to experiment with by yourself.”
Not sure I agree. Joshua Porter’s ‘Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web Applications and How to Avoid Them’ springs to mind. He said that “strong social sites build value one user at a time”. In other words, putting value to the individual first means creating a system that is useful to one person even if nobody else uses it.
If nobody uses it at all, then it’s likely that you have a ‘cold-start problem’, which results from designing only for the network. In an organisational setting, this is why systems that depend on mass usage from day one often fail. Instead of focusing on fixing the problem of individual value, most companies prefer to blame the users and choose to invest in new functionality, more training, increased internal marketing, or even incentives in order to encourage usage, which rarely work in the long term.
Interesting way to frame it, Niall. Thanks for pointing out Joshua Porter’s article - very useful.
It’s true that a site like Del.icio.us is useful even without others, and that helped it avoid the cold-start problem.
But the ones I mentioned as examples are ones that truly are no fun without friends (as currently structured). I’ve discussed Facebook with some of my 40-something contemporaries who bemoan the lack of ‘anything to do’ on Facebook. They don’t get it, and in some cases they’re right. But what they mean is there’s no one to play with (that they know of), or they’re not interested in the time-spending/wasting, flirty type stuff the teens and 20-somethings will participate in. The sites like Facebook will have to grow in usefulness for them in order to be of value, and that means either apps for the individual, or friend/relationship management becomes easier.
For that matter, and since you focus on Enterprise 2.0, CRM seems to be an application you can look at in 2 ways. If you don’t have contacts, you don’t need to manage them, so it is not ’social.’ If you do, does it become social software? No, if you’re not sharing the contacts? Or yes, because it lets you manage relationships and adds value to your business? I’m still thinking about it.
Thanks for commenting.