Social Climbers; Jack Schofield asks whether social software is the next big thing, or just another piece of internet hype
Thursday May 8, 2003 ; The Guardian
Social software is the next big thing: everybody's talking about it. A lot of people are developing exciting new programs to aid social interaction. Social software is being massively overhyped. It's just a sideshow run by a few geeks with a tenuous grip on reality. Social software isn't new: we've been using it for decades. We already have email, Usenet newsgroups, chatrooms, instant messaging, bulletin boards, multi-user games and more. Social software isn't a new technology at all, it just reflects changes in society. Take your pick...
Whatever the truth may turn out to be, social software was certainly the hot topic at last month's O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference (ETCon) in Santa Clara, California. There was a stream of talks about it, including some based on British developments such as the message boards at UpMyStreet.com, and the iCan website, which the BBC is going to launch to help promote local activism. The newly formed Social Software Alliance held an evening meeting to which "birds of a feather" duly flocked. And Hydra collaborative note-taking software was the hit of the show.
In an ETCon keynote, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University, attempted to put social software in a context that made it comprehensible. He argued that people were most familiar with two kinds of communication: two-way point-to-point formats such as email and the telephone, and "one-way outbound" formats exemplified by all forms of broadcasting. To these one-to-one and one-to-many approaches, you can now add many-to-many types of communication supported by the internet.
Shirky had co-organised a Social Software Summit in New York in November, and has now co-founded a group weblog called Many-to-Many to explore the ramifications.
"Prior to the web, we had hundreds of years of experience with broadcast media, from printing presses to radio and TV. Prior to email, we had hundreds of years' experience with personal media - the telegraph, the telephone. But outside the internet, we had almost nothing that supported conversation among many people at once. Conference calling was the best it got - cumbersome, expensive, real-time only, and useless for large groups. The social tools of the internet, lightweight though most of them are, have a kind of fluidity and ease of use that the conference call never attained," he writes.
People who have been using The Well, Cix and similar computer-based conferencing systems since the 1980s will no doubt protest but, sad to say, there have only been a few thousand of us.
Of course, Shirky concedes that software for group interaction has been around for decades. These include mailing lists, bulletin boards and multi-user games such as Mud (Multi-User Dungeon). But, he argues, we've also had the technology to do blogs for almost a decade, so the real question is "why now?"
One reason is that there is a web-based platform emerging, based on weblogs, Wikis (web pages that any user can edit), and RSS feeds (either Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication - a way of sending messages when a site's contents are updated). Another is ease of use: "ridiculously easy group-forming is really new," says Shirky. A third is ubiquity. In some cases, he argues, all the people in a group will have web access, so they can take its use for granted.
In other words, the world has changed. In the early days of online communications, the online and offline worlds were like two Hula Hoops that may have had little or no connection with one another. Users typically had groups of friends online, with whom they did online things such as chat and share files, and groups of friends offline, with whom they went to the pub, or whatever. Today, the Hula Hoops overlap, and offline groups will naturally develop online components.
At ETCon, there was naturally a very large overlap, since more than half the participants were geeks toting wirelessly networked notebook computers. During Shirky's talk, for example, you could chat online to other people in the audience via IRC (Internet Relay Chat) or instant messaging. Several people were blogging the talk live, while others were reading what they were writing. Many people were taking their own notes, but there was also collaborative note-taking going on using Hydra software, which only runs on Mac OS X 10.2. Hydra allows several people to type into the same document at the same time - a bit like a live Wiki page, as someone observed.
Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Associates, said he thought this was one of the most interesting aspects of the conference. "The electronic back-channel is a significant change in our culture. When people in a meeting are able to make comments and bring in new information like this, it makes for a richer, more immersive experience. We're just starting to get into these blended physical world/ electronic world experiences, and I think that's going to be a major change."
It's hard to disagree, though its usefulness will be limited if it only works with notebook PCs connected to the internet - especially since some of the dumber social software designers already assume you have a notebook with a large screen. If the idea makes the leap to smart phones and wireless PDAs, as I assume it will, then it could become very powerful indeed.
But Tom Coates, from UpMyStreet. com, has reservations about the "current hysteria". Three months before the conference, he posted a short essay on his blog, Plasticbag.org, saying: "There's something about the abandonment of concepts of 'online community' and the complete rejection of familiar terms and paradigms like the message board that worries me. There seems to be a bizarre lack of history to the whole enterprise - a desire to claim a territory as unexplored when it's patently not."
Coates has been working on what would now be called social software for several years, and at ETCon, he gave a talk on UpMyStreet.com's Conversations feature. This is "almost anti-web" in that it is based on geographical proximity rather than people gathering around topics of interest, regardless of the physical distances between them.
Users tell the Conversations website their postcode, and "posts are organised by nearest to furthest away, rather than by time," says Coates. The assumption is that if they live in the same area, they could have a lot in common, including shared concerns about local shops and schools, house prices, and perhaps the politicians who represent them.
But social software advocates could regard this as an old-fashioned approach to developing social software: figuring out what people could use and trying to provide it. This idea has not suddenly become obsolete, and it can work well, but it is still a top-down way of doing things. The alternative is to provide simple tools that groups can adapt to their own needs, using a bottom-up approach.
This idea is favoured by another ETCon speaker, David Weinberger, the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, a perceptive book about the web. He wants to see "emergent social software that tries to mould itself to the group, rather than assuming it knows what the group needs ahead of time. That approach actually models the design of internet. Emergent social software repeats that at the group level.
"So why is it becoming important now? It's not that there's been a technology breakthrough," he says. "Maybe we're just absorbing the more informal ad hoc behaviours typical of the web, so that emergent software is beginning to make sense to us. I hope!"
The concept of emergence can be traced back to a paper on morphogenesis by the English mathematician and second world war code-breaker, Alan Turing. He applied mathematical tools to, among other things, flowers, which showed how complex structures could assemble themselves by following simple rules.
Another ETCon speaker, Eric Bonabeau, showed that some social phenomena can be explained in the same way. Ant colonies, for example, don't need a massive, centralised controlling intelligence: complex social behaviours just emerge from individual ants following simple rules.
If there is a new type of social software emerging, it is clearly emerging from the blogging world. Weblogs that started as simple collections of links rapidly developed into diary-like personal platforms, and many have already turned into group discussions, as members of a clique list one another on their blogrolls and leave comments on one another's blogs. Links, RSS feeds and new protocols such as Trackback are increasing the number of connections between groups of people and their blogs, creating a parallel universe that is already known as the blogosphere.
So whether social software really is the next big thing depends initially on the potential size of the blogosphere, and whether it can extend its reach beyond that to the whole internet. But my bet would be that the most important social software isn't going to develop out of blogging anyway: it will come from instant messaging.
guardian.co.uk |
