Tom Coates

Social software is a particular sub-class of software-prosthesis that concerns itself with the augmentation of human social and / or collaborative abilities through structured mediation…

Wikipedia on Social Software

…some types of software seem to facilitate “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.[3] Communities formed by “bottom-up” processes are contrasted to the less vibrant collectivities formed by “top-down” software, in which users’ roles are determined by an external authority and circumscribed by rigidly conceived software mechanisms…

Clay Shirky

Stuff that can be spammed.

A connection of ties between people and their artifacts

Services that facilitate the creation of social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn. Traditionally, the purpose of the YASNS is creation of the social network and its connections.

A coinage that originally referred to traditional social network services and platforms but has come to be used as an umbrella term for social software of all kinds.

“A folksonomy is an Internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended labels that categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links. A folksonomy is most notably contrasted from a taxonomy in that the authors of the labeling system are often the main users (and sometimes originators) of the content to which the labels are applied. The labels are commonly known as tags and the labeling process is called tagging.” —Wikipedia

Making content and information available from a web site, most commonly using an XML based format such as RSS, Atom, RDF, and OPML, but any readable format including HTML, Javascript, JSON, and others may be used. The standardization of feed formats means easier, more integrated ways of accessing content and creates the ability for social software sites and applications to “talk to” one another.

As social software sites amassed data and information, developers quickly realized that the real value was not the application, but the data… the user generated content including: artifacts, tags and links. Providing standard syndication helps get the word out, but what about providing for custom channels to add, modify, and read from those storehouses of information?

Google’s PageRank feature revolutionized web search by taking into account “incidental” meta-content such as number of links to a page, the authority of those links, etc. The Attention Economy is based on the idea that our attention is a scarce— and valuable— commodity. Using technological means we can transparently quantify the attention and activities of users as not only a potentially saleable resource, but a mechanism to greatly enhance information search and access.

The knowledge is in the network… what happens when network things start talking? And not just to us, but to each other?

Storing information and artifacts around which a community can grow (or be built) is the purpose of social software. It wouldn’t work if it weren’t two-way, low-overhead, and highly connected.