Social software, software that supports group communications, includes
everything from the simple CC: line in email to vast 3D game worlds
like EverQuest, and it can be as undirected as a chat room, or as
task-oriented as a wiki (a collaborative workspace). Because there
are so many patterns of group interaction, social software is a much
larger category than things like groupware or online communities --
though it includes those things, not all group communication is
business-focused or communal. One of the few commonalities in this
big category is that social software is unique to the internet in a
way that software for broadcast or personal communications are not.
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: compare the
effortlessness of CC:ing half a dozen friend to decide on a movie,
versus trying to set up a conference call to accomplish the same task.
The radical change was de-coupling groups in space and time. To get a
conversation going around a conference table or campfire, you need to
gather everyone in the same place at the same moment. By undoing
those restrictions, the internet has ushered in a host of new social
patterns, from the mailing list to the chat room to the weblog.