Notes on Making Good Social Software

I've been studying the mechanics of social software quite a bit recently.  Now that I've begun writing a book about Web 2.0 for publication in summer, 2006 (details on that in a future article), I'm trying to get a handle on why it took so long for many of the "planks" of Web 2.0 to go mainstream.  Particularly the powerful two-way social software that we now see all around us today, which are best exemplified by blogs and wikis but also by hundreds of other applications right now, today.  In his absolutly wonderful essay, A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, Clay Shirky makes the observation that it was eight long years from the first forms-capable browser and blogs finally getting off the ground. 

So, what did we have to learn in that time for social software to really get off the ground?

As most of my readers know, social software is enablement of groups of people to collaborate using computer mediation.  It's a surprisingly sophisticated field that's been around for almost 40 years now.  Two famous examples of social software include the bulletin board systems of the 1980s and now-famous groupware system by Ray Ozzie, Lotus Notes.

The Web is now packed with numerous examples of useful, potent, and widely used social software including well-known examples like Wikipedia, del.icio.us, digg, and Wordpress.  There is also a growing body of next-generation social software exemplars such as AllPeers, RubHub, Squidoo, and Wink.  For a fairly new and more objective top 10 social software list, see here by Ross Mayfield.

This is all interesting backstory of course but I'm still trying to pin down the lessons we've actually learned so far.  Sure, at least at first there was a general Internet skill gap that impeded the mass adoption of social software by the general public.  Millions of people had to learn how to use the Web first, establish a level of trust with it, and then begin to learn the habits of being social online.  It was a steep curve for many, but more and more of us are here now.

Unfortunately, one thing I learned in my research is that both the usage and creation of much of our social software still seems to be mostly experienced-based.  And as Shirky points out, it's the worst possible way to learn. He notes the ideal way to acquire knowledge is when someone else figures it out and tells you: "Don't go in the swamp.  There are alligators in there."  Dryly, Shirky notes that "Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from reading, say."

Where I'm going with this is that there have been wildly successful social places created on the Web (Usenet, Myspace) and there have been failures (Geocities).  I'm trying to pin down the exact mechanisms that make social software better, over indifferent, or even outright terrible.  Like most Web 2.0 ideas, it's about best practices. Or, how do we break away from single sink software?

From what I can see, it boils down to a few things, which I'll summarize here.  I was surprised at the extensive bodies of knowledge on social software, which often seems untapped if you look at some of the recent attempts at it (Flock, the social browser for example.)  So, in a nutshell, here are the fundamentals of social software.  Again, refer to the Shirky citation above to get some great history and background on these:

Pillars of Social Software

1. Establishment of Handles: Anonymity doesn't really work well with social software, but users want their privacy.  Allowing them a handle to use lets people start tracking who said what and for people to find each other and form groups.  In general, switching handles must be penalized to encourage constructive behavior.

2. Allow for Members in Good Standing: Permit users that contribute well or do good works to get recognized.  This can be as simple as associating their handle with their social activities or it can be much more sophisticated.  There just needs to be a connection between the handle and the social behavior for others to observe.

3. Barriers to Participation: This seems counterintuitive to social software, but it isn't.  The history of social software has time and again pointed to the need for certain controls in a social system to be harder to access.  Anonymous users get lower credibility and abilities than identified users, and even fewer users have the power to moderate or exercise central control.  Without this, the core group won't have to tools necessary to maintain order and defend the overall social group, and chaos would eventually reign.

4. Protect Conversations From Scale: With the Web, the numbers of users in a social setting has no practical upper bound, but most social activities are groups of two-way conversations.  In a setting of thousands of people, no one can track the conversations and get involved.  Forget about the social software sites that have tens or hundreds of thousands of people.  Finding way for people to self-organize, split up and reform dynamically, and form affinities with groups is one way. There are many others.

I'll talk more about social software and Web 2.0 in the future.  As always, the exciting part of the Web is that it's made of people.  Now how are we going to use our software to make these conversations exciting, dynamic, and useful?

What do you think the essential ingredients of social software are?

links: del.icio.us