The Rise of Social Software

netWorker, Volume 7, Number 3 (2003), Pages 18-23

In this age of tech industry retrenchment and reorganization, and the busting of DotCom dreams, it’s surprising to learn that one area of Web software development—now known as “social software”—is more vibrant and active than ever. Social software refers to various, loosely connected types of applications that allow individuals to communicate with one another, and to track discussions across the Web as they happen. Many forms of social software are already old news for experienced technology users; bulletin boards, instant messaging, online role-playing games, and even the collaborative editing tools built into most word processing software all qualify. But there are a whole host of new tools for discussion and collaboration, many of them in some way tied to the rise of the Weblog (or “blog”). New content syndication and aggregation tools, collaborative virtual workspaces, and collaborative editing tools, among others, are becoming popular, and social software is maturing so quickly that keeping up with it could be a full-time job in itself.

What’s more, social software, especially the popular Weblog (or “blog”) publishing tools, is gaining notice by the larger players on the Web. Google recently purchased Pyra, creator of the popular Weblog tool Blogger, and added “Blog This!” as an option on its Google Toolbar. AOL has announced that it will launch its own Weblog tool for its more than thirty million subscribers this summer. Soon blogs—perhaps the first native publishing format for the Web—may become one of the most important prisms through which we understand the online world, since they and their relatives in collaboration and group discussion tools may become our primary way of interacting with one another online.

This may seem an extraordinary claim to make about a form of Web self-publishing that has been around in one form or another since the Web itself. If the cliché of Geocities pages was that they were all nothing more than “badly-scanned pictures of your cats,” as social software evangelist Clay Shirky puts it, there were nevertheless always sites pointing to other interesting content on the Web, or telling stories of the personal lives of Web site owners. Maura Johnston launched maura.com in 1996 to post stories of her life as a college student, and was hardly the only Web diarist online at the time; Jorn Barger was calling his daily list of interesting links a “Weblog” in 1997. Several important things changed at the turn of the decade, though: the creation of commercial blogging software that removed the barrier of technoliteracy from Web self-publishing, the explosion of Web use that fueled and was fueled by the DotCom boom, and the creation of what seemed at the time a minor innovation—the permalink.

The permalink—a link that is attached to a post on publication and that will always take you to that post, whether on the blog homepage or in the site archive—was a sort of borrowing from one of the most effective pieces of social software on the Web: the Slashdot site. Slashdot is a site for posting links and articles of interest to the technical community and discussing them, and interestingly enough, the conversation came with the code. Except rather than locating a discussion on the Slashdot site, it became a way to link to discussions happening all across the Web.

As social software developer Tom Coates put it on his blog plasticbag.org, permalinks were “the device that turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities. For the first time it became relatively easy to gesture directly at a highly specific post on someone else’s site and talk about it. Discussion emerged. Chat emerged. And as a result, friendships emerged or became more entrenched. The permalink [added] memory—links that worked and remained consistent over time, conversations that could be archived and retraced later.” Permalinks made blogs something that could easily be pointed to, rather than just a place from which you could point away at other interesting things on the Web. Today’s blogs now often have Trackback, a technology created by Weblog development firm Six Apart, so bloggers can know know which other blogs are linking to them, and easily join in the discussion on those sites as well.

By turning the individual post into the important discrete unit of blog publication, permalinks led to syndication: XML-based feeds of individual posts that could be grabbed by aggregators and give users a one-stop way to read the new posts on their favorite blogs, along with other content syndication systems like newspaper article feeds, without having to click through to every link on their bookmarks. Permalinks also made possible the blog-tracking tooks that have become a second layer of information about what interests bloggers. Blogdex, Daypop, and Technorati all track which links are most popular among bloggers, providing their users with easy access to a wide range of opinions on a topic; without permalinks, they couldn’t point to discussions of specific topics as easily or reliably.

Trackbacks can build lists of recently updated blogs, and create a centralized way for users to find new posts on a topic of interest. If you’re a gardener, for example, you can set up a URL for other bloggers to “ping” with trackbacks of their gardening posts, and soon you’ll have a self-generating centralized resource that everyone interested in gardening can use. An excellent example of how this can work in practice is Lazyweb.org, whose name is shorthand for a Web developer truism: Once a good idea has been articulated, eventually someone will be motivated to build it. Bloggers with a good idea or technical request can send a trackback ping to a Lazyweb address, and people looking for a new project to work on can see if it interests them.

The lazyweb example points to to two important facts about social software development. First, for perhaps the first time, content-management software development is being driven by rapid cycles of user needs and innovation. Though none of the most popular blogging software is open source, anyone who can write Perl can write a plug-in for Movable Type—Six Apart’s publishing tool—and many of these plug-ins have been added to the program’s core functionality in later releases. Even Blogger, the oldest and in some ways creakiest of the blog publishing tools is more flexible and adaptible for being Web-native than any traditional content-management system could hope to be.

Second, and perhaps the more pressing concern as the industry comes to maturity, is that it’s not always immediately apparent how to make social software into a profitable business. “Community is not a business model,” says Shirky, and he points to the wide range of failed attempts by DotComs to provide a monetizable community aspect to their sites as evidence. Jim Romenesko’s journalism blog is possibly the most important source for news about journalism, and is practically required reading for working journalists of all sorts. It even helps shape the journalism world at times: angry postings there by New York Times reporters are widely thought to have been crucial to executive editor Howell Raines having been asked to resign. But Romenesko himself made no money on it until it was acquired by the Poynter Institute, itself a not-for-profit. More recently, some bloggers have asked their readers for donations; Chris Allbritton, an independent journalist, was able to raise more than $10,000 from his readers to fund his reporting from Iraqi Kurdistan this spring, which he blogged about at back-to-iraq.com, and conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan managed to raise $80,000 from his readers by running a “pledge week” on his blog. But it’s not clear that this is a sustainable source of income in the long term.

On the back end, users may be driving technical innovation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re willing to pay for it. Both Blogger and Movable Type, the two most popular blogging tools, are both available for free, though each has a more functional version available to subscribers for a small monthly or annual fee. And so the industry has, until recently, remained something of a backwater. For products that affect so many users, blog tools are generally made by very small companies: Six Apart was until early this year just a husband-and-wife team.

But in part because the software is so inexpensive even for a corporate license, and the format already familiar, businesses are starting to see ways to use blogs for internal communications and even connecting with their customers. Macromedia is the largest tech company to have official blogs on their corporate Web site, and Fox had a production assistant’s Weblog on the promotional Web site for their series Firefly. About.com, which has always been in the business of providing expert guidance to the best of the Web, switched its guides over to Movable Type from an older corporate content management system this July. And in what looks to be a far more important development, many companies are creating team and project blogs for internal use. These blogs serve as centralized locations for knowledge management and project coordination, and to allow people not directly involved in a project to quickly learn what other teams are doing.

A multiple-author internal blog can serve a number of purposes. If updated regularly, it can serve as a living document of process, and a history that can be easily referred to. Employee posts can capture important knowledge that might otherwise be lost, comments and discussions can lead to shorter decision cycles, and if someone leaves the company, his or her replacement can come up to speed more quickly. The informal voice of blog writing can also be a way of capturing knowledge about an organization itself: Meg Hourihan, one of Pyra’s founders, says that they asked all their new employees to read through the archives of their internal blog. “In a few hours they had a better sense of what Pyra was about than any mission statement could have hoped to communicate.” Blogs can also be tied to existing social software applications already in use in the office—push systems can be created to e-mail posts to subscribers, or to send IM notification of new posts on particular topics within a blog—or to new collaborative work tools. Because of their familiarity to regular Web users, and their informal accessibility, they serve as a gateway to other new ways of working together.

Even in the developer community, as a next-generation syndication standard tentatively called Atom is being developed online (see http://danja.typepad.com/fecho/), blogs are being used for manifestos, longer explanations, examples of what the finished code might look like—anything, in short, that involves a sustained contribution to the discussion by a single individual. But these posts usually point to the Atom “wiki,” a simple database designed for collaborative development and decision-making. Developer Ward Cunningham named the “wiki” for the Hawaiian word for “quick,” and true to its name, it allows for rapid generation of new Web pages through a simple scripting language.

Unlike blogs, wikis let their users create new categories of information on the fly, and allow for editing of other people’s comments: The Wiki Philosophy FAQ compares a wiki to “a big book that everyone can write into… and you can erase any text (even if you didn’t write it, originally!”) Where a blog can provide a record of process, wikis are better for working out process, as at the end of the development cycle. Each wiki page should, ideally, have the final decision recorded, not the work that went into reaching agreement.

Wikis have become popular among developers because they are easy to set up and maintain, and have a relatively short learning curve. But they can be hard to convince non-technical users to adopt, in part because the interface is non-intuitive, non-graphical, and frankly unattractive. “It’s an intelligence test of sorts to be able to edit a wiki page,” according to “Why Wiki Works,” a document by Cunningham. However, the history of computing suggests that most users prefer not to be tested in this way.

A newer application called Hydra, currently only available for Mac OSX, was originally developed for collaborative pair programming, but can also be used for non-technical applications like collaborative meeting minutes and browsing shared documents. Although it is a much more limited tool, it is also far more user-friendly than a wiki, and this June won an Apple Design Award for application software. Groove Networks, founded by Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie, allows for more robust and secure collaborative work in a corporate environment and is designed to integrate into existing productivity software like Microsoft Office and Notes.

The intellectual development in the field continues apace as well; the ACM’s Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work meets annually, O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference added a social software track this year, and Howard Rheingold’s books “Smart Mobs” last year introduced concepts like real-time computer-supported collaboration to a general audience. The group blog “Many to Many” (www.corante.com/many) tracks new writing on social software, and many other bloggers publish their own thoughts or point to other people’s writings about the collaborative endeavors and new forms of community that social software allows. In some ways, social software creates its own feedback loop; by building tools that allow people to come together and find each other’s ideas, it makes it easier for new ideas and new tools to circulate, which in turn will bring even more collaboration, cooperation, and conversation online.

Michele Tepper is a contributing editor for netWorker magazine.

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