n W

THE RISE OF SOCIAL SOFTWARE SEPTEMBER 2003

n W
19
I
n this age of tech industry retrenchment and reorganization, and
the busting of DotCom dreams, its surprising to learn that one
area of Web software developmentnow known as "social soft-
ware"is more vibrant and active than ever. Social software refers
to various, loosely connected types of applications that allow indi-
viduals 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 messag-
ing, online role-playing games, and even the collaborative editing tools
I l l us t r at i on by Jas on Sc hnei der
THE
RISE
OF
SOCIAL
SOFTWAR
E
B Y M I C H E L E T E P P E R
that has been around in one form or anoth-
er since the Web itself. If the clich 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 permalinka 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 conver-
sation 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 phe-
nomenon 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.
THE RISE OF SOCIAL SOFTWARE SEPTEMBER 2003
n W
20
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, collabo-
rative 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.
Whats 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 blogsper-
haps the first native publishing format for
the Webmay become one of the most
important prisms through which we under-
stand the online world, since they and their
relatives in collaboration and group discus-
sion 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
Soonblogs may become our primary
way of interacting with one another online.
Chat emerged. And as a result, friendships
emerged or became more entrenched. The
permalink [added] memorylinks 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. Todays 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 dis-
cussion 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 con-
tent 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 couldnt
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 youre a gardener, for example,
you can set up a URL for other bloggers to
ping with trackbacks of their gardening
posts, and soon youll have a self-generat-
ing centralized resource that everyone
interested in gardening can use. An excel-
lent example of how this can work in prac-
tice 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 tech-
nical request can send a trackback ping to
a Lazyweb address, and people looking for
a new project to work on can see if it inter-
ests them.
T
he lazyweb example points to to
two important facts about social
software development. First, for
perhaps the first time, content-
management software develop-
ment 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 TypeSix
Aparts publishing tooland many of these
plug-ins have been added to the programs
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-man-
agement system could hope to be.
Second, and perhaps the more pressing
concern as the industry comes to maturity,
is that its not always immediately apparent
how to make social software into a prof-
itable business. Community is not a busi-
ness model, says Shirky, and he points to
the wide range of failed attempts by
DotComs to provide a monetizable com-
munity aspect to their sites as evidence. Jim
Romeneskos 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
THE RISE OF SOCIAL SOFTWARE SEPTEMBER 2003
n W
21
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 colum-
nist Andrew Sullivan managed to raise
$80,000 from his readers by running a
pledge week on his blog. But its 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 doesnt nec-
essarily mean theyre 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 connect-
ing with their customers. Macromedia is
the largest tech company to have official
blogs on their corporate Web site, and Fox
had a production assistants Weblog on the
promotional Web site for their series
Firefly. About.com, which has always been
in the business of providing expert guid-
ance 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 central-
ized 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
Pyras 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
blogor 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 tenta-
tively called Atom is being developed
online (see http://danja.typepad.com/
fecho/), blogs are being used for mani-
festos, 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 RISE OF SOCIAL SOFTWARE SEPTEMBER 2003
n W
22
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 lan-
guage.
Unlike blogs, wikis let their users create
new categories of information on the fly,
and allow for editing of other peoples
comments: The Wiki Philosophy FAQ com-
pares a wiki to a big book that everyone
can write into... and you can erase any text
(even if you didnt 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.
Its 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, cur-
rently only available for Mac OSX, was
originally developed for collaborative pair
programming, but can also be used for
non-technical applications like collabora-
tive 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 corpo-
rate environment and is designed to inte-
grate into existing productivity software
like Microsoft Office and Notes.
The intellectual development in the field
continues apace as well; the ACMs
Conference on Computer Supported
Collaborative Work meets annually,
OReillys Emerging Technology
Conference added a social software track
this year, and Howard Rheingolds books
Smart Mobs last year introduced con-
cepts like real-time computer-supported
collaboration to a general audience. The
group blog Many to Many
(www.corante.com/many) tracks new writ-
ing on social software, and many other
bloggers publish their own thoughts or
point to other peoples 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 oth-
ers ideas, it makes it easier for new ideas
and new tools to circulate, which in turn
will bring even more collaboration, cooper-
ation, and conversation online.
~
Michele Tepper is a contributing editor for
netWorker magazine.
THE RISE OF SOCIAL SOFTWARE SEPTEMBER 2003
n W
23
Toolsthat allow people to come
together make it easier for new ideas and
innovations to circulate.
PERMISSION TO MAKE DIGITAL OR HARD COPIES OF
ALL OR PART OF THIS WORK FOR PERSONAL
OR CLASSROOM USE IS GRANTED WITHOUT FEE
PROVIDED THAT COPIES ARE NOT MADE OR
DISTRIBUTED FOR PROFIT OR COMMERCIAL
ADVANTAGE AND THAT COPIES BEAR THIS NOTICE
AND THE FULL CITATION ON THE FIRST PAGE. TO
COPY OTHERWISE, TO REPUBLISH, TO POST ON
SERVERS OR TO REDISTRIBUTE TO LISTS, REQUIRES
PRIOR SPECIFIC PERMISSION AND/OR A FEE.
ACM 1091-3556/03/0900 $5.00