The State of Social Tools
[reposted from Darwin, June 2004, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.]
Over the past few months, I have spent a lot of time out and about, mixing with folks from many different software markets where social software technology is being applied. Social networking is on everyone’s thoughts, it seems; but other sorts of social tools are likewise getting a lot of interest. And the reason for that is simple: the core benefits of all social tools are very similar, and because of those core similarities, we are going to see (and in fact are seeing) a lot of convergence.
Looking Back to Look Ahead
Back in 1999, I coined the term “social tools” to express the fact that the terms then in use did not capture what these technologies were — and are — really doing.
The Rise of Social Tools
The big story of the transformation of business culture isn’t the props — the servers, networks, ten million websites, and all the information lying around in databases and in HTML — but what people are saying to each other and how they coordinate their actions, behavior and goals. The big story is that the global computer network is an enormous chat room, enabling us to collaborate in unexpected, complex and novel ways. We are experimenting with new social systems, systems that to an unprecedented degree involve software and hardware.
In the ’60s, it had become unthinkable to run a business without a telephone on every desk. By the late ’80s, everyone had to have e-mail. The need for cost justification of these new expenses, at first demanded by management, fell by the wayside as the second-order effects — the social impacts — became felt.
The rise of PCs has not led to increase in productivity relative to things that people formerly did without PCs, like writing letters and memos or selling widgets. PCs have decreased productivity in these areas. Why? Because people are spending their time in new activities, activities that were not possible before, and adding new value to the business. And all that comes for a price — the time spent in the care and feeding of computers, networks and software.
And at the same time, a new category of software is emerging, software intended to augment social systems. Not to change the company inadvertently, like e-mail did, when the electronic analog of interoffice mail became something else, grew into something else by changing the way people communicated and led a change in the structure of the company. No, this generation of software is intentional, designed from the start to guide human behavior into new paths and patterns, to counter prevailing ways of interaction. I call these social tools: software intended to shape culture.
When I wrote these words, social tools were a thing apart: a different flavor of software. But today, the driving purpose of social technologies— to manipulate and channel social interaction — has moved front and center in so many forms of software that relatively soon large swaths of software will have become socialized.
The Four “Co”s
I have over the past years talked about the four “Co”s that make up social tools:
Communication: instant messaging, e-mail, Web conferencing, streaming video and voice tools, and other messaging solutions
Coordination: calendaring, task and project management, contact management, and related technologies
Collaboration: file and application sharing, discussion, wikis, blogs and other shared-space technologies
Community: social networking, swarmth (digital reputation, also called karma or whuffie), group decision and other explicit community supports.
Increasingly, these technologies just won’t stay put. The features of specific products are beginning to expand with greater functionality and transcend any single “Co” to the point that each “Co” is no more than a convenient handle rather than a distinct market niche. This convergence will lead to a collision of many sorts of products, with widely varying starting points and orientations, and could lead to a wholesale recasting of product categories that we almost take for granted.
A Blurrage of Instant Messaging
You could take any social technology as an example to poke at, as a way to make my case. I am picking out instant messaging: first, because I have been doing a lot of research in that space, but also because it is being rapidly pulled way beyond the communication area and into the other three “Co”s.
Consider just a few examples of how instant messaging has been elaborated with features to support far more than basic communication:
* In Microsoft’s 3degrees, the core MSN instant messaging technology has been extended to support social groups sharing streamed music and digital photos.
* The sharing of digital photos through an instant messaging architecture also drives the Hello offering from Picasa, the well-known digital photography management program. This is also the case with Flikr, a similar offering from Ludicorp.
* In 2Enwtine’s Gush product, the core instant messaging functionality (based on the Jabber standard, and interoperating with MSN, AOL and Yahoo IM networks) has been extended to support both coordinative and collaborative forms of social interaction. The app includes blog-style “announcements” and a sophisticated RSS reader.
* Convoq’s ASAP (As Soon As Present) builds on the basic premises of instant messaging, but includes the coordinative principle of initiating a real-time chat as soon as all the desired participants are available online, as well as providing collaborative tools to better support their real-time interaction.
In fact, the major enterprise instant messaging solutions are rapidly being reworked into a combined communication/collaboration solution, providing a broad spectrum of capabilities ranging from minimal one-to-one text messaging to many-to-many real-time Web collaboration with all sorts of shared application support. In essence, this movement toward real-time application sharing through the instant messaging infrastructure will mean that nearly all nonsocial software will become socialized.
Convergence in Coordination: Everything Socialized
In short order, we may witness a wholesale shift in many of the givens that represent the conventional notion of how we coordinate through software. Consider these examples:
* The current approach to coordinating meetings — generally involving individuals looking at personal calendars and cycling through several rounds of e-mail — is just unworkable. Even in circumstances where the individuals are sharing calendars through Exchange or people are trying to use Evite or other one-off meeting solutions, the approach is too cumbersome. Imagine a solution based on subscribing to others’ published schedules, and each person deciding how much information to provide about their schedule based on degree, closeness or kind of relationship with others.
* One of the clear outcomes of the flurry of activity thus far in social networking is the emergence of the multi-layered personal profile, where who you are varies based on who is interested. This is not just a conceit that grows from the interests of dating, but a fundamental reality of social interaction that Outlook’s notion of contact information simply does not come close to.
* The use of project-oriented coordination tools (like Kubi and Groove) are an attempt to impose a social scope on the myriad to-do’s that animate our worlds. However, these offer too coarse-grained a model. Just providing information about a collection of projects from which we can identify activities to perform is insufficient. It’s not enough to act as if everything can simply be fanned out, and where all the atomic tasks are performed in Taylorist isolation.
We will see the transition to blog networks — in all their messiness — from which collaborating networks will surface the next set of tasks to be performed through emergent decision making. Unlike “project think,” where the first step is to identify exactly who is going to do what and by when for the entire duration of the project, expect to see a less exact and more dispersed approach to project management. Just as we have seen the appearance of blog features like “trackback” to represent crossblog comments, we will similarly see crossblog linkages at a coordinative level appearing in enterprise-oriented blog technologies. These are likely to support features like requesting (or tasking) someone to take on a specific project role or activity, and the subsequent backlinking of the task’s state of completion.
In Conclusion (For the Moment)
These examples are a grab bag, a random sample of the sorts of convergence that has already started to emerge or may soon do so. Some of the examples may only represent a small feature to be added to existing technologies, while others (most, I bet) denote a basic shift in the way that that we will communicate, coordinate or collaborate.
Most so-called collaboration technologies are not very socialized today, and do not really support community: generally, they are geared to a hierarchical notion of divisions, departments and teams. But how we organize socially is something else altogether. We are not bivouacked into fixed groups, like the Roman Legion, but simultaneously in many social circles at once.
And the tools that we will use to make sense of the world must be far more socialized than today’s solutions, and only those tools that make that transition will be on tomorrow’s desktop.
