Are You Ready For Social Software?

[Originally published in Darwin, January 2005. I am reprinting because of a request from a reader that led me to search for this piece. Thank goodness someone reprinted in its entirety, because Darwin content has been offline for several years.]

Years ago, a logic professor beat it into my bony head that Sherlock Holmes had it all wrong when he consistently claimed to use deduction in solving his cases. It turns out he (or better, Arthur Conan Doyle) was using induction, which is, according to Webster’s, “the act or process of reasoning from a part to a whole, from particulars to generals, or from the individual to the universal.” In working from a paltry collection of clues to a full understanding of the actions and motives of the butler and his victim, Holmes/Doyle was, basically, developing a picture of the universe surrounding the crime from a few hints.

The same sort of confusion — the difference between induction and deduction — seems to be at work in the rapidly escalating debate about “social software:” its meaning, relevance and purpose.

What is Social Software?

People naturally tend to use software as a means to advance personal interests and to interact socially. As a result, the most broadminded consider the “cc:” line on e-mail the starting point of social software; others restrict the term a bit more. In fact, you may be tempted to ask, “what isn’t social software?”

I believe the phrase social software should be more helpful, and can distinguish software built around one or more of these premises:

Support for conversational interaction between individuals or groups — including real time and “slow time” conversation, like instant messaging and collaborative teamwork spaces, respectively. This is also supported by the interplay always going on in blogs, where one blogger riffs on something another has said, and a third jumps in with more commentary, and the next thing you know, 40 others chime in, and someone suggests creating a groupblog to pursue the theme, whatever it may be. A big freewheeling discussion, with snippets of the interaction spread all over the place.

Support for social feedback — which allows a group to rate the contributions of others, perhaps implicitly, leading to the creation of digital reputation. Digital reputation — also known as karma (from the Slashdot web community model) or whuffie (from Corey Doctorow’s science fiction novel, Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom) — will turn out to be an area of great importance. Consider the lengths that eBay sellers go to to maintain a good reputation.

Support for social networks — to explicitly create and manage a digital expression of people’s personal relationships, and to help them build new relationships. These usually involve some sort of “six degrees of separation” system. One example is the Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) proposed standard, an XML-based approach to define your interests, phone number, e-mail, and the degree and kind of relationships you have with others, including creating explicit links to their FOAF specifications (which, of course, refer to others’ FOAF definitions, and so on).

The heady interest in Web-based services like Ryze, Friendster, LinkedIn and others, which are explicitly social (or business) networking systems, is being driven by a growing awareness of the fluidity and flexibility of networking through the Internet.

Adina Levin, author of BookBlog, recently suggested that social software could be defined as “tools that depend more on social convention than on software features to facilitate interaction and collaboration.” But I think this stops short of what is going on: Social software allows us to create new social groupings and then new sorts of social conventions arise.

Kenneth Boulding, the economist, humanist and social scientist, once wrote: “We make our tools, and then they shape us.” That is what social software is doing. It is changing the way that we socialize.

So What’s The Big Deal?

On the other hand, social software has aroused the ire of some well-known cyber-culture vultures, such as blogger Dave Winer (the founder of RadioLand, a blog technology company), who recently opined:

Social Software? I’ve been in the software biz for 2.5 decades, so I’ve seen this kind of hype over and over. Take something that exists, give it a fancy new name, and then blast at reporters and analysts about it. Every time around the loop it works less well. In the ’80s, it worked very well. In the early 21st century, there aren’t enough analysts with credibility to make such a pig fly.

P2P was the last gasp. I remember getting breathless invitations to keynotes where this or that luminary was going to finally tell us what it is. In the end it wasn’t the technology that made a difference, but ironically, the people. Apparently the promoters of Social Software were listening.

It’s wrong. We don’t need this. Weblogs are about punching through the hype machine of idiot analysts and reporters who go for their BS. Social Software has existed for years. What’s the big news? A few people are looking for a pole to fly their flag on. Pfui!

I disagree with Dave (which isn’t unusual), as do others who think the term has legs (or wings). David Weinberger (Darwinmag.com’s Swift Kick columnist) has weighed in saying,

First, I consider social software actually to be emergent social software. That narrows the field to software that enables groups to form and organize themselves…. Second, it doesn’t much matter to me whether the software is new or old. I’m excited about the fact that that type of software is now being recognized (i.e., “hyped”) as important.

Social Software: Bottom-up

Social software is likely to come to mean the opposite of what groupware and other project- or organization-oriented collaboration tools were intended to be. Social software is based on supporting the desire of individuals to affiliate, their desire to be pulled into groups to achieve their personal goals. Contrast that with the groupware approach to things where people are placed into groups defined organizationally or functionally.

One good metaphor is worth a thousand words, so I suggest the following: Social software works bottom-up.

People sign up in the system (for example, by downloading an IM client and registering an ID there) and then they affiliate through personal choice and actions (I add you to my buddy list, and you decide to remove me from yours).

Traditional software approaches the relationship of people to groups from a top-down fashion. In the corporate setting, its hard to imagine a person existing without being specifically assigned membership to top-down groups: your team, your division, the budget committee and so on.

Over time, more sophisticated social software will exploit second and third order information from such affiliations — friends of friends; digital reputation based on level of interaction, rating schemes and the like. And this new software will support David Weinberger’s notion of enabling groups to form and self-organize rather than have structure or organization imposed.

Blogging is a good example of this dynamic, and perhaps is the primary irritant pushing us today to grope our way towards new terms and tools. The group interactions around blogging arise in many ways: authors post thoughts, others comment and still others add their opinions. Likewise, social software starts with individuals: People start with their own interests, biases and connections, and these become reflected in social relationships, from which a network of groups emerge from the interchange. And the blog developers add more features to blogs to support this group interaction.

A contemporary example is the blog concept of Trackback — a means to automatically post at your blog any comments made on other blogs regarding something you have written.

Traditional groupware puts the group, the organization or the project first, and individuals second. As a member of a Lotus Notes group, for example, you are provided specific access to specific sorts of information based on the administrator’s settings. It’s all about control. It’s deductive: enforcing the general conditions upon each specific individual. The individual is fractured into a number of unintegrated group personas. The fact that you are involved in other groups, that you have had a long history with others in the groups, etc., is secondary to the fixed purpose of the group, whatever that is.

Social software reflects the “juice” that arises from people’s personal interactions. It’s not about control, it’s about co-evolution: people in personal contact, interacting towards their own ends, influencing each other. But there isn’t a single clearly defined project, per se. It’s a sprawling, tentacled world, where social dealings are inductive, going from the individual, to a group, to many groups and, finally, to the universe. Or at least the itty-bitty universe of all people using the Internet.

Why Now?

There are hundreds of millions of people connected through the Internet, using all manner of media — real time/transient, slow time/persistent and the various hybrids — to form groups. Online business or personal network systems like Ryze, Friendster, Meetup and LinkedIn are exploding in use, often adding tens of thousands of new users every week, because they provide the key elements of social software: conversational interaction, social feedback leading to digital reputation and explicit representation of “equaintance,” as blogger Gary Turner styles digital relationships.

The answer to nearly all “why now?” questions is technology and money, and that is true here. The availability of low-cost, high bandwidth tools like blogs or systems like Ryze, when coupled with the critical mass of millions of self-motivated, gregarious and eager users of the Internet, means social software is certain to make it onto “the next big thing” list.

Investment groups are eager to find a successful business model in social software, and I am certain that there are many to be discovered in each of the three key areas that define social software.

Despite the wet blankets and the naysayers, we are witnessing the appearance of a new crop of inductive, bottom-up social software that lets individuals network in what may appear to be crude approximations of meatworld social systems, but which actually are a better way to form groups and work them.

Perhaps just as interesting as the way that social software is transforming group interaction, across different time zones or in the same room. Social software is destined to have a huge impact on how businesses get at their markets. So the essential elements of social software will be incorporated into more conventional software solutions, changing the way collaboration and communication is managed within and across businesses, and ultimately transforming how companies sell and interact with customers.

Where Does Google Begin, And We Leave Off?

The commensualistic relationship between Google and us, the edglings that inhabit the web, leads to all manner of confusion and insights.

William Gibson worries that we are unpaid for the social gestures that we festoon the web with, such as links, that Google’s refinery converts into search engine gold. He goes so far as to say, poetically, that Google is made of us:

Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products.

via Google’s Earth

David Weinberger clarifies the relationship, but raises a deeper question about Google’s potentially negative impact on our web ecology:

David Weinberger, What’s ours in the Age of Google?

So, whats confusing about Google is that it feels so much like it is ours — for us, like us, of us. it is not just another entity in our ecology but is an important enabler of it. But, we also know that it’s a corporation out to make money. We don’t know how to make sense of this so long as we hold both sides of what, traditionally, would be a paradox. As Gibson says, we have not seen its like before.

The confusing part reflects the hope: Perhaps in this new world were building for one another on line, we can get past the age-old assumed alienation of business from customer. The Net is ours. We built it for ourselves and for one another. We’ve done so using collaborative techniques few would have predicted would have worked. The Net is ours profoundly. Google has seemed to be the one BigCo that genuinely understands that — understands it beyond a mere alignment of interests dayenu!, understands the depth and importance of the way in which the Net is ours.

So, when Google acts in a way that seems to benefit itself but not us — arguably in its initial proposed Google Books settlement and the Googizon proposal — the violence of the shock measures the depth of our belief that Google is ours — for us, like us, of us. If even Google is not ours, is there then no hope that this time, in this new world, we can get past the structural antagonisms and distrust that have characterized the old world of our economy and culture?

Perhaps if Google were clearly committed to being a ‘forporation’ (as Umair haque styles it), a corporation dedicated to advancing certain principles, and not just another C corporation, perhaps then we might be less worried.

Google has become so large, and so entwined in our experience and economics, perhaps it is inevitable that it casts a shadow and starts to feel like some outside force, like gravity, clearly beyond out control and around which we simply have to adapt.

And I have no faith in the US or other governments to compel Google to do no harm, even if we could define exactly what that is.

Weinberger: The Opposite Of ‘Open’ Is ‘Theirs’

Weinberger beautifully nails the true value of an open web (or Net): it remains ours.

The Net as a medium is not for anything in particular — not for making calls, sending videos, etc. It also works at every scale, from one to one to many to many. This makes it highly unusual as a medium. In fact, we generally don’t treat it as a medium but as a world, rich with connections, persistent, and social. Because everything we encounter in this world is something that we as humans made (albeit sometimes indirectly), it feels like it’s ours. Obviously it’s not ours in the property sense. Rather, it’s ours in the way that our government is ours and our culture is ours. There aren’t too many other things that are ours in that way.

If we allow others to make decisions about what the Net is for — preferring some content and services to others — the Net won’t feel like it’s ours, and we’ll lose some of the enthusiasm (= love) that drives our participation, innovation, and collaborative efforts.

So, if we’re going to talk about the value of the open Internet, we have to ask what the opposite of “open” is. No one is proposing a closed Internet. When it comes to the Internet, the opposite of “open” is “theirs.”

via www.hyperorg.com

This reminds me of piece I wrote last year, Web Culture: Individuality, Belonging, And Scalar Freedom:

[…] people are discovering all over again, that connection to other
people around issues that matter can become the defining source of
happiness and purpose, in a way totally different from mass affiliation
— being a citizen of large and unresponsive country, where ‘culture’
has become a product of multinational corporations, churned out from
music, movie, publishing, and television factories.

Our old dreams are manufactured. Our new dreams must be
bottom-up, like connection on the web, or in wiring within our heads.
If we are to make sense of the post-everything future before us, it
will have to come from our conversations among ourselves, on a social scale in which we feel that we matter.

Post-everything will mean embracing something we know will involve
us, leaving behind our second-class status as members of the mass
audience, and become living, active participants in a new culture.

David Weinberger, Andrew McAfee, and… (thud) IBM

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference, and I will not be blogging a lot, but I have hit my first dislocation.

David was wonderful, and recapped the messages of his new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, leaving us on a wonderful philosophical slight-of-hand: when everything is miscellaneous — when all information is both information and a means to makes sense of it — and the means to makes sense of it is put into our hands, then we, the edglings, control everything. It’s our world, our internet, our digital future.

I wanted to be marching down a street in the sunshine, arm-in-arm with my brothers and sisters with flags waving, singing the Marseillais. Truly. No kidding around.

Andrew was more quotidian, opting to give a report card on the progress of the Enterprise 2.0 meme in the 18 months since he coined the term. (I whispered William James’ adage to him, just before he took the podium, “you coin a new term at your own peril.”) He was at the same time both more positive (giving high marks to the spread of the meme and the maturity of the technology) and more negative (on the time frame of real revolution in enterprises) than I am. But still, I found it interesting.

Then… thud. A general manager from IBM’s software group is telling me about IBM’s Enterprise 2.0 push with business mashups and Lotus Connectors. It’s actually something I am interested in, at least a little, but the context of these ads is very, very old school.

Maybe I am too harsh when I say it just sounds mashifying business portals. Still, this is likely the transitional period that we will have to go through. The revolution will come as a series of small transitions, and so I have to put up with IBM slide shows with dozens of trademarked buzzwords, like Info 2.0(r), Lotus (r) Connections (r), annd QEDWiki (r). And an analogy to the Web 1.0 Internet/intranet/extranet model, and telling us that the Web 2.0 shift is not your father’s Internet anymore. Ok.

But it’s still arresting to go from the stratospheric thoughts of Weinberger to the screenshots of IBM’s thinly veiled marketing pitch. I have psychological whiplash.

Yet Another Witch Hunt

The blogosphere is buzzing about buzz in the blogosphere.

A WSJ article by Rebecca Buckman raised some questions about the buzz caused by FON getting a bunch of buzz because of prominent bloggers on the company’s advisory board blogging about a fund raising event:

>

[from WSJ.com - Blog Buzz on High-Tech Start-Ups Causes Some Static]

[…]

Some lawyers and academics with expertise in the Internet said the disclosures by the FON advisers were adequate and appropriate. But Bob Steele, an ethics specialist with the Poynter Institute, a journalism organization in St. Petersburg, Fla., says bloggers with financial ties to companies — disclosed or not — have “competing loyalties” that could taint their independence as writers. “It’s still a problem,” he says. While many bloggers don’t consider themselves journalists, anyone putting information into the public domain about people or companies has certain ethical responsibilities, Mr. Steele says.

That can be a murky issue in today’s clubby blogosphere, where many people including venture capitalists, lawyers and journalists write about Web issues and companies — and often, each other — with little editing. The rebound in Silicon Valley’s economy, coupled with the popularity of cheap, easy-to-use blogging tools, means there are more aspiring commentators than ever opining about start-ups and tech trends on the Web. And increasingly, it is difficult to discern their allegiances.

My perspective is strongly structutred by the individuals involved. I know and trust David Weinberger, and so if he has taken an advisory role with the company, I believe that the company management is likely to be intelligent, as would anyone else who would read David writings. The web, and the world of blogging, is about personalities. But as usual this story, and those suggesting all sorts of nefarious inside dealing, are trying to make sense of it with the wrong lens, as if these are organizations granted their charter to fill the airwaves from the government.

Bloggers are individuals, in general. And as such, what we write on the web is personal, biased, unfiltered, unregulated, and, yes, free. Free as in free speech, Free as in uncensored. Free as in personal, idiosyncratic, and even unpopular. I make no avowal of independence, and anyone who says I should is confusing me with the Washington Post. This is writing, and it is published, but that does not make me Jimmy Olsen, the cub reporter for the Daily Planet. It’s a kind of media, yes, but not old school media.

But I also agree that its a good idea — if you want to retain credibilty — to be transparent. Doc Searls comments on this are dead on:

[from The Doc Searls Weblog : Thursday, February 9, 2006]

[…] when I talked with David Weinberger and David Isenberg at Berkman on Tuesday, both told me their primary interest in Fon was not financial, but rather in getting Internet service to the less developed world. They also said this was the primary purpose of their advisory board involvement as well.

I don’t know if they told that to Rebecca Buckman, but I think it’s significant.

Peter Drucker used to talk about how most businesses aren’t started, or even run, just for profit. Or just because some future CEO woke up one day and said “I have a deep urge to return value to some shareholders.” Most companies are started for the purpose of pursuing a passion, and no small number are driven by a passion for doing good in the world.



Everybody I’ve spoken to about Fon, and founder Martin Varsavsky, says he’s doing the company more for love than money.



Yet that’s not where we look for interest conflicts. It’s always around money.



A little more:

Mr. Varsavsky, FON’s founder and chief executive, says none of the board members who publicized FON did so “because they’re going to get paid. … These are people who love what FON is about.” He says the advisers weren’t even sure FON would be a for-profit company when some signed up.

But University of Minnesota journalism professor Jane Kirtley says that “even if it’s prospective money, it seems to me the prudent thing” for advisers would be to disclose that relationship on their blogs. Ms. Kirtley directs the Minneapolis school’s Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law

Point taken.

Here’s another: We’re still learning here. Up until a couple years ago, some of my own disclosures were of the “I’m on the advisory board of _____” variety. Now I point to a bio page where all my advisory board memberships are listed, along with the fact that they involve equity. Now I’m wondering if even that is enough. In fact, I think it isn’t.

Looking around, I think best model may be the Disclosures page of John Palfrey, Executive Director of the Berkman Center. It’s right below links to Berkman and his bio.

So I just changed my own Bio page to Bio & Disclosures. I already had an anchor I could point to at the disclosures section.

I’m going to do the same, as soon as possible.

But I am still concerned with the subtext.

• It should be ok for bloggers, even prominent ones, to make money, through advising clients and being paid for that in cash, stock, or whatever.
• The great majority of bloggers, even prominent ones, do not make much money directly from blogging.
• The reason that they become prominent, influential bloggers is because of the depth of their experience, insight, and understanding of the world they write about. In the case of tech bloggers, in the world of tech.
• Companies have a right to ask for advice, and if they can afford it, to get the best advice they can.
• Ipso Facto: Tech companies looking for the best advice are likely to include leading bloggers in the mix. These folks might want or at least accept remuneration for their time and trouble.
• And it is alright for a blogger to tell the world why she thinks company X is cool, even if she is a paid advisor. Note that they are prominent because they are trusted, not gasbags. If they start flogging all sorts of junk, they will loose their prominence, very quickly.
• It is sufficient for a blogger to state his affiliation with the company in every post mentioning it, and perhaps on a bio/disclosures page as Doc is recommending.

Bloggers are playing an important role in this new world, where the traditional gatekeepers have less sway. But the aren’t the old gatekeepers, and looking at me and /Message like I am the New York Times or ABC News is laughable. There is no organization, no corporate policies, nothing. Just me. Stowe. The person.

I have my ethics, such as they are, and goals, and biases. If you read what I write, it’s fairly obvious. The best bloggers are pretty transparent.

So more than Doc’s disclosure is too much. We don’t need some sort of regulation, we don’t need bloggers to take either vows of silence or vows of poverty, and we don’t need a witch hunt every time some A-lister stumbles across a jewel of a tool, joins the advisory board, and tells the world about it.