by Jim Cashel
July 2003
Joe Cothrel has spent the better part of a decade focusing on the business applications of online community, most recently as vice president of research at software and services firm Participate Systems. Now an independent consultant and researcher, Joe shares some of his recent thoughts and work with us.
The realm of "social software" is showing a lot of movement. How do you think about this area
vis-a-vis traditional online communities?
We probably should define what we mean by "social software" -- there's actually some debate about this. I tend to agree with those who say social software encompasses everything we've been calling community and collaborative software up to now (e-mail, discussion forums, groupware, instant messaging), plus the relatively recent additions of weblogs, wikis and the yet-to-be-named (as far as I know) category of tools for connecting with other people (Meetup, Ryze, Friendster, etc.).
If you think of communities as collections of people that exist out there in the world (or would like to), and online communities as ways those communities come together and communicate, all this stuff fits together. However, many people use the term "social software" to refer only those recent additions, which also makes a certain sense since these new tools prompted the new term.
At any rate, I am a complete convert to the significance of these new tools, particularly blogs. A few years ago I used to talk about three eras in the development of online communities: formation, fragmentation, and integration. In the formative era, which started in the late 1970s, the boundaries of the community and the boundaries of the technology were one and the same. Think of dial-up bulletin boards or the early days of commercial online services like AOL. If you're not on my system, I can't talk to you. When the commercial Internet arrives in the mid-1990s, community platforms begin to fragment. All of a sudden I'm talking to you in a discussion forum while pointing you to my webpage on another system and maybe chatting with you via instant messaging through a third system. Blogs have taken that fragmentation a step further. Conversations that previously were captured in a single discussion thread are now distributed across many separate blog sites. You can see how some people look at this and say, "Where's the community?"
But the interesting thing to me is that even though blogs take fragmentation further than ever before, they also pave the way toward integration -- toward weaving online community interactions into our life and work in useful ways. I think this is what Ross Mayfield of Socialtext is talking about when he says, "Social software adapts to its environment, instead of requiring its environment to adapt to software." Since blog tools typically give you the option of publishing your blog in an XML format called RSS, you don't have to go to a blogger's site to read his or her content. It's basically content syndication at the level of the individual. Now we're finding community platforms like Web Crossing including an option to publish in RSS. Blogs and now forums become places to create or contribute content that is read in another galaxy, as it were.
Today, most people read RSS feeds though an aggregator; some blog creation tools like Radio have an aggregator application built in. It's a powerful way to read content from many sources very, very quickly, but it's also kind of primitive. In reality, RSS feeds can be picked up and integrated into whatever web-enabled software program or interface a programmer wants to create.
