Apple Making Huge Social Software Push?

I’ll admit that I pretty much AM an Apple groupie, but one thing worries me. I’d LOVE to see Apple get into more social tools, but I really hope they make them operate well with other established online tools. If they try to make their products exist on an island (as they have been known to do in the past), the social aspects will fail.

There are tools out there to export your iPhotos to Flickr and other photo-sharing sites. This type of functionality needs to be seamless. For example, what if somebody already has a last.fm account? Any need to use iTunes’ tools? Can the two work well together?

Nice. As a web2.0 fan as well as an apple fan, that’s good news. I think WIKI’s in general are an early form of Web 2.0 software - I wonder which one apple provides.

What is being social? What does it imply? What we call right now the social web services is not social? Stay with me a bit.

I think, it’s great to see this collaborative application. What do they do most of the time? They create clubs, they centralized data. They create islands. Which is great but miss a big part of what a social network is.

A social network is a P2P network with aggregation nodes.

There is a notion of opacity which is ruled by P2P connections. Not only a me, family, friend and the rest of the world. This is a very poor granularity.

What I mean is that to really have a social web service, there is a need to have P2P built-in architecture.

For example, Flickr. Saving photos on their Web site should be an option, the sharing of images, the tools they are offering is great, but should empower you in your independence, not capture your data and your social network. Sharing photos with individual granularity of ACLs.

So yes it’s cool to see these software arriving on the macintosh, but it doesn’t make it more social, it ease collaboration in a centralized way.

“A social network is a P2P network with aggregation nodes.”

Karl, I’m not sure I follow. Could you elaborate? I think you’re onto something, I’m just not sure what it is yet.

http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2006/01/apples-social-software-group-is-hiring

They aim to enable social connections on many levels.

PC, and Desktop software makers have to think social collaboration in their product development, or get left behind by web 2.0 developers competing in that same space.

I have taken a different look at the news focusing on what this news means to the industry… check it out here:
http://www.centernetworks.com/apple-microsoft-entering-social-networking“>

I interpret Karl’s comments by stating that Flickr, and any other Web2.0 site, forces the end users to utilize the site [under the site's own terms] in order to receive and share the user-generated content.

With the flickr example, if I post a bunch of photos from a party on there, sure my friends and others can view them in a nice gallery. But what if my friends wants to download all of them ?! What if he wants to download most of them ? He can’t just click on check boxes that will easily download the pictures.

Another example is youtube not giving users the option of downloading the videos (although there are ways around it).

The reasons for all of this, though, is that web2.0 networks are businesses: they generate profit to remain.
If the user-generated content becomes too independent from web2.0 network, there’s less dependency on the users to patronize the company (since web2.0 is still in its infancy, there’s not too many that have users paying for the services) and users wouldn’t have incentive to become loyal customers to a web2.0 service (since their content
isn’t ‘trapped’ on one network).

Interesting take on it, Karl.

I received an invitation to participate in the survey you mention and I can confirm that those questions were asked.

M

Personally, I think the coolest one in the line-up is the Podcast Producer. I think it’s because I imagine how a traditional web hosting company could take that product and turn it into a hosted offering. Granted, we don’t know too much about it, but it’s still a possibility. If hosting companies can take products from MS like Sharepoint and make it a hosted offering, why not products from Apple?

-matt

corrected link (sorry!)

I have taken a different look at the news focusing on what this news means to the industry… check it out here:
http://www.centernetworks.com/apple-microsoft-entering-social-networking

I think Apple could be the company that gets the social systems more right than anyone has yet. The key is to analyze how people socialize as a whole. How we move and act as a culture, at least the fundamental aspects can be seen any every microcosm of human actions. Sub-cultures, any group of people there are the same sets of personas, and acting upon what those need & want is what many social apps are missing. The classic social personas need the tools to acheive their classic type goals.

In reference to your comment on Apple having to catch up with the likes of Last.fm and Pandora, the launch of iLike.com increases that pressure, as we now have these nimble, agile web application companies hooking into iTunes.

Seriosanta juredk jais,jndiui.

[…] Bokardo » Apple Making Huge Social Software Push? Slightly superficial piece on the direction Apple is apparently headed with the next version of OS X. Sure it’s social software, but they still seem to think in terms of walled gardens. (tags: Apple Mac osx collaboration socialsoftware software) […]

Fantastic article covering some points I really needed. Thanks

Thanks for very interesting article. btw. I really enjoyed reading all of your posts. It’s interesting to read ideas, and observations from someone else’s point of view… makes you think more. So please keep up the great work. Greetings