The 5 W’s of Social Software

A small change I would suggest in the “What” category, and that would be “…that allows people to achieve social goals.”

For example, Threadless lets you design a custom t-shirt, sure, but more importantly it promises to let you achieve coolness and niche notoriety as a designer. The “task” of designing and sharing a t-shirt is one thing, but the social goals the site enables one to pursue are another. It’s the latter that is new. A question I have, generally, is what this sort of thing does for traditional usability which viewed task success as a fairly operational measure…when the goals people are striving for are more amorphous, long term, and as much about the journey as the destination, traditional usability metrics (e.g. time/task success/errors) start to look irrelevant.

Josh, I have to say that this post has an attractive title but what it tells us is nosence.

The whole words in you article are tantamount to say: Social software is very very very good.

Galaxy, what I actually did was to sneak in my definition of the term…if you have been following the discussions of social software lately you have noticed that the definitions are all over the place. Here is an attempt at setting a vector…

I’m disagree with Bill cause i think that (successful) social software lets users to achieve first individual goals and then as a consequence of using the system by a significant amount of people all users get collective benefits.
i’m thinking about del.icio.us where the main motivation underlying its success is a personal benefit for each user in retrieving his bookmarks.
With no selfish benefits i think users are not fostered to participate.
bye

Domenico: You are right! Think about Digg… People contribute to feel trendy with pleasure until they realize that they only spend their precious time on making a single guy millionair for a t-shirt….

Time is the most precious thing we have, some trends can make us blind for a while until we realize that they are better think to do.

I personally think that networking can only work if the main goal is to satisfy the individual actor.

Good point, Domenico - I was imprecise in my use of the term “Social” there. I totally agree that personal value precedes social value. I should have said something like “lifestyle goals” - my point being that it is something other than the simple task that brings users back.

In my opinion social software has brought a ton of new innovative ideas to the forefront, with apps like digg to traineo to now even seating charts 2.0. Though while I love the idea of new ideas and making connections with that otherwise could never have existed I wonder about the social networking giants, the myspaces, and the bebo’s and the friendsters and the cyworlds. They are all seemingly, asides from cyworld, to be going towards just an advertising world with little innovation. Taking all that was wonderful about small social networks and making them dating websites with advertising models. For my part I hope they keep coming up with new ideas.