Another Quiet Day

The Contrary View of Social Software

Nick Carr does his routine again:

Is social software a phenomenon or a passing fancy? The reality seems to lie somewhere in between, though considerably closer to fancy than phenomenon.

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In Nick Carr's sui generis style he drives home a valid question with the sledgehammer of wit and contrariness.

His starting points are a post by Phil Edwards (on his Cloud Street blog, which I have been following occasionally for a while and highly recommend) and an article by the estimable Ryan Carson; the same article, as it happens, that I wrote about earlier: Why Ryan Carson Doesn't Use Social Software.

If you gently sift away the veneer of cynicism and top-layer of sarcastic critique, you find that Nick Carr distils the two aforementioned texts into a couple of simple and valid observations about social software:

1. Don't add social features when it adds to the work the user has to do to complete a task.

2. The many web applications and web sites today which don't observe 1. will be judged by history to be passing fads.

To which I'd add a third.

3. Only teenagers can work full-time at maintaining their connections to their social group.

Those three together have, I think, the whole social network and social software thing covered.

Now, I'm off to the pub to celebrate my surviving a Ph.D viva and job search.

Update: I just added the following comment to Nick Carr's post:

I'd argue that there is no such thing as social software and that it is merely a tech product category designed to tap into a VC and M&A fad.

Wherever there are communication and organisation tools, the human animal will form a community and build a social structure.

The fact that some categories of software have enough bespoke organisational and communicational tools to support those social structures is hardly a revolution.

It's useful, like any tool. But the question here, that nobody has been asking is whether selling the tools is selling the community?

Fox did not buy the Myspace community or social structure any more than Vodafone aquiring a small African mobile phone service means that Vodafone now owns Uganda.

The communities will maintain their value. The tools might not.

The version on his post has a minor typo that I can't edit out. Ho hum. Now I'm really off to the pub.

Second Update: I suck. More fixes for the above comment and post, mostly typos. Although, in my defence yesterday was a pretty unusual day.

Baldur Bjarnason – 1/9/06