Is social software a phenomenon or a passing fancy? The reality seems to lie somewhere in between, though considerably closer to fancy than phenomenon. “Social software,” writes Phil Edwards today, “looks like very big news indeed from some perspectives, but when it’s held to the standard of actually helping people get stuff done, it fades into insignificance.” Edwards looks at some of the reasons why it’s easy to be fooled into thinking that “everyone’s doing it,” when in fact only a very few are doing it, and they’re mainly doing it in narrow, well-defined domains:
Put it all together – and introduce feedback effects, as the community of geek commentators starts to find social software apps genuinely useful within its specialised domain – and social software begins to look like a Tardis in reverse: much, much bigger on the outside than it is on the inside.
Edwards quotes from an essay by Ryan Carson called “Why I don’t use social software.” Carson, who like Edwards is no technophobe, gets to the heart of why there’s less to the social software movement than meets the eye:
I just don’t have time to use all of these amazing apps, and I’m guessing you might not too. I’m a fairly typical web citizen. I’m 28, married, make a reasonable wage, own a house and I have a few close friends. You’d think I’d be a web app company’s dream, but I’m not. How come? I’d love to add friends to my Flickr account, add my links to del.icio.us, browse digg for the latest big stories, customise the content of my Netvibes home page and build a MySpace page. But you know what? I don’t have time and you don’t either.
The crux of the problem is that, in most cases, social software is an extremely inefficient way for a person to get something done. The crowd may enjoy the product of other people’s inputs, but for the rather small group of individuals actually doing the work, it demands the investment of a lot of time for very little personal gain. It’s a fun diversion for a while – and then it turns into drudgery.
The scale of the net means that it’s very easy to confuse fads for trends, so it’s always good to keep in mind that, out in the real world, hardly anyone has even heard of Flickr or Digg or Delicious. And even very popular services like MySpace and Facebook appear to be used mainly as substitutes for email and instant messaging rather than platforms for social production. Carson quotes Yahoo’s Tom Coates: “The social aspect of technology rather comes in and out of fashion every three or four years and we’re definitely in the middle of a particularly sizeable peak.” When the faddish phase subsides, something useful will remain, but it will be considerably less than world-changing.
UPDATE: Stowe Boyd and Fred Stutzman offer rebuttals, making the case that love conquers all. Boyd calls it a search for “belonging” while Stutzman calls it a search for “affection” – and, they say, it trumps such mundane concerns as efficiency and utility. If you squint, you can just make out in the shadows cast by their high-flown words a sad tableau of lonely people peering into computer screens. Or is that just a trick of the light?
I dont think that the core premise of utility or effeciency should ever be entertained when discussing the effectiveness of social software. That was and will never be an issue. If it were the case we would only have one choice for a newspaper, one news station and for the most part, one source for all input eleviating choice. Social software brings us choice and plays on intrinsicly placed ideals and concepts that we associate with personally. These software solutions perpetuate our inhibitions and/or maximize our relations. Whether they are people centric, content centric or globally centric. It’s about what we want, not what you think we aught to do or how we do it better. out.
I am a professional who uses the fanciful social networking tools daily to do my job – and have encouraged my staff to do so as well. We now track projects online, subscribing via RSS to things we need to track. The methods we used before this were disparate and inefficient. Moving to an online format wasnt easy, we did have learning time, its true, but we already can’t imagine how we functioned without it.
I am a quick to test new technologies as they come online, but am slow to adopt them into my continued daily life, both social and work. I’ve had a few that i dismissed out of hand initially, only to come back around after a certin time has passed. Flickr and Digg are great examples – after playing with them initially, it took me a great deal of time to come around to using them on the regular basis.
If you don’t have time for something, then don’t use it, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that others (sometimes many others) won’t find a useful and efficient way to incorporate it into their regular activities.
Let’s be clear here – you may not think that social software is a particularly big deal and you may think it’s all echo chamber stuff, but you’re rather unsupported by the evidence. I’ll use Alexa stats because it’s convenient to do so, and I’ll accept that they’re not totally solid, but they’re a pretty good guide to what’s going on, even if they were (say) a full order of magnitude out they’d still be a pretty good indicator. According to them – myspace is the sixth most popular ranked site, you tube the 16th, ebay the 10th, wikipedia the 17th, orkut the 24th, flickr the 40th, friendster the 45th, facebook the 66th. Even digg is the 100th, and the uber-geeky del.icio.us the 147th. Flickr is one of Yahoo’s largest properties – run by fifteen odd people with a hell of a lot of support. It’s easy to spot fads in the technology community, but harder to describe them as fads when the punters actually come and use them and where there is material value being created in them.
You quote me, but you quote me selectively. As far as I’m concerned social software of various kinds is the current cutting edge in technologies of co-operation that started with writing, law, politics and money. I don’t know how successful they’ll be in comparison with those, but I suspect that they’ll be implicated and layered gently into the fabric of our lives over the next ten to fifty years in ways that from now would seem extraordinary, but then will seem boring and mundane. In my longer piece for the Carson people, I argued that people never notice the major transformations around them and that I had no doubt that social software of various kinds would rise up and fall down the hip-list at any given time and that many companies would fail, but that the trend would remain upwards. These are technologies that help people create value and colaborate, and do so at an enormous scale. I have no doubt that they cannot help but be taken up and used widely in one incarnation or other.