Social Software + Web 2.0 + Social Graphing

TIM O’REILLY
Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc.

In November 2002, Clay Shirky organized a “social software summit,” based on the premise that we were entering a “golden age of social software… greatly extending the ability of groups to self-organize.”

I was skeptical of the term “social software” at the time. The explicit social software of the day, applications like friendster and meetup, were interesting, but didn’t seem likely to be the seed of the next big Silicon Valley revolution.

I preferred to focus instead on the related ideas that I eventually formulated as “Web 2.0,” namely that the internet is displacing Microsoft Windows as the dominant software development platform, and that the competitive edge on that platform comes from aggregating the collective intelligence of everyone who uses the platform. The common thread that linked Google’s PageRank, ebay’s marketplace, Amazon’s user reviews, Wikipedia’s user-generated encyclopedia, and CraigsList’s self-service classified advertising seemed too broad a phenomenon to be successfully captured by the term “social software.” (This is also my complaint about the term “user generated content.”) By framing the phenomenon too narrowly, you can exclude the exemplars that help to understand its true nature (((Does the term Digital Storytelling suffer from too narrow a framing and fixing of termonology?))) . I was looking for a bigger metaphor, one that would tie together everything from open source software to the rise of web applications…

…Now, five years after Clay’s social software summit, Facebook, an application that explicitly explores the notion of the social network, has captured the imagination of those looking for the next internet frontier. I find myself ruefully remembering my skeptical comments to Clay after the summit, and wondering if he’s saying “I told you so.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s young founder and CEO, woke up the industry when he began speaking of “the social graph” — that’s computer-science-speak for the mathematical structure that maps the relationships between people participating in Facebook — as the core of his platform. There is real power in thinking of today’s leading internet applications explicitly as social software.

Mark’s insight that the opportunity is not just about building a “social networking site” but rather building a platform based on the social graph itself provides a lens through which to re-think countless other applications. Products like xobni (inbox spelled backwards) and MarkLogic’s MarkMail explore the social graph hidden in our email communications; Google and Yahoo! have both announced projects around this same idea. Google also acquired Jaiku, a pioneer in building a social-graph enabled address book for the phone…

…* As these various data graphs become the indispensable foundation of the next generation “internet operating system,” we face one of two outcomes: either the data will be shared by interoperable applications, or the company that first gets to a critical mass of useful data will become the supplier to other applications, and ultimately the master of that domain…

…Ideas themselves are perhaps the ultimate social software, evolving via the conversations we have with each other, the artifacts we create, and the stories we tell to explain them.

Yes, if facts change our mind, that’s science. But when ideas change our minds, we see those facts afresh, and that’s history, culture, science, and philosophy all in one.

How would digital storytelling feature the social aspect as the explicit ‘act’ (= families?)? How do you incorporate social graphing (= family tree? …bloodties translated as social (most communicated with) ties)?

How do you socially graph artefacts (e.g. photos) when they become mixed into other peoples stories?

traffic data = social links – location links – event links