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The Debate about Social Software
Roland Piquepaille writes "Is "social software" the new overhyped buzzword? In an article for the Guardian, Jack Schofield says yes. On the contrary, in Historical Roots of Social Software, Howard Rheingold offers insights about this new phenomenon. And in this Tech Central Station article, Arnold Kling agrees with Rheingold. He thinks that social software is likely to the basis of what could be the next "killer app." Kling says that with social software, the interaction is no longer between you and your computer, but between the groups you belong to and networks of computers. In order to explain the issues, King studies three types of problems that this new kind of software might solve: the matching problem, the issue-resolution problem, and the classroom-management problem. So, is social software hype or reality?"
The concept behind social softwareis very legitimate...But its also becoming one of those buzzwords like 'realtime' or 'high preformance computing' The definition of realtime is to place a deadline on a proccess...and kill it if it has not completed by that time....and high preformance computing is the structuring of algorithims to crunch numbers faster
Yet Microsoft says windows XP does both.
If you ever needed more proof that these are no more than overused buzzwords...thats it!
Similarly, social software is a very real concept, but it just seems to have one of those sexy...media friendly names....every time i turn around now i hear a devloper talking about the next generation of 'social software'. Please.... its not some magical philosiphy that software devlopers are using to better society...we do what makes money...hence our software follows social trends....boom...social software
What seems off to me about these filtering and pattern matching programs is the vague key values. Like genre recognition software for managing movies, where do you put your stops, what do you filter on? When you're looking for directions, you have a simple weighted graph traversal, the data is mainly empirical. But when you're looking for a plumber, what're the key values and who puts them in for each entry?
Come on, seriously, is there going to be a Killer App that is going to make Silicon Valley explode and get convicted murderers with zero experience jobs as C++ software engineers?
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
All that being said, I do very often get annoyed at my fellow techies who seem to insist on living down to the worst stereotypes of our group. I want to grab them and shake them and say, "It's okay to get some exercise, take a shower, and put on clean clothes! You'll still be smart!" Fortunately, it seems to me that Those People are in the minority.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I was thinking that killer app was an overhyped buzzword.
Seriously, if I tell my non-Geek friends about "social software" they'd probably look at me blankly as they try and figure out what ELSE you could possibly do on the internet with a computer besides chat with other people, buy stuff on eBay, exchange emails and pictures, etc. To them the computer is a FACILITATOR.
It's like the geeks just discovered that information-based machines can, *gasp*, be used to exchange information with OTHER PEOPLE and not just computer programs running on other machines.
Welcome to the party.. people have been forming social groups for years, whether it's at church, or over the telephone, or pen-pals, or now blogs and chat rooms and message boards and collab software.
So I'll just toss this one squarely in the "hype bucket".
...pinch of salt.
He has recently written both that Ogg Vorbis isn't yet good enough to be used for encoding music, and that the English Al-Jazeera site is running IIS on Linux. Those, and other small things, make me read through things he writes carefully.