Web sites that are built on Social Software allow users to help each other find information and give tips on things you like or things to avoid.
Tags
The keywords that are listed here are the most frequently used on the Internet when it comes to different types of social software. Below there is also a list of explanations of the most well-known web sites.
Social Navigation
Techniques that allow users to grade and write reviews on items such as books, CDs, washing machines and MP3-players, are regarded as social navigation.
Collaborative filtering
Collaborative filtering is what you usually call algorithms that take information from users (like which type of music you prefer) and give suggestions of other things you might like. This way the system can see that for example 500 people like a certain CD and give suggestions of other CDs they might like to each of them, since for example 250 of those 500 also had another artist as her favourite.
Folksonomy
Folksonomy means that it is the users who classify, or name the contents on for example pictures on Flickr. If I want to search for a picture with cats sitting in a basin I can easily do this with the help of picture tags. Besides Flickr, it was the bookmark site Delicious who built this technique – see below.
Tag
A tag is the same thing as a keyword.
Tagcloud
On several of the big web sites that apply folksonomy it is possible to view your tags in a so called tagcloud. It is like a kind of table of contents, but all the tags are lined up in the same way as in an ordinary text. Tags come in different sizes depending on how many posts (pictures etc) they are connected to. They can also come in different colours and transparency. It is quite simply a visual representation of a user’s tags. When you click on a tag you get a list of all the posts you have assigned that tag to.
RSS
RSS is an important part of most social software. RSS makes it possible to exchange information between systems, see for example TagCloud below. For more basic information about RSS, see the glossary.
Special web sites
The systems mentioned here are examples of how social software can work, but they are also the most notable systems when it comes to the use of this technology. They are most frequently mentioned in texts about social software.
Amazon.com
Amazon is probably one of the web sites that have been most important for the development of systems for social navigation. Here users can write reviews on books, CDs and other items. You can also grade and see the average grade for each product. One of the characteristic functions is called “listmania”. People create lists of products, mainly books and CDs, in their field of interest.
Pricerunner
Pricerunner is a web site which mainly compares the price of different articles, but it also contains reader-reviews of the products. Another great feature is consumers’ opinions about the stores that sell the articles. Stores are graded on the following criteria: Total grade, Delivery on time, would you shop here again.
CINT
Swedish website for consumers. If for example you are going to buy a new camera you can go to this website and see what other people have written about the camera you want to buy. You can see if it was a man or a woman who commented, and the age of the person. Each person gives the product a grade and a short review. The grades are then aggregated so that you can see the average grade and compare different products.
Delicious (del.icio.us)
Delicious is a system for managing bookmarks (Microsoft calls them favourites) in a web environment. It is very easy to create bookmarks which are saved on your account at Delicious so that you can access them from all computers. You can also share these bookmarks with others and search among other people’s bookmarks. Delicious is based on tags instead of hierarchical categories. Together with Flickr, Delicious was one of the first web systems who started to apply “Folksonomy”.
Flickr
Flickr was one of the first systems who started to use folksonomy with tags and tag clouds. You can keep your photo albums on Flickr. You tag the photos, and you can create tag clouds with the help of the tags. You can also search among other people’s tags.
Technorati
Technorati is a kind of search engine for blogs. The search is made with tags. You have an account where you subscribe to information based on certain tags or a combination of tags. You can get the information directly in Technorati’s interface or via RSS.
Tagcloud
www.tagcloud.com creates a ”tagcloud” based on the keywords in your RSS-feeds. You can for example create a tagcloud based on words and terms which occur in your favourite blogs.
Librarything
Keep your bookshelf online and share it with others. Books are categorized with tags like in Flickr or del.icio.us. Search other peoples bookshelves with tags. You can easily import books from Amazon.com.
GigerBlog
GigerBlog is my blog. I write quite a lot about social software there, especially the type that has lately been known as Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is a new way of thinking about web development, partly regarding the user interface, but especially regarding business models. One of the core elements of web 2.0 is that which is often called collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is based on user participation and smart algorithms (often like Collaborative Filtering). I like to call this type of intelligence “hybrid intelligence”.
Peter Giger
2005-12-10
