Defining Social Software

Social Text is an organization that works on what it call "Social Software Solutions" for fortune 1000 companies. I really like their style and philosphies. They run the "Social Software Alliance Wiki" through their workspace. The alliance is made up of a large number of experts in the field social software/online community field. It's a pretty impressive group.

Today I posted a message about "defining social software." Here is my take on it:

"Where normal software links people to the inner workings of a computer or network, social software links people to the inner workings of each other's thoughts, feelings and opinions."

others include:

Matt Jones
"Social software = software that's better because there's people there"

Ross Mayfield
"Social Software adapts to its environment, instead of requiring its environment to adapt to software."

Clay Shirky
"Social software treats triads of people differently than pairs" (on the idea that, polygon-count like, social systems can be broken down to triangles, but no further) or "Social software treats groups as first-class objects in the system.", meaning that IM that only works point-to-point doesn't count, but 3-way or more IM does.