Social Software: Continuing the Story

Background
In 2004, technologist Christopher Allen wrote a short article about the development of social software  since the 1940's. Back in 2004--pre-Facebook, pre-YouTube, pre-social networking--most of this software was geared towards collaborative business and/productivity tools(ex. Adobe Connect, Skype, and, in a very limited way, Second Life-like environments). At the time of writing, he made a few vague predictions about how such software would be characterized in 2010:

"Typically, a visionary originates a term, and a community around that visionary may (or may not) adopt it. The diaspora of the term from that point can be slow, with 10 or 15 years passing before a term is more generally adopted. Once a term is more broadly adopted, it faces the risk of becoming a marketing term, corrupted into differentiating products rather than explaining ideas.

Is 'social software', which just now gaining wide acceptance, destined for the same trash heap of uselessness as groupware? And, if so, what impact does the changing of this terminology have on the field of social software itself?"

The Re-Write:

Although the trend of social software through the opening years of the millennium had primarily been tools for academic and business collaborations, beginning with Friendster in 2002 the popular adoption of social software to facilitate social networking and online community building became the predominant form of social software. The three most important exemplars of this type of social software that emerged by the close of the decade were Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Facebook, which emerged from an initially crowded social networking market that included MySpace, Orkut, and Friendster, has become the de facto social network of mainstream culture, not just in the United States where it originated, but globally, with over 150 million users from over 60 different countries. Facebook evolved into not only a service for linking people and maintaining "weak" social relationships, but also a gaming, advertisement, and entertainment platform, with all the applications reinforcing the site's collaborative, socializing nature.

YouTube, a video sharing site, was started in 2005 and was by 2010 one of the most popular sites on the web. It regularly spurs collaborated creative efforts, often in the form of creative video responses (replies) to original media from other YouTube users.  Definitely falling within the realm of social software, the site is primarily viewed as an entertainment site.

Twitter, a streaming feed of short text posts ("tweets") created by individual users, is a cultural data feed that incorporates everyone from the average joe, politicians, entertainers, athletes, and fictional characters.  The overall effect of the site is universal inclusion of individual messages, organized temporally, but not connected by any specific theme, narrative, or prompt.

The Future: 2020

The popular social networking sites of 2010 had already revealed that traditional social norms, traditions, and mores often came into conflict with the types of views, attitudes, and customs that were revealed by users. Ultimately, these sites erode not only users notion of personal privacy, but also society's expectation of it. This will have a revolutionary effect on public-private social norms, morality, and social transparency.