danah is right, Allen has done us all a great favor by posting his work on the term social software. I want to address her despisity (despision? despisement?) of the term, though, especially as my shayna punim graces the 2000+ section of Allen’s doc.

I don’t think the term ‘social software’ is perfect, but I do think it’s optimal, as it’s obviously in use where other terms aren’t. So I think it’s a local but not global maxima.

And I think it’s a local maxima because software is where the action is now, in this kind of social experimentation. In fact, I think that danah’s complaint, “I feel as though the term allows us to emphasize the technology instead of the behavior that it supports” is one of the things the phrase ‘social software’ has going for it.

Technologists have been looking at social interaction for decades, usually through one of two lenses — either ignoring the users as hopelessly irrational (something with more than a grain of truth in it, as committed groups have emotional, not just intellectual, motivations), or by trying to shoehorn social applications into single-user paradigms, ignoring the fact that groups produce interactions that individuals and pairs don’t (e.g. flaming, trolling, etc.)

So in this case, emphasizing to technologists the way software can both embody and alter social patterns is the right answer, since it creates a sense of possibility in bringing new techniques to old patterns to see what the interaction is like.

And the misundertanding of the need for, and use of, that phrase by technologists seems to me to be at the heart of danah’s complaint. When she asks “Why are we acting like giddy children who just found a new toy?”, it’s because we’re giddy children who have just found a new toy.

The fact that sociologists have been talking about these kind of things for decades hasn’t created a lot of value in the way social tools are designed, since there isn’t much of a habit among sociologists of talking in ways or venues that matter to developers (though there are notable exceptions, of course, including danah herself.)

I spent the summer reading academic journals, principally Small Groups and Group Dynamics, and I can tell you that if you are minded to actually change the way groups interact, there’s more insight in the Flickr and del.icio.us interfaces than in combined publishing history of those journals.

The difficulty of pattern fit is a fairer cop, since the domain of social software has fuzzy edges (of necessity, in my view.) For example, I say pairwise communications, such as SMS, falls out of the pattern, while MMOs are in, since the group effects, not the pairwise ones, are the hard ones to deal with. But this is a judgment call; others differ.

And as for the focus on YASNSes, wikis, weblogs, etc, yes, the tech community suffers from neophilia, but then we would, wouldn’t we? If we thought old things were as good as new things, we wouldn’t invent new things. This creates some loss, but also considerable gain, and our tribe, almost by definition, is made up of people who think the gains from focusing on the new things outweigh the losses. (Not all of us are pure neophiles, though — my first post here was to a piece of writing done in 1970…)

Complaining that we shouldn’t be delighted that new things are happening reminds me of Dave Farber’s comment that Napster was nothing new, because the original internet treated all machines as peers. Everything since — scale, the rise of the PC, the spread of audio tools, the horror of unstable IP addresses — seemed to him to be mere details. And yet Napster was a big deal — it, and not the original IP-bound tools, changed the world in the direction of both decentralization and what Tom Coates calls the New Musical Functionality.

And social software feels like that to me now. We’ve had social network maps since the 1930s, and the 6 Degrees pattern since the 1960s, but we’ve only had networking services since 1996, and only had working ones since 2002. Bass-Station, Meetup, Flickr, del.icio.us, Fotowiki, LiveJournal, dodgeball, Audioscrobbler, these are new things, and they play well with others (unlike Lotus Notes et al, which wrecked the earlier term groupware), so we are not just getting new tools but are getting combinatorial complexity, as with the spread of the del.icio.us tagging pattern from feature to infrastructure.

danah’s term, computer-mediated social interaction, is more descriptive, but probably less galvanizing for tool-builders, and places the edge problems in the technical domain — users don’t regard phones as computers, for example. Just plain “mediated group interaction” is probably even better (with my admitted bias towards triplets and away from pairs), but say that to someone who builds software and see if their eyes light up or glaze over.

Allen probably credits me too much with popularizing the term (it was, ironically, David Winer and Shelley Powers who did most to spread it, by denouncing me and the horse I rode in on, back in 2002.) However, inasmuch as I have spread it, my principal goal hasn’t been accuracy, but inspiration. If you can get people schooled in single-user interaction to get excited about understanding and coding for the inherently social possibilities of software, you get cool new stuff to play with. And that beats uninspiring accuracy any day…