Social Software You Don't Have To Work To Use

Worn Out, Used Rubik's Cube
Originally uploaded by frozenchipmunk.

Well I did it today. I added Nicholas Carr to my feedreader and blogroll. I've decided he's the sand in the oyster and he's providing a valuable service to the web world with his contrarian bent.

He asked this question about social software the other day on his weblog:

Is social software a phenomenon or a passing fancy?

And then answered it as follows:

The reality seems to lie somewhere in between, though considerably closer to fancy than phenomenon.

The reason its a passing fancy?

The crux of the problem is that, in most cases, social software is an extremely inefficient way for a person to get something done. The crowd may enjoy the product of other people's inputs, but for the rather small group of individuals actually doing the work, it demands the investment of a lot of time for very little personal gain. It's a fun diversion for a while - and then it turns into drudgery.

Well I don't really agree with Nick on this comment as my blog has never been drudgery and I bet his isn't either. But let's take that comment as reality.

The best social software doesn't require any effort or work as he calls it. Last.fm took me all of five minutes to install the agent and I am sharing all my music listens with the world without any incremental effort. It took me about the same amount of time to install the Attentiontrust Firefox Extension and now I am able to share all my search activity and clickstreams with the world without any incremental effort.

That's where all of this is going. Social software at its best doesn't require any incremental effort. We are just at the beginnings of all of this anyway, when the geeks and the hackers are doing it and nobody else is. But mark my word, social software is the future. I am sure of it.

Comments (12) | Posted September 1, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

I agree that many flavors of social software "have legs". But 1) the users enamored with this stuff now (with the exception of MySpace) are truly early adopters. Very few of these applications are mainstream. Fred, as far as early adopters go you are on the earliest part of the curve. 2) Many of these applications are not intuitive and therefore take more incremental time to extract value than you are suggesting. 3) Not everyone likes to share. I think Brad's onto something with his 80-19-1 rule.

Posted by: Steve | Sep 1, 2006 2:22:44 PM

You've been doing the Ben Barren "random Flickr pic w/ a post" thing lately. I've been thinking about it, too... its a cool effect. Do you generally ask the person or do you just repost?

Posted by: Charlie | Sep 1, 2006 4:36:14 PM

Social software is a stupid joke.

Just meet the guy with whom you want to be social for a beer and be done with it.

No need to use software.

Posted by: Dave | Sep 1, 2006 4:44:18 PM

I agree that social software is the future because it fills an existing need in some specific cases better than existing offline solutions. But the future is also the long tail.

Sure, it's a hoot for a lot of people to read blogs about exciting people like the life and thoughts of a successful venture capitalist. Or even the high voltage rants of Mark Cuban. You get to learn new things, see impactful points of view, but I believe this blog has 8,000 readers and only gets a few comments a day. So, if it's the feedback that keeps it from being drudgery, that model fall apart for those that can't attract that size of audience.

It's the long tail world though, and small interative audience will be found where the required volume decreases by a magnatude when their is a context. The smallest context being that my parents are interested in my Flickr feed which features my kids. There is lots of space inbetween the large audience, and existing offline relationships though, even if Dave just wrote, "Just meet the guy with whom you want to be social for a beer and be done with it." Social isn't social for where I think it might go.

My personal content consumption is migrating and I think it is representative. I used to use My Yahoo, read magazines and watch TV for content. Blogs now augment that. My consumption isn't just migrated, but increased because I still get newspapers and magazines. Can a tagging service for DVR's be far behind? Get rid of the DRM and hook up to a peer to peer network and you might have something.

Social software is the new editorial process that plucks things out of the Long Tail now.

Posted by: Lloyd Fassett | Sep 1, 2006 5:03:42 PM

The perception that "social software is an extremely inefficient way for a person to get something done" could have come about because most of today's "social software" is intended to help people waste time instead of save time. That is changing, though; there is a huge new wave of applications that utilize the tactics of social software to help people get things done.

Posted by: Jeffrey McManus | Sep 1, 2006 5:25:40 PM

Is collaboration a phenomenon or a passing fancy? Human beings are social animals. They love to share and trade ideas, news and resources. Information networks and tools just faciliate these processes. I believe in facts. Myspace has 106,301,331 users. Are they wrong?

Posted by: Dimitar Vesselinov | Sep 1, 2006 5:40:42 PM

Hello,

This is a great blog. I'm going to be sure to link yours to mine. Would you mind doing the same for me?

Thank you very much.

My site:
www.americanlegends.blogspot.com

Take care,
Mark

Posted by: J. Mark English | Sep 2, 2006 12:14:32 AM

i think this business about social networks being harder to use than not is kind of silly. Its all too new, so yeah, there is some learning curve in implementing it, but so what?

More than likely we will hit a point in the not too distant future where the reverse is true and its much harder not to just breakdown and use it - though by then, there will have been a shakedown of all these social tools and we'll see which ones are sustained into the future as the tentpole technologies we all come to rely on.

Posted by: andy beach | Sep 2, 2006 4:39:48 PM

Sharing will work when there isn't work involved to share. What is shared is done for the individual's benefit first and only then for others.
So for sharing to succeed,
the software has to
1) serve the individual's need first and well
and then 2) make it really, really easy to share (like clicking the "share" button, that's all)

Posted by: Hari | Sep 2, 2006 10:44:08 PM

Fred, I agree that social software is definitely NOT a passing fad. The only way that social software is a fad is if better communication and collaboration is also a fad. I would contend, however, that Nicholas is correct insofar as that a great deal of social software being developed is "social for the sake of being social." The social software that will ultimately last will not only add value to the individual, but also to the collective.

Posted by: Hooman Radfar | Sep 3, 2006 3:35:14 PM

i think of nick carr as what i call a debunker person rather than a bunker person. don't expect consistency from him, other than in the negativity. he doesnt hang in a bunker and argue one position - he argues multiple positions, with humour. therefore debunker.

Posted by: james governor | Sep 4, 2006 6:41:04 AM

Carr's negativity on all things non-authoritarian is well-established. A brilliant grain of sand in the oyster, indeed. But, where's the imagination?

Friction-free connectivity? Who can imagine it?

Plenty of people.

Posted by: Tom Guarriello | Sep 5, 2006 11:10:15 PM

A VC

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