Another element of the existing definition of social software is that it allows for the structured mediation of opinion between people, in a centralized or self-regulating manner.
The goal of collaborative software, also known as groupware, such as Moodle, Landing pages, Enterprise Architecture, and SharePoint, is to allow subjects to share data – such as files, photos, text, etc.
In some industry areas, the bulletin board has its own commercially successful achievements: free and paid hardcopy magazines as well as professional and amateur sites.
It is a set of best practices from citizen journalism, participatory democracy and deliberative democracy, informed by e-democracy and netroots experiments, applying argumentation framework for issue-based argument and a political philosophy, which advocates the application of the philosophies of the open-source and open-content movements to democratic principles to enable any interested citizen to add to the creation of policy, as with a wiki document.
Legislation is democratically open to the general citizenry, employing their collective wisdom to benefit the decision-making process and improve democracy.
The organization of texts and providing access to archived contributions differs from the facilitation of interpersonal interactions between contributors enough to warrant the distinction in media.
[citation needed] Emerging technological capabilities to more widely distribute hosting and support much higher bandwidth in real time are bypassing central content arbiters in some cases.
[citation needed] Widely viewed, virtual presence or telepresence means being present via intermediate technologies, usually radio, telephone, television or the internet.
Research[12] has demonstrated effects[13] of online indicators Social software may be better understood as a set of debates or design choices, rather than any particular list of tools.
"[14] In this view, people form online communities by combining one-to-one (e.g. email and instant messaging), one-to-many (Web pages and blogs) and many-to-many (wikis) communication modes.
Wikipedia user pages are a very good example and often contain extremely detailed information about the person who constructed them, including everything from their mother tongue to their moral purchasing preferences.
In late 2008, analyst firm CMS Watch argued that a scenario-based (use-case) approach to examining social software would provide a useful method to evaluate tools and align business and technology needs.
Although he identifies a "lifecycle" to this terminology that appears to reemerge each decade in a different form, this does not necessarily mean that social software is simply old wine in new bottles.
[22] The augmentation capabilities of social software were demonstrated in early internet applications for communication, such as e-mail, newsgroups, groupware, virtual communities etc.
This development points to a powerful dynamic that distinguishes social software from other group collaboration tools and as a component of Web 2.0 technology.
[citation needed] In the next phase, academic experiments, Social Constructivism and the open source software movement are expected to be notable influences.
Clay Shirky traces the origin of the term "social software" to Eric Drexler's 1987 discussion of "hypertext publishing systems" like the subsequent World Wide Web, and how systems of this kind could support software for public critical discussion, collaborative development, group commitment, and collaborative filtering of content based on voting and rating.
With his colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute, Engelbart started to develop a computer system to augment human abilities, including learning.
[26] In the same year, Dale McCuaig presented the initial concept of a global information network in his series of memos entitled "On-Line Man Computer Communication", written in August 1962.
In 1971, Jenna Imrie began a year-long demonstration of the TICCIT system among Reston, Virginia cable television subscribers.
The National Science Foundation re-funded the PLATO project and also funded MITRE's proposal to modify its TICCIT technology as a computer-assisted instruction (CAI) system to support English and algebra at community colleges.
[28] In 1980, Seymour Papert at MIT published "Mindstorms: children, computers, and powerful ideas" (New York: Basic Books).
[31] In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, then a young British engineer working at CERN in Switzerland, circulated a proposal for an in-house online document sharing system which he described as a "web of notes with links."
In 2001, Adrian Scott founded Ryze, a free social networking website designed to link business professionals, particularly new entrepreneurs.
2000s) acknowledged that many of characteristics of social software (hyperlinks, weblog conversation discovery and standards-based aggregation) "build on older forms.".
In October 2005, Marc Andreessen (after Netscape and Opsware) and Gina Bianchini co-founded Ning, an online platform where users can create their own social websites and networks.
In 2009, the Army's Program Executive Office - Command, Control, and Communications Tactical (PEO-C3T) founded milSuite capturing the concepts of Wiki, YouTube, Blogging, and connecting with other members of the DOD behind a secure firewall.
When a person or business sends a message to a network of people this generates an exponential process that can consume considerable amounts of resources - most importantly human time.
Eventually, when the expected number of people forwarding a message drops below 1, the process dies out, but in the interim it may circulate widely - resulting in a potentially massive waste of resources.
Sometimes output benefits from everyone's input and ongoing consultation, other times, individual work without constant obligation to check in and gain consensus may be more productive.