While the variations on the various 2.0 cluster memes are also beginning to proliferate as more people write about them, it is, except in the case of “social media,” comparatively easy to put one’s fingers on dominant definitions of these categories, because early and continuing work on each of them is more closely associated with a thinker of high prestige who has offered a preferred definition of each of the categories, than is the case for “Knowledge Management.”
Web 2.0
“Web 2.0” thinking is most closely associated with Tim O’Reilly, President and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc. In his latest effort at a definition of Web 2.0 he offers:
“Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I’ve elsewhere called “harnessing collective intelligence.”)”
This definition defines Web 2.0 as a movement, but also implies a short definition of what Web 2.0 tools are. They’re internet software “applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.” One key idea here is that such applications view the Internet as the platform for both development and use, in contrast to Web 1.0 applications which used the Internet, but ultimately saw the PC as the platform of reference. Examples of Web 2.0 applications are by now well-known. They include applications such as Blogs, RSS Feeds, Wikis, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking, Polling/Voting, Collaborative Tagging, Interactive Media, Folksonomies, “Mashups” of various kinds, and other applications too numerous to mention.
There are problems with O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0, which I won’t cover here, but I do need to note that it is inclusive enough that it might well include the coming generation of Web 3.0 tools, whose distinguishing characteristic is that they are based on the “Semantic Web.” It is very likely that Web 3.0 applications will be just as oriented toward utilizing network effects and collective intelligence as Web 2.0 applications are, so, O’Reilly’s definition won’t distinguish the two. But such a distinction is important in justifying the name Web 2.0 in the first place, since, without it, why use numerical software “version-like” terminology to describe such changes at all? Why not, instead, just refer to the social web, to the semantic social web, and to the intelligent-agent enhanced semantic social web, rather than to the Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and Web 4.0 terminology currently being used and contemplated?
Social Software
The Wikipedia article on social software defines it this way: “Social software encompasses a range of software systems that allow users to interact and share data.” Clay Shirky defines it this way: “It’s software that supports group interaction.” And Stowe Boyd defines it as “software built around one or more of these premises:
1. Support for conversational interaction between individuals or groups — including real time and “slow time” conversation, like instant messaging and collaborative teamwork spaces, respectively. . .
2. Support for social feedback — which allows a group to rate the contributions of others, perhaps implicitly, leading to the creation of digital reputation . . .
3. Support for social networks — to explicitly create and manage a digital expression of people’s personal relationships and to help them build new relationships . . .”
Though Boyd’s definition is more specific than the other two, the important differences in viewpoints that exist are between the Wikipedia treatment and the accounts of Shirky and Boyd going beyond their formal definitions. In contrast to the Wikipedia account, their explications of “social software” emphasize that in the modern web-based context, social software creates emergent network effects resulting from scale and self-organization that produce the true value of the software to its users. Modern social software produces emergence when its use is widespread. It creates global attributes and patterns at the system level that are truly novel. The definition of social software I’ll use is: software that supports group interaction, and creates emergent network effects resulting from increasing scale and from the self-organization the software enables and supports.