Social Software: Making Connections on the Web

CLiC Spring Workshop, 19 April 2007, Pueblo

Steve Lawson, Humanities Librarian

Colorado College, Colorado Springs

Goals for today

learn what makes software “social”
learn about three specific sites:
- Flickr
- del.icio.us
- LibraryThing
learn how social software can be applied in your library

Software is not social

Not the usual “software”

There's the software you install on your computer: that's generally not what we are talking about today.

Usually, “social software” is software installed on your web server (like WordPress or MediaWiki). We aren't really going to talk about these today, though blogs and wikis usually fall under “social software”

The third type of software runs on commercial or organization sites (like MySpace, etc.) This is what we are talking about today.

People are social

people dancing and drinking, with tinfoil hat

The software isn't social: the software allows people to form social networks online around their interests.

Social people make friends

Social people chat (in public and private)

Social people share (directly and indirectly)

Social people argue

Flickr

Flickr - almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world - has two main goals:

1. We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them.

2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos.

About Flickr