Social Software Categories (Niemeier)
In the last few years, different researchers have tried to develop categories for social software. Recently I came across a categorization developed by Joachim Niemeier (via the Enterprise 2.0 Facebook page) and wrote a short comment that I’d like to share with you here. First something struck me about this and several other diagrams that categorize social (interaction management) software: all of them miss some essential applications, notably gaming, collaborative innovation, open innovation applications.
All these applications are not only about collaboration, but also about competition. So even though competition is a basic social interaction (though perhaps less obvious), it is not in any of these diagrams. Google knol, though not a big success, is a competitive wiki. Yahoo! Answers could be called competitive (there is competition between respondents), open-innovation platforms are typically competitive, and so are problem-solving platforms like hypios.com.
Now I think that even classical wikis, supposedly about collaboration, might actually be called competitive. Doubts? Try to edit the Norbert Wiener entry on Wikipedia.
It’s just that Wikipedia doesn’t wear competition on its sleaves like knol. However, the competition on Wikipedia certainly isn’t less violent; anonymously deleting other peoples entries is much more brutal than the process on knol, where you add a signed, alternative dictionnary entry to explain the same concept which will then compete for the favor of readers.
Competition is such a basic social interaction that even in supposedly collaborative settings, it eventually takes over:
On group editors, sometimes alternative titles persist until someone decides to erase all but one.
In social tagging applications, people may competitively tag, either by erasing former tags they believe don’t fit or by adding unusual tags, revealing a conception of the item being tagged that is incompatible with others.
This leads me to a more general point: the web has trouble accepting some of the competition that happens here. Even though we all easily accept that there is competition between applications (for example, between knol and Wikipedia, browsers like Firefox, IE, Safari and Chrome, and search engines like Google and Bing), we hesitate to acknowledge that the competition between the users of applications.
Wikipedia might be a particularly striking example because we usually conceive of it as a collaboration site. But on a closer look there might be much more competition on the web as it first seems. Blogs? Compete for readers and subscribers. Twitter? Users compete for followers and then tweets compete for the attention of followers. And how about dating sites?
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Tags: collaboration, competition, Open Innovation, social interaction, social software, wikis
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