Software, Software Development and other Atrocities

I have liked software most of my life, but not every kind of software. I like software which has the people and social aspects embedded in it. Why? because I find it more interesting to think on people using software than only on software. Software that fit that criterion are Software for Information Systems and Social Software.

Information Systems are all these systems within organisations which make information accessible to the people who use it. Information Systems are aligned with the aims of the organisation. Software that supports those information systems are designed mostly to fit the (pre-designed) business processes which keep the organisations alive. On the other hand as they have to support the people working on those business processes they have to account for the unpredictability, nonlinearity and ambiguity 1 of humans. People are not robots and cannot be fixed as business processes on a blueprint. Most information systems and software development methodologies struggle with this. Old, traditional methodologies assumed organisational environments remained unchanged through time and focused only on the practicalities of software development. (E.g. Payroll was a system that did the same calculations every month.) With time things started to change, and human and social aspects started to play a more important role. Systems like workflows and groupware started to appear. Those applications modelled better what people were doing at work, they accounted for group work and collaborations, and they were a bit more flexible. Yet the feelings I got from using those applications were that they were rigid, too computer-oriented rather than people oriented.

During my PhD (a study of software development) I came across the term social software. Social software is software that encourages and allows social interaction within groups and facilitates the control of the information created through those interactions. Modern forms of social software include weblogs, Wikis, IM and online forums. Yes, that’s right; I am talking about software to develop Online Communities. Although this term has evolved from groupware and similar kinds of applications, now social software is mostly focused on web 2.0 technologies and aiming at online interactions, but not limited to them... social software ≠ web 2.0.

Social software has what traditional information systems perspectives lacked: it pays explicit attention to human and social aspects of groups using software. This means that the design of social software considers individual and social characteristics of their users, or in other words, the nature of their interactions through the computer: CMC (Computer Mediated Communication.) Designers have to translate traditional old usability guidelines to new group-usability ones, old Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) methodologies to Human-to-Human interaction (through computers obviously) approaches. For example, by asking questions about how groups of people (and not only individuals) would react to a certain event, they could design effective tools to allow (or impede) those reactions. The interfaces resulting from these experiments would not be only computer interfaces but social interfaces which are tailored to the kind of community they want to support. This means that social applications contain embedded within them some rules or norms which reflect the rules and norms that distinguish these communities from the others and that keep them alive.

And here is where I start giving some examples. YouTube, one of the biggest social networking sites, hosts a community of video creators and sharers. A priority for YouTube therefore is to allow the creation and sharing of video files. Users of YouTube can create their profiles and upload their videos. They can also create channels containing sub-sets of videos. An example would be a YouTube member having a sports channel and a holiday channel. All these videos and channels help users to create an image for them, an image which they can use to interact with other users. As YouTube are supporting a “community” they also encourage interactions between members. For example by allowing commenting, they let members talk between them about their videos. This talk is enhanced by the ability to respond to videos with other videos. Also with the embedding of videos option YouTube allows its community to spread its arms beyond to other communities. For example a blogger can embed a video in his blog.

Different kinds of communities have different kinds of tools, because their users’ needs are different. Justin.tv a community for people who share live streaming video have chat rooms facilities along their videos, so users can talk while they are watching what’s going on where the camera is.

Facebook users can share lots of different thingies but that community is more focused on developing personal profiles. So they draw on the self-centred nature of people as well as their voyeuristic facet (members can secretly see friends’ profiles.)

Twitter, hmmm, at first sight Twitter is a community for attention seekers, nerds, celebrities.... or just people with particular communication skills... so particular that they can fit in 140 characters. By keeping posts to 140 characters Twitter are restricting the kind of users they get to the stereotype above. It feels to me that talking in Twitter is like trying to fill a glass drop by drop, but in fast motion. Yes, tweeters have to be quick at reading and at writing, the more people they are following the more information they have to organise and assimilate, and that information comes in little chunks of 140 characters. Twitter is not a place for people who are shy, it is a community of people who want to share everything they do and think, now, not tomorrow or next week, but now.

So, why do I like social software? I've alread mentioned one part of the answer in the introduction, I think it is more interesting to think on people using software that just on software, and that is what social software does. The second part of the answer is because, although tailored to particular communities, social software provides more freedom to users, to explore their chaotic, unpredictable, nonlinear and ambiguous nature. That makes life even more intersting.

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1 Software is structured and predictable. People are unpredictable, nonlinear and ambiguous. Social interactions are even more chaotic. One cannot predict exactly how users are going to behave when they use software. They can use its features as they were designed by developers, or they can subvert the system, inventing new uses or just using the software incorrecty. People are non-linear, their behaviour looks more like a web rather than a line because human behaviour is variable. After one input thousands of possibilities for outputs can emerge. Ambiguity migth be one of the characteristics that software developers hate the most. People cannot always be straight and express their thoughts or feelings. When asked about their job they would tell you what's on the paper and not what they do in reality. There are always hidden agendas flowing in the underground of organisations.Have a look at Cockburn's...