Social Applications

Perhaps one of the most distinguishing characteristics of the latest wave of Web services (Often called “Web 2.0″, but that term has “jumped the shark” if you ask me. It’s over-used to the point of loss of all meaning.) is user participation. Some call these “Social applications” and they all involve the user as the primary source of information, rather than editors or producers or algorithms. There are all kinds of social applications - social networks, photo sharing, Wikis, social bookmarks, ratings and reviews, and so on.My day job at Wink is to build a “people powered search engine” using tags and other info generated by users to determine which pages on the Web are most interesting and relevant to them.

Here are some social applications:

Social Bookmarks

The most popular social bookmark service is del.icio.us. It’s unusual name has inspired sites like appropriately named supr.c.ilio.us (Which according to the American Heritage Dictionary means: Feeling or showing haughty disdain - that was the intent, Right Ryan?) and de.lirio.us. Other social bookmarks sites include Yahoo MyWeb, Furl, Blinklist, Raw Sugar, and Shadows. There are many others.

Social bookmarks sites store your favorites, or bookmarks, at a service giving you several advantages:

• You can access your bookmarks from any computer
• You can organize your bookmarks according to keywords rather than keeping a long list in your browser
• You can see what sites others have bookmarked
• In the future, an analysis of bookmarks could yield interesting results about the organization of subjects - into a folksonomy, for example.

Social News

News is traditionally written and edited by professional writers and editors. But the social version of news is written, or submitted by the users themselves. Then others who like the story can add their voice, often with comments and usually with endorsements of some kind. Slashdot is one of the most successful and long standing social news sites frequented by techies. Newcomer Digg has grown quickly. Users submit stories they find on the Web and others who read the stories “digg” them adding votes until the stories make the front page.

22 December 2005 | Wink | Comments