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Chapter 1: Social Computing
military and universities to interact with each other. Social computing has actually almost always started
as a tool that people saw as only being useful for goofing off or having fun. Originally, email was
thought of as a way for people to communicate with their friends and did not provide a critical business
value.
During the rise of the personal computing era, people within companies started to get desktop com-
puters, and companies began to see this as a valuable tool for increasing business communication with
remote offices and customers. However, many companies originally didn’t see the value of allowing their
employees to be on the Internet, for example, chatting with friends or surfing personal web sites, such
as those found on
www.geocities.com , one of the first freely available web page hosting sites. Another
problem during this time was the cost of sending all of this information through the Internet. The cost of
providing Internet to all households and employees was still a large price to pay. Most social comput-
ing applications rely heavily on transferring larger than normal amounts of data. During the mid-1990s,
many users still had 56K modems or less. (In most cases, it was much less.) This made it initially diffi-
cult to have large web sites that were very interactive with rich media or continuously manage instant
messaging. AOL was one of the first to provide this service to the mass public, but it took much longer
to finally adopt these standards within companies.
As the close of the 1990s came, Internet bandwidth and the number of computers were no longer a
problem. As the number of connected machines increased, popular new tools like instant messaging
and interactive web site portals started to show up. During the dot-com days, many companies started to
push the limit of what could be done with web sites. There were many investors for technology firms who
were hoping to get rich, and this helped move the web portal and space. New applications like wikis and
blogs started to show up for people to use. Sites like Wikipedia and WordPress quickly became popular
as more users began to share their thoughts, ideas, and experiences. The beginning of the new century
was the start of a sea change that was to bring social computing to the forefront of many computer users’
daily experiences. More and more people started to use the social computing tools that have grown into
what we know today.
Social Computing Concepts
In order to build social computing applications, it is good to know what types of features define social
applications. There are many types of social computing applications that have been implemented today,
but each one can usually be assigned to a general category that has similar traits. These general categories
can be viewed as the social computing concepts. Each category has a different focus in terms of the way
the data is displayed and how users interact with that data.
It is important to keep in mind that hundreds of social computing applications have been created, and
more are arriving almost daily. Just because there is an existing implementation of one of these concepts
available on the Internet doesn’t mean that a totally different implementation might not work better for
the business. Part of the process of building the right social computing applications for an organization
is determining the right need and building an application that best solves that need.
There are four major areas that the concepts can be broken into; however, these groupings are not hard
and fast as many applications span across multiple social concepts. These four areas are:
T Social media: This is the use of bringing interactive media together with user profiles.
T Social bookmarking: This concept allows users to save content to review later and share with
other users.
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