I second the recommendation to watch Into The Wild. I was just rescanning back through some notes of mine which included a link to this post. Since I read this post the first time, I saw Into The Wild. This time around, I immediately made the connection with the quote from the movie: Happiness is only real when shared.
Iād like to recommend the website www.morethansound.net for some excellent dialogues between Daniel Goleman and various innovative thinkers. One particularly relevant is entitled Socially Intelligent Computing with Clay Shirky and Daniel Goleman. In this dialogue, they discuss social intelligence as it relates to online interaction. Check it out!
If social software means anything useful, it must be something like what Wikipedia says Social software encompasses a range of software systems that allow users to interact and share data. In that case not all software is social software. In some of the comments you seem to be redefining social software as software of interest to more than one person, which is pretty much software and isnāt that useful.
If you actually are saying all software is social, well come on Jeff, there are 5 worlds just like Joel says (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html). Your older posts are relevant to all of them. These days IMHO you seem to be more focussed on your own current application area.
People are still writing software embedded into mobile phones, cars, refrigerators, central heating, aircraft, nuclear power stationsā¦ Software to image process movies on the fly for broadcast on TV, science models used for safety studies on big industrial plantsā¦ Device drivers, operating systemsā¦ Whatever the heck those enterprise applications doā¦ Traditional shrinkwrap desktop applications like spreadsheets and word processors, custom stuff for individual clientsā¦
None of that is social in any meaningful way.
Wasnāt invention of writing the most important communication revolution? It also groups and maintains individual communication.
technology revolutions: writing, printing press, Github+stackexchange