Clay Shirky describes social software, applications written for a particular situation — a small group of people, period of time and, possibly, physical space — contrasting this with the “Web School” approach where applications have to scale to large groups of people for long periods of time, and usually with out any space boundaries. By situating software within a small group context, application developers can take advantage of the offline social practices of the group and not have to explicitly and extensively code to [try to] ensure “appropriate” use. As more software tools become available, and more people become facile with programming, it may become as easy for many people to write applications for a particular situation as it is to compose a slide deck for a particular presentation.
Sample student projects from Clay’s Social Software class at ITP, from whence the inspiration for this article came (at least in part), include
The latter two are physically situated in “the lounge, the meeting place/dining room/foosball emporium in the center of the ITP floor.”