One of the best surveys of ‘social software’ I have yet found is this from a Canadian University’s Communication Studies course. It provides a good overview of many of the developments in communication technology and online community over recent years (and reminds me that I really need to read some works of Howard Rheingold).
What continues to be lacking in much discussion of online community is an analysis of the results of the overlapping layers of relationship which exist between members of various online communities. Tools such as Technorati, which detail links between blogs can articulate some of the links which exist between blogs but fail to represent any explanation of how that link came to be made. Similarly, technologies such as XFN ( XHTML Friends Network) can go some step towards articulating relationships between the creators of sites and content, giving some indication of the nature of those relationships, but they are still some way from contextualising the content of the conversations which are interwoven in those relationships.
From my own experience, I have friends with whom I interact physically on a regular basis, who I also interact with frequently online. Some of those friends I initially met online; others I was aware of but not friends with online before we became friends off-line; and still others whose online presence I have become aware of some time after the initial in-person meeting. There are other people I know through friend-of-a-friend connections, or with whom I still interact primarily or entirely online.
Over time I have noticed a shift in my primary online conversation from a point where most conversations were with people I had met online, to a point where my primary contacts online are with people whom I am in regular contact offline or meet with in person more than once a year (often much more frequently). I suspect there will be further shifts as I move thousands of miles from many of my existing social networks and so need to use communications technologies in a different way to remain in touch.
[This multi-layered communication is nothing new. For many years we have seen relationships develop using a combination of written, remote verbal (telephone) and local (in person: talkingl, body language) layers, on top fo the fact that we learn news of our friends not only directly from them but also indirectly through mutual acquaintances.]
With almost all of these people, the conversations we hold continue in a variety of fora. Online, we will read each others’ blogs, participate in public and private email exchanges, join discussion boards, and chat using instant messaging clients. Blogs form the public face of many of these conversations, and hopefully provide the necessary context to understand them, but are woefully inadequate in any attempt to truly model social relationships or active communities.
Perhaps the most useful part of the article with which I opened is its discussion of the fact that online communities will often divide and that the developers of tools to facilitate these communities need to allow for members to take ownership of sections of those communities. Beyond that, a mark of the successfulness of online communities is that the relationships developed through it will transcend those tools and become multi-layered. If anyone wants to model the importance of social software and online communities, they’ll need to find ways to exolore that.