Stowe Boyd on "Building social applications"
Stowe harks back to his original vision of what social software is and should be and makes critical comparisons between this vision and some of those applications we have today such as facebook and lastfm
Stowe on building social applications
Here's the original vision that Stowe had in the late '90s.  “A new category of software is emerging, software intended to augment social systems. Not to change the company inadvertently, like email did, when the electronic analog of interoffice mail became something else, grew into something else by changing the way people communicated, and led a change in the structure of the company. No, this generation of software is intentional, designed from the start to guide human behavior into new paths and patterns, to counter prevailing ways of interaction. I call these social tools: software intended to shape culture." Â
- Stowe Boyd [Message, August 1999]Â Â
