A bunch of thoughts have been buzzing around in my head recently about social software: what it is, where it's going, and what that means. I'm going to try and get those thoughts in order here. First, as is always useful, some definitions: Social networks These are characterized by one-to-one, personal, long-term connections. They are used primarily for communication and/or contact-management. All the usual culprits are here: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr; plus myriad others less familiar to my audience: Hi5, Ning, Mixi (Japan), Orkut (Brazil), etc..* Crowd processors These are many-to-one: they take data gathered from the behaviour of large groups of people and process it into something that is useful to you. One-to-one contacts may exist, but they are not the primary benefit of the service. This is where you find Last.fm, Pandora, Amazon, Del.icio.us, Yelp. Social software This is many-to-many, and is essentially a combination of the other two. It uses data from social networks to process...

Get used to hearing that, people. Because you're gong to be hearing about it a lot. Hillary Clinton's historic but ultimately flawed campaign is finally over, and thank god. Now time to start creaming McCain. And with his awful, awful speeches and even worse policies, that's not going to be too hard. Big update: a summary of tonight's speeches: McCain Awkwardly and falteringly delivered, with bad intonation and creepy fake smiles, to a very small room half-filled by an elderly white audience -- in New Orleans, so I guess the white folks were bussed in from Mississippi. (Seriously: no black people in the room? In New Orleans?) In the background, an unflattering green backdrop reveals a new slogan: "A Leader We Can Believe In". This speech -- and that crowd -- was an excellent indication of why democrats are going to win in November. McCain's campaign is a shambles, disorganized and demoralized. Its candidate is out of touch and unlikeable. This is another Dole candidacy, and that's great news for Obama....

The various news outlets have been competing recently to publish the most presidential-looking photos of Obama they can find.

Just a little too busy/tired to blog. Luckily, Twitter and the linklog can keep you entertained.

In part 1 I explained what we have right now: social networks and crowd processors. I then expanded on the future of social networks. Now let's talk about the future of crowd processors, which I called "social software" before. To be more usefully specific, let's give this software its own name: Social processor Software the creates value for its users by utilizing their social networks. Social processors are combinations of the two existing types of social software, social networks and crowd processors. This solves two problems: Social networks don't do anything. They collect data about your social graph and then... nothing.* Crowd processors (see previous post) do a lot of processing, but their recommendations often throw up combinations that are strange or impersonal. How crowd processors work Crowd processors do a ton of processing on all their members to calculate recommendations of various types. They take two approaches: calculate global recommendations, e.g. the Amazon Best Sellers list: the...