The Goal

The primary goal of the Handbook is to share our knowledge of social technologies in an environment that can be easily consumed and augmented by others — online.

The Vision

In Bowling Alone (2000) Bob Putnam demoaned technology for its negative impact on the development and maintenance of community in the last half of the century, and posed a challenge to us all to explore how technology can help bring people back together again. In the past decade, with the increased penetration of online information and social media into people’s day-to-day lives, and the increased access to rich media and lightweight authoring for the average user, the development and proliferation of social software has achieved an exponential growth rate. As we look to the future, every person will have access to mobile, ubiquitous social technologies, with integrated tools for continuous awareness, communication, and lightweight sharing with their social networks. Social metadata will be an essential component to any information technology that effectively helps users filter and focus on the content they care about. Social software will be essential to everyone for the maintenance of their social lives, and the democratization and globalization of communication and sharing will facilitate the development of not only local, but world communities.

The Handbook Online

The plan for the Handbook is to provide basic tools for creators of social media,  reviewing theory, research and best practices to be considered when designing, building, and deploying social software. The design of social software has unique problems, requiring practioners to adopt the hats of social scientists, technologists, and community organizers. Effective social applications must account for not only the technological infrastructure enabling communication and collaboration, but also the complex social dynamics that affect all day-to-day social behavior. We will review current trends in social technologies, and discuss some of the hard problems that need to be addressed by innovators in the field. We expect that as social software continue to innovate in areas such as social networks, social navigation, lightweight authoring, and mobile and ubiquitous computing, we must increasingly envision integrated social computing experiences: that is, a social software in the context of the Web 2.0 platform.

About the Authors

The main structure of the Handbook is built around a course on Social Web 2.0 at the University of Washington taught by the main author and editor, Shelly Farnham, and an extensive white paper on research and development in Social Computing co-authored by Shelly Farnham, Scott Counts and Matt MacLaurin, written when they were in the Social Computing Group at Microsoft Research in 2005. Continuing updates to the Handbook are provided by Shelly Farnham, Peter Brown, and Jordan Schwartz, and other guest authors who are friends of Waggle Labs.

We invite others who wish to contribute their expertise to the Handbook to email Shelly Farnham at s h e l l y – a t – w a g g l e l a b s . c o m.