Grounding principles for governing social software investments

Abstract

During the early years of the World Wide Web, also commonly referred to as the internet, there was relatively little engagement between content providers and end-users, or between end-users. Although some specialized communities, such as newsgroups, approached the internet as an open, decentralized, participative platform, not many content providers really did. Communication occurred mainly in a top-down, one-to-many, centralized mode of content broadcasting. In many ways the internet remained similar to already existing media such as television or radio. This first era of development is now being referred to as web 1.0. The advent of Web 2.0 has been about embracing the inherently open and social characteristics of the internet. It supports a profound change in communication toward a many-to-many, decentralized format. The latter favors the emergence of bottom-up trends rather than the design of top-down, paternalistically imposed strategies and structures. Web 2.0 applications aspire to make maximal use of the level playing field for engagement offered by the internet, both technologically and socially (O’Reilly, 2005, 2006). The World Wide Web has thereby entered “the realm of sociality” (Bouman et al., 2007), where software becomes fused with everyday social life. Social software applications such as Wikipedia, Facebook and MySpace have all but become household names.