The Emerging Areas of Social Software - Essay Example

The Emerging areas of Social Software Introduction: Social Software is in use since 2002 and it has been defined a simple software that support groupinteraction (Martin et al, 2006). There are many social software that enable people to connect and interact with each other through these computer-mediated technologies such as blogs, wikies, instant messaging, chat, Internet forums etc. Clay Shirky, has attempted to put social software in new context. He argued that people generally have two types of communication: two way point-to-point for example email, telephone and one way outbound examples include all forms of broadcast. Shirky open a new door of communication: many-to-many type of communication and has co-founded a weblog group known as Many-to-Many (The Guardian, 2003). Actually we have reached here through a long and gaining experience for hundreds of years in broadcast media. The experience was gained through printing press and broadcasting through radio and Television. We had earlier the communication technique such as telephone and telegraph before email and other electronic media came into existence. The vast experience gained through these personal or one-to-one way of communications or social communication through radio, TV etc help us in quickly adopting these new social software through which a fast communication through Internet takes place. The present paper deals with the major social software, advantage of social software including in learning and education and tangible advantages especially in large IT industry The Major social software: Now we have all three types of communication i.e. one-to-one way of communication (instant messages, email), one-to-many way of communication (blogs) and many-to-many way of communication (wikies). Let us see how the three ways of communication takes place. a) Instant Messaging (One-to-one communication): Instant messaging is a one-to-one way of communication and by this techniques a person can communicate with other person privately over a network. The major instant messaging provider includes skype, yahoo messenger, and msn messenger, ICQ etc. The system highlights a group of people if they are online and thus you need to have the email id of the person to know whether he or she is online. You can open any instant communication to any of the person whose status is online. These are very simple to use and people can communicate with each other in almost real time across the globe. b) Blogs (0ne-to-many): Blogs and websites are the examples of one-to-many way of communication are becoming more and more popular. Many people write blogs and the readers of these blogs can post their views about the topic. There are a large number of people having their blogs on the net. Some of the common blog websites includes blogspot and livejournal. c) Wikies (Many-to-many): Wikies are the excellent examples of many-to-many way of communication. Here in wikies a person can edit the content written by another writer. So, a number of people can write and edit the contents available on the websites. The examples of these websites include Metballwiki, Wikipedia and Wiktionary. d) VoIP: VoIP or voice over Internet protocol is also termed as Internet telephony or IP telephony. In VoIP the voice is routed through IP based networks and requires a broadband and therefore it is also termed as broadband telephony or voice over broadband. The voice over IP protocols are used to communicate voice between two users and these services are very cheap and even a VoIP to VoIP phone calls is either free or costs too less. There are lots of advantages of VoIP over dialed PSTN and some of these includes incoming calls are automatically routed to your VoIP even when you are out of town, VoIP work from anywhere with a reliable Internet connection, mobile VoIP facilities and many more. The main difficulty with VoIP is that you can not send fax from it (Wikipedia, undated). Emerging Trends in social software: The major advantage of social software in Community gain: There should be recognition for the contribution of social software especially in the field of community gains (Martin et al, 2006). Users of this social software have been benefited in a number of community ways and education and learning is the number one gain. Some of the major key attributes that helped in benefiting education and learning includes better communication between community groups, communication with many people, sharing and gathering information and knowledge and resources, introducing new tools for communication and collaborative collecting of information. Geographical Information system: One author has analyzed the significant emerging features of social software and these are spatial and geographical (Roush, 2005). Some of the interesting social feature availability in web-based Google earth and MSN virtual earth programs provide a wide range of geographical information. There are available some services to tag photographs and actually it is possible with the help of some GPS camera. There have been published reports on utilization of Google earth by bloggers (Taylor, 2005). Social Networking: The next and most important task through social software is to find out like minds. It is our hobby since very beginning to look out for people having similar interest so more information and resources can be shared and all the people looking for specific information on a particular subject are benefited. There are three main methods of bringing people together and these are linking personal network, profile matching and exchange the skill for which you have some affinity (Martin et al, 2006). Mobile Social Software: The next emerging trend is the physical space for mobile blogging or moblogging. Mobile blogging is becoming more popular now days as it is possible to blog from any corner of the earth and marks their physical position so the blogging communities could utilize the information. Such bloggers can also look out the physical space by utilizing the google's google earth feature or similar feature of MSN. This feature is also known as MoSoSo or mobile social software. Sometimes instead of using a mobile phone, a laptop computer can also be used. Actually the idea behind this emerging trend of social software is to add the location and time element in this type of digital networking. It is being used by a number of people to find out other people in their locality or vicinity for social or business networking. RSS feed: Social tagging and RSS tools are also playing more important role in the social networking and therefore these tools will help the readers to provide the content and access to regular updates to the specific and interested subjects. Further these updates or the latest information is only provided to the user who opted to receive such information. The benefit of the RSS or tagging is that the user receives all the information at one place and if the user is no more interested in a particular subject he or she can delete the feed (Lee, 2007). Exploring tacit knowledge through Knowledge Management: A lot of multinational and fortune 500 companies talk about the benefit of KM (knowledge Management) and a number of companies has already taken initiative to implement knowledge management in the respective organizations. There is a lot of features in the knowledge management software and this is really good to explore some tacit knowledge from the well experienced people and share it with other employees of the organization. It is also important to convert tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. According to Nonaka (Nonaka, 1991) tapping of tacit knowledge is often highly subjective and it depends on the individual employee to make these insights knowledge available for testing and using by the company as a whole. He further steps out the phases by linking contradictory things or ideas through metaphor followed by solving these contradictions through analogy and thereafter crystallizing the concepts and embodying them into a model that will work as a knowledge model for whole of the organization (Nonaka, 1991). Although the knowledge management software is good enough to bring out the tacit knowledge and share it among the other employees of the organization, however taking out the knowledge from a person and converting it to explicit knowledge is still a tough task and requires various steps to complete the job. Therefore the knowledge management software provide a good opportunity to the employees to share the information, get the views about it, search out jointly the process so that it can be made explicit, create more knowledge etc but at the same time people and especially large organizations have security concerns related to the software. The advantage of Social Software in large IT Service Company: A social software consultant has already been identified a few necessary steps and strategies to adopt the social software in any such large organizations (Suw, 2005). Author focuses on installing social software such as blog or wiki is not sufficient until and unless it is top-down supported. In addition to the top-down support, the top management should trust and identify the key people or user group and understand their requirements. The management needs to know and evaluate the day-to-day aims of the people and type of information they share, providing training and supporting bottom-up adoption. It is really important to know the actual benefits in terms of sharing knowledge or imparting training and the management should evaluate it from time to time so that necessary steps to improve the systems are taken care off. According to IBM the use of Internet for social networking is increasing among employees and it will become a more efficient working way instead of wasting time on the job (Emmet, 2007). According to the published report IBM is looking for ways to implement social software and networking tools so that the whole of the organization is benefited with the move. The aim of IBM management is to achieve more efficient and innovative ideas at the work place. Luis (2007) has commented on the IBM's initiative to adopt social software within the organization to achieve better efficiency and coordination among the employees. He advices not to neglect and ignore the innovation that is taking place within the organization from the Web 2.0. He also discussed the lack of securities in it, however his emphasis is to get the best of innovation that is taking place at web 2.0. In my opinion it is therefore a challenging task to implement any of the social software that can bring out more number of people interacting with each other to achieve better efficiency and innovation. I have no doubt that although it is tough but it is possible to retrieve a huge tacit knowledge from the vast strength of employees a large IT company has. The need is to get them identified and involve them in the process of social networking so that the maximum benefit from them can be taken. In a large IT service company, we will have a number of talented people ready to share their views with the fellow employees. If the management or the top executives are able to motivate the employees in the sharing process the social software will really benefit a large number of fellow employees as well as the corporation in terms of direct better outputs and more efficiencies and at the same time the huge indirect cost benefits. Conclusion: Sharing of the knowledge is an important part of our daily life and the effective sharing is beneficial in all spheres of life. A number of social software are available through which an effective sharing of ideas and contents can be made. We have covered some of the current and emerging social software. Although it is difficult to say whether these social software are beneficial for a large IT service company, however if we take some necessary steps we could make these effective in a large IT company. The highest benefit expected in such situation is the improved efficiency and innovation and the overall performance will indirectly reflect in financial results. I presume that the implementation of all such social software is successful if we are able to tap only a few percent of huge tacit knowledge available in such large IT service company. References: Emmet, Ryan (2007) IBM wants you to network [online]: ENN Electric News Web Sit. Ireland. 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