I think social software ain’t all that or a bag of potato chips. Allegedly the toast of ETCON and, like, the biggest thing ever, I’m not totally convinced.

Social software is software, mostly websites, that allow people to hang out and stuff. It’s the first round that hasn’t convinced me: tribes.net, Friendster and so on. In reality, the term is ridiculously broad, covering loads of different potential application areas. It’s not even something new either. I guess it’s just a camel’s back accident, suddenly it’s moved out of the core and gone overground within the startups. I consider myself just outside of that sphere, so the fact that I’m talking about it now says something. That I developed a stoopid simple piece of social software three years ago is a random connection really. That I’m rewriting it now with some urgency says more.

I found an interesting blog post via Microsoft Research of all places, which discusses some of the problems. What use are systems which provide tools to communicate with everybody you knew ever? It’s like the Christmas mail-merge newsletter, or the village notice board that nobody reads. I don’t believe people can really have 300 friends. Rael Dornfest has 115 people in his AIM buddy list, how often does he communicate with each of them?

Hanging out on Hype for so long nips any potential desire to join a friend site like tribes in the bud immediately. I have have joined tribes, just to see what’s up, and I’m not really impressed to be honest. Not that I’ve really given it much time. In my limited bit of exploration, I failed to see anything that really puts it head and shoulders above your run -of-the-mill forum site. Particularly, it seems that the main axis of group activity centers around subjects again. I haven’t built my own tribe, maybe I should just to see. Everything else up there is on my desktop - email, calendar and so on. I already have ways of controlling and sharing those content blobs and they’re things that not really all that social softwarey IMHO.

My thing with Hype at the moment is that the axis of group activity should not be a specific subject, but just group background noise. There’s enough of that and that’s what makes me use Hype. I get a regular feed of hacking, news, links, games, events, blog-like experience entries and many other types of content. I don’t actually visit many other blog like sites on a regular basis, Slashdot and recently boingboing, but that’s it. I’ve no need to stray outside my group.

So I think everybody will be up for that. I’m hoping to attract people who aren’t necessarily so net literate. I think a lot of heavy net users have shoehorned their community fix into comments on blogs, forums and other similar but slightly wrong-headed systems. People who are new will hopefully find Hypothetical easy to use and basically addictive in the way that I do. The test is my 17-year-old sister. If I can get her and her friends to use it, I’m in business.