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How Social Software be categorized?

We talked about Social Software for months, since the first Social Software online forum at 2003/5 in China. The definition is still in discussion, but the business experiments never stop. There are always geeks and entrepreneurs to explore the new frontiers.

In some recent discussions, we talked about Flickr.com, Del.icio.us, Wealink.com, allconsuming.net, and of course blogosphere, as well other social featured new stuffs. In all these social software samples, people are connected by unstructured knowledge, including microcontent(blogs, urls, book titles, photos, contact information, etc.), it's the tacit social networking within, all publicity can be controlled by user himself/herself. You can expand such social networking by protecing your proviacy at the same time. However, to those explicit social networking service(SNS), such as friend-making/professional matchmaking sites, it's unlikely to be privacy ensured as the same time of expanding your networking(whether inviting existing connectors or request new connections). Or it's so weak connection and no-use to people(people event don't want to share their real name or real contact there). So Social Software will be re-categorized from konwledge type, privacy/publicity, people's requirements, etc. The value of SS can also be categorized and compared accordingly.

Need more time to figure out...