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Social Software Building Blocks / nForm / Customer Insight, Strategy, Design and Development

There are lots of definitions of social software out there, ranging from the clinical ("software that enables people to connect through computer-mediated communication") to the pragmatic ("stuff that gets spammed").

While doing research for a recent workshop, I came across a useful list of seven social software elements. These seven building blocks--identity, presence, relationships, conversations, groups, reputation and sharing--provide a good functional definition for social software. They're also a solid foundation for thinking about how social software works.

The original list was assembled by Matt Webb (who was expanding on a list created by Stewart Butterfield). Here's a brief definition of each element

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