This document summarizes a research paper that proposes a unified paradigm called "Social Machines" to describe social web-oriented systems. It begins by discussing how computational and social elements have been blended into software. It then presents three visions that contribute to the Social Machines paradigm: 1) social software like social media platforms and systems based on social data, 2) people as computational units through human computation and crowdsourcing, and 3) software with social elements like agent-based web services that interact in communities. The paper provides an overview of these visions and how they converge to form the Social Machines paradigm, with the goal of establishing a common conceptual basis and identifying important research areas.