Social software supports group interaction through conversational interaction between individuals or groups, social feedback mechanisms, and tools to manage social networks and help build new relationships. Communities form around shared interests, practices, actions, purposes, circumstances, or positions, and involve groups who interact regularly to learn and improve at something they are passionate about. Characteristics of useful social software and websites include doing a single thing well, simplicity, syndication, hackability, participation, open content, prioritizing sharing over protection, addressing long tail interests, leveraging network effects and collective intelligence, incorporating human language and voices, and allowing for emergent behaviors, classifications, and perpetual beta testing.

1. ALT/SURF 2006 social software Scott Wilson, CETIS This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/foaf.rdf

2. Social Software "software that supports group interaction" Clay Shirky, 2003

3. Social Software Support for conversational interaction between individuals or groups Support for social feedback Support for social networks to explicitly create and manage a digital expression of people's personal relationships, and to help them build new relationships. - Stowe Boyd, 2003

5. Communities of practice “ Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” - Etienne Wenger, 2004

6. Community of practice

7. Community of interest

8. Community of action

9. Community of purpose

10. Community of circumstance

11. Community of position

20. Useful characteristics of web 2.0 Doing one thing well Simplicity Syndication, Hackability Participation Open Content Share over Protect The Long Tail Network Effects and Collective Intelligence Human Language and 'real voices’ Emergent behaviour/synergy Addressable Objects Emergent Classification Playfulness Perpetual Beta