One definition I've seen around recently is that "Social Software treats Groups as [First Class Object]-s". [Geoff Cohen] discusses what this means to him. "First-class object" is computer science techy-speak for an idea or construct that can be directly addressed or manipulated by a program... Some scientists actually imply that groups have more reality than individuals. Certainly, groups have more reality than many of the formal, legal entities that recognize or define a large number of people, such as corporations or countries. To expand on that, I argue that our abstractions and legal code work at the wrong level. Right now, our laws, our social networks, our vocabulary work at two levels: individuals and large, formal organziations. But the real action, the real activity, the place where the real work happens, is at some harder-to-define-but-I-know-it-when-I-see-it intermediate level of a group of people... I think (but I'm not sure) that a useful idea here is what graph theorists call a clique, which is the maximal set of nodes that are all connected.

User Options Recent Changes Help Page