The seven building blocks of social software

Jesse found this one. this image is a very good summary on the seven basic building blocks of social software. These blocks are:

1. Identity - a way of uniquely identifying people in the system
2. Presence - a way of knowing who is online, available or otherwise nearby
3. Relationships - a way of describing how two users in the system are related (e.g. in Flickr, people can be contacts, friends of family)
4. Conversations - a way of talking to other people through the system
5. Groups - a way of forming communities of interest
6. Reputation - a way of knowing the status of other people in the system (who's a good citizen? who can be trusted?)
7. Sharing - a way of sharing things that are meaningful to participants (like photos or videos)

This is a very interesting framework to evaluate social software applications. On which of these tenets does the application score. E.g. Flickr scores best on the sharing feature and on the identity feature, while Twitter is all about presence and conversations.

http://nform.ca/publications/social-software-building-block