Social software, also known as social apps or social platform includes communications and interactive tools that are often based on the Internet. Communication tools typically handle capturing, storing and presenting communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a pair or group of users. They focus on establishing and maintaining a connection among users, facilitating the mechanics of conversation and talk. Social software generally refers to software that makes collaborative behaviour, the organisation and moulding of communities, self-expression, social interaction and feedback possible for individuals. Another element of the existing definition of social software is that it allows for the structured mediation of opinion between people, in a centralized or self-regulating manner. The most improved area for social software is that Web 2.0 applications can all promote co-operation between people and the creation of online communities more than ever before. The opportunities offered by social software are instant connections and opportunities to learn. An additional defining feature of social software is that apart from interaction and collaboration, it aggregates the collective behaviour of its users, allowing not only crowds to learn from an individual but individuals to learn from the crowds as well. Hence, the interactions enabled by social software can be one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many.
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on the access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes publicly visible.
Political polarization is the divergence of political attitudes away from the center, towards ideological extremes. Scholars distinguish between ideological polarization and affective polarization.
A social networking service (SNS), or social networking site, is a type of online social media platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections.
Newsvine was a community-powered, collaborative journalism online newspaper which drew content from its users and syndicated content from mainstream sources such as The Associated Press. Users could write articles, "seed" links to external content, and discuss news items in an online forum. These news items were submitted by both users and professional journalists. Newsvine, the company, was not a news bureau and exercised no editorial voice, but provided social news platform for the online community which had grown around it. Members decided with their online actions what news articles stay on the site and what news is removed. Newsvine was named the Top News Site of 2006 and one of the 50 Best Websites of 2007 by Time magazine.
Parliamentary informatics is the application of information technology to the documentation of legislative activity. The principal areas of concern are the provision, in a form conveniently readable to humans or machines, of information and statistics about:
Hyves was a social networking site in the Netherlands with mainly Dutch visitors and members, where it competed with sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Hyves was founded in 2004 by Raymond Spanjar and Floris Rost van Tonningen. The service was available in both Dutch and English.
Wallop is an American software company that was spun off from Microsoft in 2003 to provide a social networking service, and from 2008 made Adobe Flash-based applications for other social networks. Wallop was a research project from the Social Computing Group that was a part of the Microsoft Research team. In the beginning, membership to Wallop was limited so that the testing groups were more controlled for trial purposes.
A social news website is a website that features user-posted stories. Such stories are ranked based on popularity, as voted on by other users of the site or by website administrators. Users typically comment online on the news posts and these comments may also be ranked in popularity. Since their emergence with the birth of Web 2.0, social news sites have been used to link many types of information, including news, humor, support, and discussion. All such websites allow the users to submit content and each site differs in how the content is moderated. On the Slashdot and Fark websites, administrators decide which articles are selected for the front page. On Reddit and Digg, the articles that get the most votes from the community of users will make it to the front page. Many social news websites also feature an online comment system, where users discuss the issues raised in an article. Some of these sites have also applied their voting system to the comments, so that the most popular comments are displayed first. Some social news websites also have a social networking service, in that users can set up a user profile and follow other users' online activity on the website.
In news media and social media, an echo chamber is an environment or ecosystem in which participants encounter beliefs that amplify or reinforce their preexisting beliefs by communication and repetition inside a closed system and insulated from rebuttal. An echo chamber circulates existing views without encountering opposing views, potentially resulting in confirmation bias. Echo chambers may increase social and political polarization and extremism. On social media, it is thought that echo chambers limit exposure to diverse perspectives, and favor and reinforce presupposed narratives and ideologies.
FetLife is a social networking website that serves people interested in BDSM, fetishism, and kink. It distinguishes itself from competitors by emphasizing itself as a social network rather than a dating site.
SodaHead Inc., was a provider of polling technology for media companies. It previously offered an opinion-based discussion community with staff-written opinion essays and interactive features including slide shows, groups, and message boards.
Diaspora is a nonprofit, user-owned, distributed social network. It consists of a group of independently owned nodes which interoperate to form the network. The social network is not owned by any one person or entity, keeping it from being subject to corporate take-overs or advertising. According to its developer, "our distributed design means no big corporation will ever control Diaspora."
A filter bubble or ideological frame is a state of intellectual isolation that can result from personalized searches, recommendation systems, and algorithmic curation. The search results are based on information about the user, such as their location, past click-behavior, and search history. Consequently, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles, resulting in a limited and customized view of the world. The choices made by these algorithms are only sometimes transparent. Prime examples include Google Personalized Search results and Facebook's personalized news-stream.
The Canadian political blogosphere includes political commentary using any social media technology. Its culture differs from that of Europe or the US. The term 'blogosphere' was first formed colloquially in 1999, and has since evolved to mean "the cultural or intellectual environment in which blogs are written and read."
Networked feminism is a phenomenon that can be described as the online mobilization and coordination of feminists in response to sexist, misogynistic, racist, and other discriminatory acts against minority groups. This phenomenon covers all possible definitions of what feminist movements may entail, as there have been multiple waves of feminist movements and there is no central authority to control what the term "feminism" claims to be. While one may hold a different opinion from another on the definition of "feminism", all those who believe in these movements and ideologies share the same goal of dismantling the current patriarchal social structure, where men hold primary power and higher social privileges above all others.
Minds is an open-source and distributed social network. Users can earn cryptocurrency for using Minds, and tokens can be used to boost their posts or crowdfund other users. Minds has been described as more privacy-focused than mainstream social media networks.
Social media use in politics refers to the use of online social media platforms in political processes and activities. Political processes and activities include all activities that pertain to the governance of a country or area. This includes political organization, global politics, political corruption, political parties, and political values. The media's primary duty is to present us with information and alert us when events occur. This information may affect what we think and the actions we take. The media can also place pressure on the government to act by signaling a need for intervention or showing that citizens want change
Political polarization is a prominent component of politics in the United States. Scholars distinguish between ideological polarization and affective polarization, both of which are apparent in the United States. In the last few decades, the U.S. has experienced a greater surge in ideological polarization and affective polarization than comparable democracies.
The advent of social networking services has led to many issues spanning from misinformation and disinformation to privacy concerns related to public and private personal data.
