What is the social app?

The social app is the media.

Social apps are often perceived as tools. However, it is the social usage of such tools that ultimately delivers the social experiences, and all social experiences must be interpreted in corresponding cultures. In McLuhan's media theory, the bridge between tools and cultures is the media. Therefore, the social app actively used in social context ultimately is the media. This media centric social computing model is depicted below:

As a fan of digital photography, I process RAW photos with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. The two tools are capable of delivering best possible personal experience for me. However, these Adobe tools are not social apps as there is no social experience involved in my usage. To share my personal experience with others, I post some processed photos onto Flickr. Flickr as a social app is the media for social interactions. If nobody visits my Flickr page, namely, no social usage, Flickr would be merely my personal photo storage media and won’t be anything better than my USB hard drive.

My Flickr social experience is interpreted with the culture coined by the digital photographer community at Flickr. One social norm any careful user can figure out is the photo “dressing code”. To get respect by pro eyes, usually photos need to “dress up” by post-processing. “Naked” unprocessed photos are considered non-professional and novice. Also in Flickr culture, the social value system is carried by the host sub-cultures of the peers. Photographers participated at the same group (e.g. 50mm lens, surrealism) would be more easily appreciate each other’s work and behavior.

The media is the bridge connecting cultures and tools. The active social app, in the form of media, is able to change our cultures gradually. Flickr changed the culture in photographer community. The social value system for judging a photographer is no longer impacted by the person’s profession and professional credential. Nobody cares if you are a professional photographer for living and how many awards you've received in photography contests. At Flickr, only your works speak.

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” – Marshall McLuhan

When usability is useless

A common mistake in social apps is to design usability with a common conventional objective - efficiency for task fulfillment. Indeed, efficiency is the central theme of the mainstream productivity tools (e.g. word processor, spreadsheet, google search, nextag price comparison, etc.). However, usability merely for efficient user experience is useless in the context of delivering rich social experience because now we live in the web.

Facebook in early days was an CRM (collegemate relationship management) tool. In the sense of usability, the user experience was comparable to enterprise CRM (customer relationship management). The site was designed for efficient task fulfillment in profile management, friend management including a workflow for add-friend request and approval, and an inter-friend messaging system. The social experience, unfortunately, was relatively poor comparing to rival myspace until facebook embraced many third-party mini-apps. A significant number of popular facebook apps are dedicated to delivering social experience (e.g. X me, food fighting, SuperPoke, etc.). These very sociable time wasters have nothing to do with efficiency but actually destroy the productivity in user experience, making the usability for efficiency and productivity totally useless.

SuperPoke at my facebook profile page.

Conventional usability might be inadequate in describing social experience for social apps. In addition, we need to emphasize sociability aspect and create a more human web environment to live in.

We live in the web

web1.0: we use the web
web2.0: we live in the web

The fundamental distinction of web2.0 is that the web is no longer a single user experience such as content search, price comparison, booking airline tickets, etc. Web experience now becomes a pervasive social experience, as long as there are user-to-user interactions or communities involved in site.

Social networks (myspace, facebook), social media (flickr, youtube), and social bookmarks (digg, del.icio.us) are obvious social applications for delivering social experiences. However, social apps are not necessarily fancy web2.0 inventions. In fact, some old web1.0 applications are extremely social. ebay is a community centric site where the feedback scores are its core asset in defending competitors (yahoo and amazon). Virtually all the online forums are very rich in social experiences, specially when the user starts to post and spends hundreds of hours in the community.

Web social experiences establish our virtual life in cyberspace. As we live in the web, web social experience is part of our daily life. Comparing to our physical social experience, which one is more "real"?

Believe or not, we live in a hyper-reality in that the artificial reality may seem more real. Watch out, our social life is engineered by social apps whenever and wherever we live in the web. Achieving healthy outcome from "social engineering" with best possible commercial gain, however, is not an easy task, if not impossible.