Online communities have traditionally been seen as a useful approach to engaging with the social aspects of online communication, and they have been at the heart of some of the most innovative uses of online communication technology, from the Well through to UpMyStreet and Habbo Hotel .

It seems ironic that one of the most individualist industries (internet development) in the most individualist cultures (e.g. US, UK) has spent so much time discussing community. As Meg Pickard points out , this perhaps reflects an anxiety with our own social fragmentation and alienation, a search for meaning, or possibly a yearning for a sense of community that has been lost with the decline of the "third place" – public spaces where people would normally meet and interact physically.

Over time, the term online community has come to be associated with a wide variety of web sites, software tools and platforms, from instant messaging to e-commerce ventures. The publication Online Community Report carries a directory of news and developments in this area, and lists what it sees as the ten most important current trends . In addition to this list, we might add the increasingly visible online social networks Ryze, Ecademy and Friends Reunited , where people gather together to network and share information about themselves. Despite the failure of so many similar ventures during the dot-com boom, with business models based upon advertising revenue and subscriber fees, new online social networks are still emerging, such as There and Everyone’s Connected .

Recently, the idea of online communities has been taken a step further to encompass the wider, more general notion of social software. Some practitioners have now started thinking in terms of social software as a successor to online communities, and this has provoked a resurgence of debate over what constitutes an online community, and what we mean by social software.

In November 2002, Clay Shirky organised a “Social software summit,” which started a debate among online community practitioners about the evolution of online community and social software thinking. Prompted by Ross Mayfield’s reflections on the meeting, fellow weblogger and summit participant Matt Jones began a discussion (“Defining Social Software” - soon defensively re-named “Discussing 'Social Software' ”) in which he grasps for a definition that can elevate social software above what he perceives as increasingly commoditised "online community" tools and applications. Matt begins with the obvious assertion that social software involves human-to-human interaction in groups of three or more, where network effects mean that the interaction improves as more people participate; but as Stefan Magdalinksi reminds us, many online social applications have failed to scale well in the past (e.g. USENET) and some have degenerated once they reached a certain size. As with online communities, what matters is who social software seeks to connect, why and for what purpose. For example, another participant, Matt Webb , recoils in horror at the brash business networking approach of the Ecademy business community, which he sees as trying to “*actively* meet[ing] people, … (like [they] read tipping point and did it deliberately!).” For Matt, the organically developing, homespun generation of webloggers is a community but a dedicated business networking group is not.

Tom Coates, also present , touched on one of the key problems with online communities as they are currently conceived, which is also a key challenge for social software:

"We're all members of hundreds - thousands even - of different overlapping communities all the time. Some are tiny, some are huge. Some are more important to us than others, but all are important to an extent."

We all have multi-layered identities and may be part of any number of overlapping communities at any one time, and yet online communities as currently conceived demand complete immersion in a single community at a time. They can be too demanding and idiosyncratic.

A greater problem, however, is that although we can build very effective communication and online interaction tools to support existing communities, and occasionally a new virtual community might even coalesce around these tools, we cannot generally create a community with software. In Meg Pickard’s words: "If I wanted to start up a standing-on-one-leg-in-the-rain community, would you join? Not unless you were already interested in standing on one leg..."In the real world, communities sometimes come together around a river, a road, some shops or in a business perhaps even a fire escape where smokers gather; but artificially created physical communities, like 1960’s housing projects, are less likely to stimulate the same generative communal interaction, despite the best intentions of the planners. In the online world, perhaps in addition to building online community structures, we should also focus our efforts on stimulating basic, effective forms of social online interaction with the aim of increasing our capacity to connect with others in general. Some of the best online communities are not built – they emerge.

Sometimes, conventional online communities can do an excellent job by bringing people together around common interests or objectives, but we cannot simply build them like pre-fabricated buildings and expect people to participate. Stimulating and supporting communal activity is more involved than just building a structure and providing content. As well as focusing on the community space, it may involve equipping individuals to participate or interact, and removing obstacles or friction that prevent people from making links with each other. It is a more multi-faceted exercise than the first wave of online communities suggests.

This is perhaps where a broader notion of social software is required. For example, Ross Mayfield writes that as well as supporting online applications with a social purpose, “Social Software adapts to its environment, instead of requiring its environment to adapt to software.”He is quick to point out the implications of this for current enterprise software:

Realizing these models requires a fundamental change in architecture.  You won't see SAP release a "Social Software Module" or Peoplesoft announce an "EnterpriseSocial Software Management" product.  If that was the case, we would all be talking about it, but there is too much legacy.  Perhaps this is the opportunity, for major categories of enterprise software to be fundamentally revisited by new companies, but that depends upon the value proposition.

Clearly an enthusiast, and also a purveyor of social software services, Ross nonetheless acknowledges that we are a long way from achieving adaptive social software:

The value proposition of Social Software must be more than intuitive (if software adapts to me and my relationships, I will spend less time adapting to it, or not using it).  Social Software will definitely offer new collaborative functions, but that's not the core value either.  The value of Social Software is its embedded economies of scope.  The ability for an asset to adapt to new uses (its environment) without large transaction costs.

What does that mean in practice? Fabio Sergio’s freegorifero site discusses how and why this adaptive quality might be expressed from a visual design point of view. He sees online user experiences as essentially “unfinished,” requiring the user and a context to complete the resulting rational and emotional interaction that is the basis for user experience. Consequently, he believes the role of design is to fade into the background, so that users have more freedom to participate in the final product, and to focus instead on drawing users in, engaging them and extending the experience by encouraging dissemination. His wonderfully optimistic essay ConnectedLand pursues this idea and links together current developments in design, information architecture and technology to speculate on future directions for interaction design.

The emergence of ubiquitous, mobile, discrete computing increases our general level of connectedness, but it also poses a challenge: how to design for variable contexts and leave the way clear for emergent behaviour and unpredicted outcomes. Dan Hill provides a good introduction to this subject in a presentation to the AIGA London Forum in December 2002 that covers several design disciplines and cites examples of this technique in action within computer games, operating systems, weblogging tools and online software. One of the few oft-quoted examples of this technique in mass-market web sites, which he mentions in his presentation, is the BBCi homepage where some graphical elements subtly change colour depending upon user behaviour to highlight often-used navigation.

This adaptive quality, which goes beyond ideas of personalisation as currently used in online communities, is a key component of online social applications. It is crucial to understanding how we can realise the goal of embedding social tools in peoples’ everyday lives and consciousness - something that few online communities can lay claim to. Even the best tend to require too much behavioural bandwidth, and because they often connect a mass of individuals to a “system” rather than directly to each other, arguably the community is sometimes just a glorified audience, as Clay Shirky points out .