The world of social media software is constantly changing. Increases in bandwidth, web technology advances, the browser becoming the operating system, and mobile devices that give users instant online access wherever they are all provide more opportunities for creating interesting, viral, sticky applications that people can’t live without. In the time we have taken to write this book, hundreds of new sites and applications have launched in the hopes of spreading and growing like Facebook or Twitter.

What we are seeing is an ever-increasing amount of people experimenting and making mashups with different kinds of social features, interwoven into just about any kind of content or service you can imagine. Some of them are amazingly inventive, and others are downright weird. With all these different opportunities and rehashes of social features, just where should designers be paying attention?

The breadth of software being developed for consumers today is only half the story. Opportunities lie with mashups and open software. Areas that traditionally have been ghettoized in traditional web software design are mobile and enterprise. Often forgotten or addressed as an afterthought, these areas provide rich and interesting challenges to creating social experiences.

If you want to see the future of interactive interfaces, look to gaming. Game designers have the liberty to experiment and Darwinian competitive pressures. The ideas they come up with and prove out in the market are setting expectations for a large number of people who may eventually become, or may already be, your users. With more and more consoles appearing in homes, families playing together, and games becoming a standard offering on mobile devices, designers need to consider how social intersects with gaming and how that changes the nature of play.

Cutting across it all is the need to understand how different age groups are negotiating digital life.

The collection in this book is presented as an evolving language, and as such is fluid. The patterns can be used one at a time or selectively mixed together to create a rich social experience. We end with a reminder that the subjects of our interfaces are human lives and aspirations, and ethical dilemmas are never far away as we create these frameworks within which people gather, play, commune, and—we hope—thrive.