The mere fact that we as humans organize ourselves into groups isn’t all that special. After all, other animals form groups. But as this list shows, being in groups, and being around groups, and not being in groups really changes the way we behave.

We didn’t always think this way. In 1933, German behavioral psychologist Kurt Lewin, escaping Hitler’s rise to power, emigrated to America in order to continue his studies on group behavior. At that time, the commonly held notion about human behavior was that we act according to our personality. Sigmund Freud and his theories on the unconscious mind were in vogue. Most of the prevailing research assumed in one way or another that our inborn tendencies dictated our behavior.

But Lewin’s research said different. He challenged the prevailing wisdom by formulating a simple yet profound statement to describe human behavior. The statement, which was expressed as an equation, of all things, thrust Lewin to the forefront of an emerging field. Indeed, Lewin is often called “the father of social psychology.”

This is Lewin’s equation:

B = ƒ(P,E)

The equation says that an individual’s behavior is a function of both their personality and their environment. While the classic nature vs. nurture debate asks you to take sides, Lewin’s equation does not: it invitingly allows for both the person and their environment to affect what happens in a complex, yet profound, way.

Lewin’s equation highlights the tension between the individual and the environment. The environment, of course, is basically made up of everything that isn’t us. That’s an awfully big set of things to think about! However, we easily recognize several types of environments. One is the physical environment, which has a tremendous effect on what we do. When it’s cold outside, we must put clothes on or suffer the consequences.

Other people and groups make up our social environment. And, perhaps even as much as the weather dictates how we dress, the actions of others affect how we behave. Imagine how many of our decisions are strongly influenced by what other people say or do. Just as the friend who made a product recommendation to our shopper on Amazon influenced her behavior, so we are profoundly influenced by the people we know and the groups we join.

In the software world there is even another kind of environment: the software interface.

The interface is the environment in which people work and play on the web. It is the arbiter of all the communication and interaction that takes place there. If there is an action available in an interface, then you can perform the action. If an action is not available in an interface, then you’re out of luck. While we are intuitively aware of this, just as we are aware of the weather, we rarely reflect on how much our behavior is determined by the interfaces we use. Almost all of it!

This sounds like the designers of the interface are in control! Not so fast. Designing an interface that evokes the desired behavior is a huge challenge.

If the interface is too confining, people won’t use it.

If the interface is too flexible, people won’t know how to use it.

In the middle, the sweet spot, interface designers can create powerful social software that supports the person and their personality, as well as the social environment and the groups they are a part of.

Thus the challenge of social software is to design interfaces that support the current and desired social behavior of the people who use them.

Designing an effective interface has always been tough, even when we were merely designing interfaces for one person to interact with content we controlled. But when we add the social aspect, things get even more difficult. Though we can see glimpses, we have little understanding of the overall effect of social software going forward. In 1985, Howard Rheingold, writing about the nascent personal computer revolution, foresaw social software’s massive challenge and potential for change:

Just as humans are social, so our software must be as well.

This reliance on our social network is increasingly a forced move. Living in the Information Age, for all its benefits and wonders, is like drinking from a fire-hose. We have more information than we know what to do with, more than we could ever digest, and probably more than we can even imagine.

And a previous age, the Industrial Age, still has a strong effect as well. The ease of manufacturing at a large scale has caused a situation where we simply have far too many things to choose from. So now we not only have too much information, we have too many products as well. Often we don’t have two or three options to choose from: we have dozens. And then there is a seemingly infinite amount of information about those products! There is simply not enough time to consider each option thoroughly.

To fight this deluge of information, we’re turning more and more to trusted sources, whether they be in our own household or in other social circles. Instead of trying to sort, filter, and weed through endless sources of information, we’re focusing our attention on those we already trust, or those we have reason to believe might be trusted. We don’t have much choice.

Barry Schwartz notes an interesting side effect of this problem: the Paradox of Choice.^[5] He has found that when faced with such an overload we not only fail to make the right choice in many situations, but we often actually get paralyzed and make no choice at all! I remember a friend of mine was shopping for a digital camera several years ago, and decided to utilize several online price trackers to help him find the best model at the best price. He became paralyzed by the options. The paradox was realized: he ended up not getting a camera! He had to rationalize this by citing another reason (a change in financial situation) because on the surface, like any paradox, not choosing due to too much information seems irrational. It’s not. It’s human.

The problem with advertisements isn’t just that they’re distracting, it’s that they’re also biased: they don’t represent a truthful view of the world. They’re all about sell, sell, sell. When we see an advertisement, we’re seeing an idealistic vision of the world that simply doesn’t exist.

As the shopper on Amazon said in reference to the camera manufacturer: “I already know what they’re going to say.” This bias is simply unacceptable. To retain our sanity in a world of too many biased messages, we’re being forced to rely on our social circles to give us sorely needed unbiased perspective. We’ll go out of our way for an authentic conversation with someone we can trust. We don’t want to know how excited someone is to tell us about their great new thing, we want to hear what people like us have to say. Just like the Amazon shopper.

Combine the increased number of items to choose from, the blitz of advertising, and the explosive growth of the web, and it’s easy to see why we are swimming in information. Humans have never had to deal with such a situation.

In 1971, seeing the writing on the wall (and everywhere else), the insightful Herbert Simon described the inevitable outcome of this information onslaught:

Simon points to the real need here: we need to allocate our attention efficiently. In other words, we need to pay attention to what matters, and try to ignore what doesn’t.

The Attention Economy, as it has come to be called, is all about the exchange of attention in a world where it is increasingly scarce. Much of what we do on the web is about this exchange of attention. To circle back to the reviews at Amazon, it is definitely about more than money: it’s about attention.

At its very core, social software is about connecting people virtually who already have relationships in the physical world. That’s why MySpace and Facebook are so popular. What do most people do on those sites when they sign up? They immediately connect with friends they already have!^[9] Or, to put it another way, they maintain their current attention streams. These applications are helping people manage their attention in an economy where it is increasingly hard to do so.

When we join social network sites and focus our attention mostly on the people we know there or give our attention to people like us on Amazon, we’re filtering information and being parsimonious with our most precious asset. We’re effectively saying “No” to the vast majority of information out there, and we’re being forced to do this by the sheer amount of information we face.

In 1995, back when Amazon was just a fledgling start-up, the web was quite a different place than it is now. It had just turned five years old. By one estimate it contained 18,000 web sites, total.^[12] (Now there are hundreds of millions.) Most of those 18,000 web sites shared a common property: they were read-only. In other words, all you could do was read them. It was a one-way conversation. The information flowed from the person/organization who ran the site to the person viewing it. Sure, you could click on a link and be shown another page, but that was the extent of the interaction. Click, read, click, read. If you were lucky, the site might have listed a phone number that you could call.

That’s not to say that people didn’t use it socially. One person would write something on their web page, and a while later another would respond on their own web page. This made the conversation difficult, but possible. It’s kind of like only being able to talk at your own house. When you want to say something, you and your friend go to your house. To get your friend’s reply, you go to theirs.

Amazon and other pioneers then made a big leap forward: they figured out how to attach a database to the web site so they could store information in addition to simply displaying it. This capability, combined with cookies to save state information, as well as forms for inputting information, turned web sites into web applications. They were no longer read-only. They were read/write. Thus two-way conversation emerged on the web, a conversation between the person using the site and the person/organization who ran it.

Next, as web applications became more sophisticated, designers tried new feature sets. As people got comfortable interacting with them, and as bandwidth increased and access became more pervasive, designers started to enable many-to-many conversations. Feature sets evolved based on which features survived in the new enviroment. Instead of just talking to the people who published a site, you could talk to all the other people who visited it as well.

Figure 1.2. The evolution of communication from one-way to many-way on the web.

As the power and reach of the web became evident in the last part of the 1990s, designers started to refashion bulletin board systems for the web, taking advantage of the knowledge gained from those earlier attempts. One casualty of this porting was that the original BBSs largely faded away.

These many-to-many conversations were a small step technologically but a huge step socially. When you go from talking to one party (the site owner) to talking to many parties (other visitors) you enable, for the first time, group interaction. Group interaction is what separates a web application from a social web application.

Another recent step that has brought this change into clearer focus is egocentric software. The rise of social network sites like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook has put the person at the center of the software. While there has always been talk about community on the web, web software makes a much deeper set of social interactions available to us. You can friend people. You can follow them. You can even send people a kiss.

Social web applications are now everywhere. Consider the following list of names you know and love, all of which are in the top 30 most-trafficked web properties in the U.S.:^[13]

But those are just the biggest ones. Lots and lots of smaller social web applications are sprouting up as people get more comfortable with the idea of interacting socially. Here are some interesting ones:

Social web applications are the fastest growing properties on the web. It’s no wonder. Good social sites have social features that enable them to be shared easily. Their entire purpose is to connect people, and when they do that efficiently, they grow very quickly as a result.

YouTube, for example, streams over 100 million videos per day. One of its co-founders, Jawed Karim, notes very few people dispute that YouTube is the fastest growing web site in Internet history.^[15]

Figure 1.3. Social sites/applications/platforms are the fastest growing properties on the web.

Here’s an amazing statistic:

In August 2007, over ten percent of the time Americans spent online was on a single social web app: MySpace.com.

With all the choices we have for where to spend our time, nearly twelve percent of all people’s time is spent on a single site! In addition, a mere twenty web domains account for thirty-nine percent of our time online. Many of them are social web applications.

These numbers are startling for several reasons.

We are deeply attached. The average time per visit on MySpace is the length of a sitcom: twenty-six minutes.^[16] And, since many people visit MySpace, Facebook, and other social network sites at least once per day, this lengthy stay is habitual. In other words, the social web is becoming a way of life.

We follow our friends. One of the more egalitarian promises of the web is that “every web site is equal.” Any given site has just as much opportunity as the next one. But these numbers show that while this may be true in principle, in practice people strongly congregate where their social circles and their friends are.

Figure 1.4. This graphic from Compete, an analytics company, shows how mad people are about MySpace. 11.9% of all online time in the U.S.? That’s insane!

In addition to the big name sites above, there are an estimated 100 million blogs on the web. According to the blog-tracking site Technorati, in March 2007 there were approximately 70 million blogs, with 120,000 blogs being added every day!^[17] By the time this book is published, the number of blogs on the web will be over 100 million.

Figure 1.5. The number of blogs on the web is growing at an amazing rate, with no signs of stopping.