This is an excellent read as I think about Drupal's role within social software... After years of study, I found this blog from Matt Webb most interesting, and actually very accurate. Enjoy reading.

From the blog:

"We need mechanisms in the online software to bring in a similar incentive structure to the offline world. The single most useful piece of thinking I've been using is Stewart Butterfield's March 2003 post on the devices in social software, mechanisms successful pieces of social software tend to have.

Identity
Presence
Relationships
Conversations
Groups
Reputation
Sharing
I'll describe each of these, as I see them, critiquing AOL Instant Messanger (just as an exmaple), and then describe how we put them into use.

Identity | Your identity is shown by a screenname, which remains persistent through time. There are incentives not to change this, like having your list of friends stored on the server and only accessible through your screenname. This acts as a pressure to not change identity. Having a persistent identity is more important than having one brought in from the physical world.

Presence | Presence is awareness of sharing the same space, and this is implemented as seeing when your friends are online, or busy. AIM isn't particularly good at group presence and visibility of communication, although other chat systems (such as IRC and early Talkers) use the concept of "rooms" and whispers.

Relationships | AIM lets you add people as buddies. From that moment, their presence is visible on your screen. This is a relationship, you're allowed them to have an effect on your environment. Not terribly nuanced however.

Conversations | Conversations are implemented as synchronous messaging. There's a difference between messaging and conversations. Messaging is just an exchange of text with no obligation, but conversations have their own presence and want to be continued. AIM does this by having a window for a conversation. It's difficult to drift out of it, it hangs there, requesting you continue. Contrast this with email which often is just messaging, and conversations die easily.

Groups | AIM isn't great at groups. Although you can have group chats, the group is transient. People have more loyalty to a group when there's some kind of joining step, when they've made some investment in it. Entering a window just doesn't do that, and there's no property of the group that exists outside the individual user's accounts.

Reputation | Reputation is used more in systems which allow meeting new individuals. AIM's simple version of this is "warning". Any user may "warn" any other user. A users total "warn" level (a figure up to 100) is shown to everyone they communicate with. Unfortunately, it's not a trustworthy reputation system, and reputation is notoriously difficult -- but humans are great at dealing with it themselves, given certain affordances: persistence identities, and being able to discuss those identities with other people. AIM's simplistic relationship system makes reputation not so important though.

Sharing | People like to share. With AIM, sharing is often as simple as giving a friend a link to follow. Other systems, such as Flikr, are about sharing photographs. These act as small transactions that build genuine group feeling."

Curious what our Drupal development community thinks about these 7 components (as pivotal/needed) to the Drupal project. Thoughts/discussion? Thanks.