http://www.sylloge.com/personal/2003_03_01_s.html#91273866 - read the original because it’s better in context, but here’s parts of it in case the original goes dark. With a little reformatting:
“Monday, March 24, 2003 An article complaining about ‘social software’ and a rebuttal from Ross Mayfield. So there is an argument. But this is the thing that caught me (from the original article): “The key idea behind social software is that by using technology we can reinvigorate interest and participation in the democratic process.”

Attempting a rigorous definition seems pointless (partly because “social software” doesn’t pick out a neatly contiguous space), and I much prefer “social computing applications” (since there are no connotations of AI, the MS Office paperclip, “friendly software”, etc.), but in any case that is certainly a bad definition.

Applying social software to politics is only one small piece of a big picture because politics is only one small piece of what people do. It is like trying to explain the key idea behind enterprise software as “using technology to reduce the costs of doing payroll.”

So, what is social software? By me, it is software that people use to interact with other people, employing some combination of the following five devices:

• Identity
• Presence
• Relationships
• Conversations
• Groups

Conversations can be real-time or asynchronous. Relationships can be as simple as “contacts” or can be more subtle. There’s been relatively little group stuff (yet).

Instant message networks have four of these (Identity, Presence, Relationships and Conversations) networks of blogs have three (Identity, Relationships and Conversations), Metafilter has two (Identity and Conversations), Yahoo Groups has three (Identity, Conversations and Groups), IRC has four, but two of those in a half-assed way (Presence, Conversations and weak forms of Identity and Groups — cf., the sixth paragraph down in this Joel of Software article). And so on.

We’ll be seeing many more applications which combine these elements. Here’s why: when I first started using the internet (in 1992) I used it almost exclusively for social purposes (mostly Usenet and email, occaisonally IRC, FTP, gopher) and so did everyone I knew (“IRL” or online only). That was possible because everyone who was on the internet then were experts/power users/very familiar with computers; they were skilled enough in the medium and comfortable enough with the technology to be able to use it socially.

Now, the 600 million people who came online in the post-web explosion are developing that same skill and comfort. Most of them already use the internet socially, but this aspect of internet usage will only become more important. Weblogs were only the beginning.

<snip>”

And

“Andrew Wooldridge adds reputation and sharing to the list below. I can see that, though I was thinking of reputation as an aspect of identity, whereas sharing, like collaborating, playing, etc., as things people would do inside a platform which supported (some combination of) the five things (technologies? devices? dimensions?) listed [above].”