Why social software now?. “A small brouhaha is brewhaha-ing over whether “social software” is mere hype. (See Frank Paynter, for example.) After all, the category is about as broad as “software for people” and includes technology as old as holding hands. And yet it’s the thing I came away from the O’Reilly Conference most excited about. First, I consider social software actually to be emergent social software. That narrows the field to software that enables groups to form and organize themselves. Yes, it’s still broad but at least it’s not coextensive with any software that has a user interface. Second, it doesn’t much matter…” Reposted from Joho the Blog