Research in Social Computing : Approaches and New Directions

People have begun to accept technology as a matter of course in the day-to-day areas of their lives. As a result, the development and proliferation of social software has enjoyed exponential growth in the past several years. In this paper we argue that as researchers and practitioners who create social technologies, we must take a “social engineering” approach, actively designing social applications to help users achieve their social goals. We then review current trends in innovation in social technologies, and discuss some of the hard problems that need to be addressed by the field in the next several years. We expect that as social technologies continue to innovate in areas such as social networks, social navigation, lightweight authoring, and mobile and ubiquitous computing, we must increasingly envision an integrated social computing experience: that is, a social computing platform.