Institute For The Future

Future of social software: An informal survey

"One of the great pleasures of being a futurist is that it gives you license to ask interesting people strange questions.

One of our upcoming Perspectives pieces deals with the future of social software and collective intelligence; very briefly, it outlines the differences between knowledge management strategies and information architectures and newer social software systems, and what the emergence of these tools could mean. In the course of researching the subject, I sent out e-mails to several people in the fields of social software and information architecture, asking

Where do you think social software will be in ten years? Will it be the foundation of a discrete category of applications or services? Will social software-like capabilities be built into other software? Will the whole concept be as outdated as a KC and the Sunshine Band album?

Several very interesting responses came back, but the brevity of the Perspectives left me room to quote only a fraction of the total.

So, in the coming days, I'm going to post them here.

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