Social Software Definition

Advances in information technology are changing the way in which individuals communicate and interact. With this new technology, people can meet, connect, and co-work in virtual space (Marenzi et al., 2008).The Internet is becoming a core part of mainstream social life. In addition to email and instant messaging services, various social technologies, such as blogs and social networking services, have become more widely used (Grossman et al., 2009). The advent of social networking applications, and especially of websites dedicated to promoting social interaction, caused a social phenomenon in the Internet. Millions of users, some of who have little or no prior experience using online applications, regularly turn to websites such as Face book,

The strength of social software is that it can integrate and unite people with similar interests and provides enhanced possibilities for sharing ideas (Counts et al.,2005). The major areas of Social Software include blogs, wikis, and the social network services. Social Software provides various tools; some tools are focused more on the connection between people, while others are designed to allow users to share different types of information or work together on one project. A Social Software is difficult to fit into a strict classification, because Social Software includes many different tools that tend to intertwine and to rely on each other (Kietzmann et al.,2011).
Social software covers one or more of these elements:
i) Support for conversational interaction between individuals or groups: discussions between individuals and groups include real time conversations like instant messaging, and “slow time” conversations that occur in collaborative virtual spaces (Kim.,2012 ). ii) support for social feedback: reputation and trust are crucial in online interactions; this is demonstrated by the importance placed by sites such as e-bay, which tracks their sellers’ ratings and reputations( Lee et

In an increasingly technological world, software, especially mobile social applications they are becoming more varied and complex. New features are being added quite rapidly to new mobile social applications, which users are expected to use immediately (Rafique et al .,2012) Learnability is a characteristic where performance improves with experience. As tasks repeated, elements of the task are better remembered, prompts are more clearly distinguished, skills are sharpened, and transitions between successive tasks are smoothed. The aggregation of these effects results in faster performance times, fewer errors, less effort, and more satisfied users (Albert et al.,2013).
The software acceptability determines whether the software is good enough to satisfy all user needs and requirements. The overall acceptability of social software is defined as a combination of its practical and social acceptability. Practical acceptability is again broken down into various categories, including usefulness, reliability, and compatibility with existing systems (Kaasinen.,