Websites and software tools which allow you to discover, extend, manage, enable communication in, and/or leverage your social network. Includes blogs, social networking sites, virtual communities, relationship capital management software, biography analysis software, and many more. Some people use this term for the software used to run online communities and online dating sites, but we do not use that term for that purpose in this book and website.
Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication. Many advocates of using these tools believe (and actively argue or assume) that these create actual community, and have adopted the term "online communities" to describe the social structures that they claim result.