Glancing: Social Software

When there's more time, I'd like to think a bit about axes on which to organise social software.

There's telic [goal directed] vs atelic. Bugzilla is definitely goal directed -- but how about some of the features of Outlook?

There's certainly a continuum from pairwise to group. As much as email is used for groups of people (mailing list, and so on), I think its applications still come from a pairwise mindset: adding people to a To or Cc list is just adding people to a list. The group doesn't take on its own identity. And it's always easier to lose people from the group than gain them: people can't loiter nearby and wait to be invited.

Even listservs are often pairwise: they're often broadcast. But these things bleed into each other.

The point of mediation of the communication makes a big difference. Is it one where you choose who to talk to - like email, again - or is it one where you choose to whom you listen? The latter is like the www, where your experience is determined by you the listener (the reader) rather than the speaker (the author).

Also, how much time-binding is present? That is, how much is your use of the medium changed by previous uses of the medium? In electronic communication, the medium usually stays the same, or changes very slowly. In the real world, old messages accrete in the environment.

Formality vs informality.

Active vs passive, or even, deliberate vs accidental. More about that under communication theory.

There are more than just axes that would be good to explore. Some questions:

How much does the system allow people to build up implicature? Including: assumptions about meaning from active or passive use -- say, if someone doesn't respond to an email quickly, what does that mean?
How much does the construction of the system bias it towards certain uses? Making it more formal, or whatever?
Software which is entirely mediated and there is no direct communication, like wikis.
How do the affordances of a system create patterns of behaviour? For example, handwritten letters are assumed to be well thought-out because they take a certain amount of time to compose and write, and (importantly, I think) actually put in a postbox. But emails have a different expectation because they're quicker to dispatch.
Again, on the subject of affordances: how does what's possible, what can't be hidden, what's imitable -- how does all this go to create a set of ethics or manners for the medium?