Can I get an AMEN! Social software should be sexy, easy to use and absolutely effective in getting you laid.
Liza Sabater
Why? Because it should be all about making connections, hooking up with people like you in the online world, but most importantly, it should help you to hook up with people like you in the brick and mortar and hard as a rock offline world.
That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it's not only crude but insightful. "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software)."Social software" is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.
I really don't care what people say about wikis, but they are not easy to use at first. I cannot fathom a treasure trove of encyclopedias started by the masses with the wiki-ware that's out there. The same goes with publishing platforms like Drupal and it's offshoots. These are the technologies of the early "bygrockiwillearnhowtomakethiswork" adopters, not the masses.
I guess software developers either have to get laid more or get their laid-full friends to check out their work more often. If you're user is all sexed out and cannot figure out how to use a feature, then back to the coding board.
And no, friends with a lot of self-love don't count.