Required reading: JWZ pours a cup of cold coffee all over Novell’s Hula.
“Groupware” is all about things like “workflow”, which means, “the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I’m done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from `unchecked’ to `checked’, and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review.”
Nobody cares about that shit. Nobody you’d want to talk to, anyway.
but wait, there’s more:
Anyway, I babbled at Nat along these lines for a while, predicting that, while I was sure that anyone he talked to in a corporation would tell him, “free groupware, yes, awesome!”, there was really no reason to even bother releasing something like that as open source, because there was going to be absolutely no buy-in from the “itch-scratching” crowd. With a product like that, there was going to be no teenager in his basement hacking on it just because it was cool, or because it doing so made his life easier. Maybe IBM would throw some bucks at a developer or two to help out with it, because it might be cheaper to pay someone to write software than to just buy it off the shelf. But with a groupware product, nobody would ever work on it unless they were getting paid to, because it’s just fundamentally not interesting to individuals.
So I said, narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?
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.
Just go read the whole thing.