## 2 Three Notions of Sociality for the Analysis of Social Software
### An Action-Based View of Sociality  
The second understanding of sociality that is applied in definitions of Web 2.0 and Social Software is based on [PERSON]. His central categories of sociology are _social action_ and _social relations_: \"Action is'social' insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course\" [12]. \"The term'social relationship' will be used to denote the behavior of a plurality of actors insofar as, in its meaningful content, the action of each takes account of that of the others and is oriented in these terms\" [12]. These categories are relevant for the discussion about Social Software, because they allow a distinction between _individual_ and _social activities_: \"Not every kind of action, even of overt action, is'social' in the sense of the present discussion. Overt action is not social if it is oriented solely to the behavior of inanimate objects. For example, religious behavior is not social if it is simply a matter of contemplation or of solitary prayer. [...] Not every type of contact of human beings has a social character; this is rather confined to cases where the actor's behavior is meaningfully oriented to that of others\" [12]. [PERSON] stresses that for behavior being considered as social relation, it needs to be a meaningful symbolic interaction between human actors, hence communication. According to this understanding, Social Software and Web 2.0 are oriented on applications that allow human communication. The social character can be distinguished from activities such as writing texts with a word processor or reading online texts: \"Social software's purpose is dealing with groups, or interactions between people. This is as opposed to conventional software like Microsoft Word, which although it may have collaborative features ('track changes') is not primarily social. (Those features could learn a lot from Social Software however.) The primary constraint of Social Software is in the design process: Human factors and group dynamics introduce design difficulties that aren't obvious without considering psychology and human nature\" [13]. Such understandings include a wide set of digital communication technologies; they are broad, inclusive definitions, such as the one of [PERSON] [14]: \"Social software, software that supports group communications [...]. Because there are so many patterns of group interaction, Social Software is a much larger category than things like groupware or online communities - though it includes those things, not all group communication is business-focused or communal. One of the few commonalities in this big category is that Social Software is unique to the Web in a way that software for broadcast or personal communications are not\". [PERSON] _et al._[15] provide a similar definition. They describe \"Internet 2\" or \"Social Computing\" as technologies that \"exploit the Internet's connectivity dimension to support the networking of relevant people and content\". The user is an integral part in the production process of content, tastes, emotions, goods, contacts, relevance, reputation, feedback, storage and server capacity, connectivity, and intelligence. The central feature is communication: \"These applications build on the capacity of ICT to increase possibilities for interpersonal communication. Blogs, wiki, voice over IP, podcast, taste sharing and social networking services all increase the possibility of finding other people like us, and therefore enhance communication possibilities and their value.\" [PERSON] [16] gives examples for the technologies that are included: \"Social Software can be loosely defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message-boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking\".