The Social Web is a specified term for the World Wide Web as a kind of Social Media. The term is currently used to describe how people socialize or interact with each other throughout the Web. The Social Web mostly refers to social networking, myspace for example, and content-sharing sites (which also offer a social networking functionality) within Web 2.0.

These social websites are mostly formed around the connections of people of the same interest, but there are several theories that specifies exactly how this formation works. There are for example said to be "people focus" websites such as PalBlast, Bebo, Facebook, and Myspace, that focus of social interaction, often by making the user create an online identity (and a profile). There is also socializing on the web that is typified by "hobby focus". For example, if one is interested in photography and wants to share this with like-minded people, then there are photography websites such as Flickr, Kodak Gallery and Photobucket.

Often when speaking about the Social Web, collective intelligence is mentioned. Collective intelligence refers to the phenomena of internet users getting together, sharing content, in order to create something bigger than one single person could do. Sometimes, this is also called Wisdom of Crowds.Wikipedia is a perfect example of this.

The Social Web as a current description

The social web can be described as people interlinked and interacting with engaging content in a conversational and participatory manner via the Internet.^[1]

Since social web applications are built to encourage communication between people, they typically emphasize some combination of the following social attributes:^[2]

• Identity: who are you?
• Reputation: what do people think you stand for?
• Presence: where are you?
• Relationships: who are you connected with? who do you trust?
• Groups: how do you organize your connections?
• Conversations: what do you discuss with others?
• Sharing: what content do you make available for others to interact with?

Examples of social applications include Twitter, Facebook, and Jaiku.

The Social Web as a future network

The first is an open global distributed data sharing network similar to today's World Wide Web, except instead of linking documents, the Social Web will link people, organizations, and concepts.

The use of the term in this context was introduced in 1998 by Peter Hoschka in a paper called "CSCW research at GMD-FIT: From Basic Groupware to the Social Web".^[3][4] The paper identifies 6 research topics relevant to the Social Web: personal representation and virtual identities; mutual perception and social awareness; formation and establishment of norms and conventions; self organisation of groups and communities; social contruction of community knowledge; software agents as mediators in social processes.

In July 2004 the paper "The Social Web: Building an Open Social Network with XDI" describes how the introduction of a new protocol for distributed mediated data sharing and synchronization, XDI, could enable a new layer of trusted data interchange applications. The key building blocks for this layer are I-names and I-numbers (based on the OASIS XRI specifications), Dataweb pages, and link contracts.^[5]

Open social networks using FOAF has been around since 2000.

Perhaps the best analogy for the Social Web is the worldwide banking and credit card system. This infrastructure has evolved over centuries to facilitate the global exchange of a very sensitive form of data — money — by establishing a common means of exchange among trusted third party service providers — banks. The Social Web takes the same approach for exchange of private, sensitive information by establishing a common means of exchange among trusted third party service providers — i-brokers.

Earlier uses of the term include:

• In 1955 the term "Social Web" was introduced by August C. Krey in the essay collection History and the Social Web published by the University of Minnesota press.^[6]