Social computing: Principles, platforms, and applications

We present a conceptualization of social computing as the computation of social dependence among autonomous actors. Our conceptualization unifies many diverse kinds of applications such as multiparty business processes, social networks, and online discourse. We contend that the current tradition in software engineering fundamentally falls short of what is required to successfully build such applications. We propose a vision of social computing that relies exclusively on social abstractions and outline the challenges in realizing the vision.