When you hear people talk about Youtube and del.icio.us or digg clones, and they appear not to be programmers, computer science students or some other sort of enthusiasts, but people that didn't care about all that few years ago, you know something has changed. And that happens. More and more people I know talk about those things, some of them are also using them, but it probably will take again some years until they majority really uses those tools.

Nevertheless I find it very exciting, that the Web and especially Social Software are really changing the way things work. I guess I'm not the only one. That's why new services and communities are popping up every month, always claiming the "social" nature, building on user generated content. That is fine, that's exactly what it needs that those things get into the mainstream. When Apple first introduced the original IPod, only few people bought one, now everyone has some sort of MP3 player, from different vendors (although Apple managed to stay ahead of competition in terms of market share). That is what's happening with all the popular services we like and do use for years now.

The really interesting question if you work with all those technologies is, what can we possibly do, what could we achieve with all that data that we collect, by people using those services. We have to consider security of course, but the more challenging question is: are we really using all that interactions to generate something that is more useful? Now we all can publish within seconds, tag, annotate, link, bookmark and group various items, but are we really using that information, or is it there "just because we can"?

The goal has to be, to do more with the existing information, by combining other methods with the strictly social approach that many services have. In many cases people tend to belong to one of two groups, the one that favors algorithmic, "scientific" approaches (call them the "Google News People") and others that believe all good mechanisms have to be of social nature (probably the "Wikipedians"). Of course this is a little exaggeration, but why isn't there a service that tries to combine both approaches and apply them to problems that are suitable for either. Sort of a "Social Semantic Software" paradigm, that is much more defineable than other popular buzzwords. Some examples:

• Let people contribute and build Wikipedia, but let machines try to find similar or connected pages, cluster the content and provide better insight.
• Use all those machines of Google for search, but let users find really similar pages (not the ones that Google offers) by using the opinion of people?
• If Folksonomies work on services like del.icio.us, why not support them with Entity extraction?
• When will we be able to use all that data of digg to learn something about dissemination on the web and user behaviour?

And I think there should be some more great applications of Social Semantic Software. If we only could accept the fact, that combined approaches are generally more successful.