In a 2004 essay called “Situated Software”, Clay Shirky wrote:

In the US today, if you are under 35 or make over 35,000 dollars a year, you are probably online, and if both of those things are true, then most of the people you know are probably online as well. You can now launch an application for a real world group, confident that all of them will have access to the internet.

More generally, his point is that conditions are correct for the emergence of new social/network applications which are designed for communities whose natural size mitigates several of the classic scaling challenges of application development. If your group is only a couple of dozen people, you don’t need massive disk storage or highly optimized database queries. Furthermore, if the community is small and has real-world social bonds, then the application needn’t be burdened with anti-spam features or secure monetary transactions which divert energy from the primary use cases.

Coincident to encountering that essay, I was checking into installing a phpBB-style forum where I could rally some of my friends to talk about music. In the last year or so, I have become a pretty involved member in LTHForum.com, a somewhat Chicago-centric food board which finally broke my long-term distaste for forum-style discussions. I’d like to find a collection of similarly interested and well-rounded people to have the same kind of discussions over music, and actually, I already know those people, but I don’t get enough face-to-face music geek time with them. In case you’ve never investigated such things, I could install something like this for about a hundred bucks a year and a few hours of setup and maintenance time. Among even just a dozen or so friends, that becomes a totally trivial cost for a tool that provides a locus for lots of recreational interaction.

In the same essay, Shirky also wrote:

Situated software is in the small pieces category, with the following additional characteristic — it is designed for use by a specific social group, rather than for a generic set of ‘users’.

I think he’s overemphasizing the idea that the software needs to be designed for a specific social group. As mentioned above, it need only be deployed for a smaller set of users; it can still be written for any generic clique. The hosting providers have already created a market for such things to be installed: besides phpBB, there are a dozen other applications that a customer can install with one click and no additional costs (unless they get slashdotted). Perhaps this is “situatable software” instead of “situated?” None of my friends use Digg very much, but maybe if we could situate a private Digg installation, they’d find it more worthwhile? (After I wrote that, I stumbled upon CoRank Relaunches: Create Your Own Digg on Read/Write Web but haven’t had a chance to investigate yet.)

Elsewhere in this article, Shirky coins the term downsourcing as “the movement of programming from a job description to a more widely practiced skill.” I am curious about the real scope of this phenomenon, although I intuitively agree that something is happening. This is the garage band era. These guys are writing the applications that are going be be archived on the website equivalent of Nuggets. Just like Nuggets, those shaggy but ingenious inventions will still have limited appeal. But they’re going to set the stage for more whole new things.