Social Software: not that hard

From Social Machines by Wade Roush at MIT Technology Review:

Software engineers, he says, have discovered that computer science's decades-long effort to make computers smart enough to understand humans is simply irrelevant; they can make computing truly personal and social using simple Web-based programming tools. After all, we don't really want to talk with computers--we want to talk through them. "The brilliance of social-software applications like Flickr, Delicious, and Technorai," Pang says, "is that they recognize that computers are really good at doing certain things, like working with gigantic quantities of data, and really bad at, for example, understanding the different meanings of certain words, like 'depression.' They devote computing resources in ways that basically enhance communication, collaboration, and thinking rather than trying to substitute for them."

I should say, lest this post start a week-long debate with Ricky, that the "Pang" in the quote above isn't a computer scientist, but a Historian of Science, hence his point of view. The quote is also not really representative of the article as a whole.