Towards an understanding of social software: the case of Arinia

Stuart J. Barnes
University of East
Anglia, UK
Stuart.Barnes
@uea.ac.uk
Martin Böhringer
Chemnitz University of
Technology, Germany
Boehr@hrz.tu-
chemnitz.de
Christian Kurze
Chemnitz University of
Technology, Germany
Kurze@hrz.tu-
chemnitz.de
Jacqueline Stietzel
Chemnitz University of
Technology, Germany
Jsti@hrz.tu-
chemnitz.de


Abstract
This paper presents the case of Arinia, a custom-
made piece of social software with strong similarities
to today’s microblogging applications. Arinia has been
in use in a medium-sized technology company for more
than 10 years; therefore, it is considered that the
software is a valuable source of insights into the
underlying principles of microblogging in an
enterprise context. Due to the unique nature of the case
we used an interpretive approach to learn about
Arinia, its users and their contexts, involving semi-
structured interviews, a survey, quantitative usage data
and an excerpt from the posting base in order to
achieve a comprehensive view on the case. The results
suggest that there is reasonable potential in sharing
micro-level information inside organizations. In
particular, the findings provide evidence of enabling
factors and allow us to introduce the concept of the
‘information food chain’. Together, these findings
present a foundation for further research on current
microblogging applications.


1. Introduction

The rising popularity of Twitter has recently
encouraged ideas about how to leverage the
microblogging approach within the enterprise. There
are a number of professional software tools and early
case studies are available. Notwithstanding, it is still
not clear exactly what microblogging – and especially
enterprise microblogging – really means. This
discussion in the blogosphere and in various research
papers shows that microblogging is more than a short
form of blogging. Rather it could be seen as an
approach for sharing activity information and
information „nuggets‟ implemented with social
software components (e.g. communities, profiles and
open API).
This paper presents the case of Arinia – a custom-
made piece of social software. While its technology
and appearance do not fulfill modern expectations for
software its usage is very similar to microblogging
applications today. Since Arinia has been in use for
more than ten years now this unique case provides
valuable source of insights into the underlying
principles of microblogging in an enterprise context. In
this paper we use an interpretive approach in order to
achieve a comprehensive view of the case.
The organization of this paper is as follows. We
discuss microblogging and its historical predecessors
in the following section before describing the research
methodology in section 3. The case is presented in
section 4 starting with a background overview
followed by an in-depth analysis of the findings.
Finally, section 5 presents a discussion of the results
and draws conclusions and implications for research
and practice.

2. Background

The principle of microblogging is best known via
its most famous application, Twitter. Users have their
own public microblog where they can post short
updates. Other members can be „followed‟ by adding
them to one‟s personal network. As with weblogs, the
messages appear in chronological order on the user‟s
start page. Microblogging services often support a
wide range of contribution possibilities. For example,
messages to Twitter can be posted via mobile text
messages, desktop clients or several third party
applications.
Microblogging is a very new type of application.
Research papers on the topic are still rare. While a
good body of knowledge is developing around Twitter
itself ([2], [5], [7], [8], [9], [11], [15]) there is less
research on the further development of microblogging
for adoption in the enterprise ([3], [4]) and conceptual
improvements of the approach due to enhanced
technology ([13], [14]) or better visualization [1].
The application of microblogging to the enterprise
is a heavily discussed topic among practitioners.
Gartner suggest that “by 2011, enterprise
microblogging will be a standard feature on 80 percent