On Collaborative Software for Web Communities Evaluation - A Case Study

Collaborative software, and more specifically social software, must provide its users with not only a good application interface, but also and more importantly with easy and direct contact with other users. Within the field of collaborative software, we chose Orkut R ©as our object of evaluation, particularly in terms of the following communication tools: communities, messages and scrapbook. The research consisted, initially, of the evaluation of the abovementioned tools and, secondly, of the assessment of our method itself and its ability to appraise the inherent features of this kind of software. In the present paper we will introduce and describe the method upon which we based our assessment. In addition to that, we will justify the choice of this particular method and discuss the results obtained.