Towards an understanding of social software: the case of Arinia

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.