Clay Shirky describes a new term -- situated software-- in his latest essay, released to the Net this evening.
Shirky says "situated software" is "designed in and for a particular social situation or context. This way of making software is in contrast with what I'll call the Web School (the paradigm I learned to program in), where scalability, generality, and completeness were the key virtues . . . The biggest difference this creates relative to classic web applications is that it becomes easy to build applications to be used by dozens of users, an absurd target population in current design practice."
It's a neat essay. Clay describes some applications created by some of the students he teaches under this 'situated software' paradigm.