I have been following the concept of the long tail as it relates to business and statistics, and have recently begun to discern how the long tail may relate to social software. The long tail as defined by statistic refers to a distribution effect that can be visualized by the graph at right, in which a small portion of 'popular' events occurs very often (red), whereas the vast majority of events occurs far more rarely (yellow). This overall population of rare events, however, is itself quite large — this huge population of low amplitude events is known as the long tail.

Tim Bray muses the long tail to be "a tangled mess of microcommunities and subcultures and tribes and hobbies and fanatics." He goes on to posit that although these informal social communities have always existed, the interlinking power of the web is finally making these structures visible because they "now they span the globe in real-time." With the advent of social tools on the web, members of the long tail are finding each other and creating bridges, just as higher amplitude members of the yellow end of the distribution curve are finding like-minded members of the long tail and creating pathways to them.

Another intersection between social software and the long tail comes to me by way of Seb Paquet, writing about a Popularity Slider feature on upto11.net, which was a social music site also mentioned in response to my post on Webjay as being a service with a folksonomy component (dizzy yet?). The slider allows you to filter what kinds of artist recommendations you receive based on your music preferences. Normally, such a recommender system tends to tip you towards the more popular items at the red end of the distribution, which may not necessarily be as close to what you might actually like as some of the less visible items. The Popularity Slider allows you to essentially truncate the distribution curve in order to filter out the items at the popular (red) end of the graph. This is an incredibly intuitive and useful application of tapping into the benefits of the long tail.

How do you see social software relating to the long tail? What benefits are to obtained from tapping in to the less popular end of the spectrum?