Very good read on a NYU professor experience when teaching about social software and getting his students to create software for particular groups of communities. He is commenting that:

"Situated software isn't a technological strategy so much as an attitude about closeness of fit between software and its group of users, and a refusal to embrace scale, generality or completeness as unqualified virtues. Seen in this light, the obsession with personalization of Web School software is an apology for the obvious truth -- most web applications are impersonal by design, as they are built for a generic user. Allowing the user to customize the interface of a Web site might make it more useful, but it doesn't make it any more personal than the ATM putting your name on the screen while it spits out your money. Situated software, by contrast, doesn't need to be personalized -- it is personal from its inception."

He points it out exactly what is happening right now with the rise of small fit-forms applications ("software for mom"). Examples: wikis, digital lifestyle aggregators or WebJay. Another interesting observation is that there are many technologies for developing situated software (i.e. Perl, PHP, DHTML, ActionScript) all of them using MySQL database. (via Mike)