Technology buzzwords follow a well-travelled trajectory from Creation to Buzz to Hyped to Overused to Meaningless to Ignominious Death.

The term "Social Software" has now officially made it to the Meaningless stage. "Social Software" is a derivative of the already-dead buzzphrase "Social Networking Software" which went from Buzz to Ignominious Death almost before the ink on the VC term sheets was dry.

As evidence of the meaningless of "Social Software," I present the "Social Software Top 10" list. The common thread appears to be web sites built around user-generated content; no post-IPO companies need apply.

But if all you need to be "Social Software" is user-generated content, why isn't eBay on the list? Surely that's a company built entirely around the collective content (in the form of auctions) of its users. eBay's feedback system is arguably more sophisticated a social mechanism than anything on MySpace, if more formalized and limited to the context of online auctions.

Any why not Amazon.com, which has long included user-submitted reviews, and has a feedback and scoring mechanism.

For that matter, the World Wide Web itself is the ultimate Social Software, since the entire concept was built around web users creating web pages. And how about Google, which generates no content itself and relies on the links inside web pages to determine what pages are relevant to any given topic.

I look forward to the ignominious death of the Social Software buzzphrase.