My Reflection

Name: Peter Johnsson

Student Number: 40987590

The Web 2.0 phenomenon is a great example of social computing and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) in modern society. Today’s Internet is no longer just an information repository it is now a new avenue for social interaction and sometimes even a replacement for the traditional methods due to its usability. You can use the web to go online to date, to make friends, find people who share a common interest as you, discuss topics and use services such as instant messaging which among the younger generation is becoming more prevalent in use than even mobile phones. With such great benefits it is important that people understand why these particular services and this new phenomenon is so popular. In this article I will focus on what criteria a successful social website has. This article will investigate the effects criteria such as awareness, usability, popularity, user contribution and community interaction. The following programs form the basis of my research and will serve as my case studies:

• Last.FM – Share, compare and investigate your music tastes with friends

• Del.icio.us – A social bookmarking tool

• Blogger – Google’s blogging platform where you can post ‘blogs’ of information.

• Google Calendar – Google’s virtual calendar service

• Facebook – Social network site to interact with friends

With this focus as a thesis I will detail a reflection of my experiences in using my chosen web services and relate these to prior research in the field and come to a conclusion.

Last.FM

Last.FM is a website that is records information about the music you listen to and updates your profile on Last.FM with this information. With this updated information you are able to view a myriad of information about your musical tastes, and can share in the experience with friends on the site. The site provides such features as being able to see your top artist, top song, recently played songs, and the ability to listen to an automatically generated playlist of free music based on genres and bands you like. As part of its social networking functionality you can have friends that you can compare yourself to, they can recommend you music they think you will like, talk to you via discussion boards, groups and comments.

Last.FM was one of my favourite web services that I researched for this article. I found that it provides a very enjoyable and useful experience. The statistical information, ‘my radio’ and friend recommendation features I all found very enjoyable. However, I found the social side of Last.FM lacking in some respects, while I believe it has good potential there is a number of areas it could improve upon. I found it lacking in a number of ways, primarily I found that all the things you can do without the aid of utilising the social network as part of distracted from the other important social networking aspects, in short I experienced this site primarily as a solo experience and not as a social website per se. I believe this is because not many of my friends I know in real life or people I was interested in learning of their musical tastes used the service, and also the site had quite poor awareness. This lack of awareness is demonstrated that to find out what my friends are up to I have to physically go to their page and read it, unlike on Facebook where I can receive quick updates on the main page from my friends. One of the site’s main incentives for social interaction is the ability to recommend a friend an artist or song, however I thought this was not needed in the presence of a feature where each user gets a tailored radio station that plays a number of artists similar to music they listen to, thus negating the need for a friend recommendation system. It’s other social aspects such as the ‘music neighbours’ feature are however a novel and useful way to point me to other users with similar tastes to me, but this really is not enough in comparison to a site like Facebook which offers a similar service with far more. One of the great features was its events system where you can find concerts and get recommendations to attend others by your friends I found this useful and time saving.

So I felt that there was little incentive to interact with other people on the site and I only felt slightly connected to others while using it. I found the website very usable, but lacking in awareness and social interaction. I think Last.FM which benefit by removing conflicting features and to expand the social side of its site to offer more incentive for interaction. This could include a more detailed and user aware comment and profile system, and to include a Facebook type ‘news feed’ to increase my social awareness while using the site by informing me about what my friends are up to. This would promote a goals shift of the website away from individualistic information profiles to a social network of music listeners that share, experience and discuss music. An example of the limited social features of last.fm is shown in the image below:

- A cropped screenshot showing the limited awareness of the friends feature. All that is visible is the user’s name from the homepage.

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a bookmarking system that serves as a replacement to standard bookmarking features in web browsers. It has plugins available for Firefox to enable fast saving of bookmarks and searching of bookmarks via an easily navigable tagging system. Something that sets del.icio.us apart from other bookmarking systems is its social aspect. Del.icio.us allows a user to not only save his interesting websites but to share these with other people in the community and the other members in the community can share back with him in return. Social features of del.icio.us include a friendship system, ability to view friends’ bookmarks, current top links in the community. This fosters an exchange of information where everyone learns something new.

I was very impressed by how successful del.icio.us as a bookmarking system as I found its tagging system, mobility and plugins highly attractive over other bookmarking services. In my experience I found that viewing the bookmarks of my friend’s network was a useful and easy to use feature that was benefitted by a good awareness because I could see a summary of all my friend’s latest links on a single page by clicking just one button on my home page. This is in contrast to Last.FM where to find any information I have to go all the way into my friends profiles one by one. I did feel more connected to my friends due to del.icio.us sparking conversation topics about links we had both bookmarked and read or felt the other would be interested in from viewing their history of links. But the key point is that this sparked discussion was not capitalised upon by del.icio.us and instead occurred outside of the site on an instant messaging service. If the features of the site were expanded to make there seem more to it than yet another simple bookmarking service more interest could be sparked. The site has sufficient levels of awareness and usability but is lacking in social interaction and contribution. An image shown below depicts the friend network bookmark page of del.icio.us:

- This screenshot shows the ‘your network’ button which brings up the summary page of bookmarks my friends have saved

In the paper ‘Social Bookmarking and Exploratory Search’ by David Millen et al they state the following:

“The quantitative and qualitative results presented in this paper show that social bookmarking systems support a variety of exploratory search activities, which help satisfy end-users’ learning and investigative information needs. The results above show that community browsing is the most frequent way to search/browse for information. Community browsing includes looking at the community collection, looking at co-worker’s collections and browsing by topics defined by social tags.”

These findings indicate that bookmarking services are a useful and popular way to search and store information and that social bookmarking features are the most commonly used features of these services. With these findings in mind and the knowledge from my experience of the websites lack of social interaction it would be beneficial to make improvements to the social interaction of the site by implementing such suggestions highlighted in Millen’s paper like groups, link recommendations and discussion areas.

Blogger

Blogger is Google’s blogging service. It allows a user to create a personal ‘blog’ which is a website where a user can write up an entry about whatever topic interests them and can have their friends and other members of the public read and comment on. Blogging is very much a matter of personal taste as it can be a very powerful force for social interaction on the internet but there are a number of caveats. To have a useful blog you must first build up a successful community around your blog. You need to be able to attract people to read and comment on your blog which sometimes proves to be a difficult task. There are also a significant number of privacy issues with certain uses that blogs are used for, there are numerous stories of people posting personal information on their blog that a spouse of employer has later found and used against them. It was these worries and other taste issues which led me to close down blogs of mine that had been running for a long time. In my experience I found after you had finally got people to read your blog and interact with you, the privacy issue was still there and blogs do not offer enough incentive to use their services. For example, if I want to have serious discussions about topics I am interested in I can join a bulletin board because they have far larger communities, usability, awareness and social interaction.

The problem of building up a community around your blog could be helped by the service having a built in recommendation or neighbours system similar to services offered by Technorati. I did feel more connected to my classmates while using the course blog and found it a helpful source of information and discussion especially among a smaller group.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is an online calendar service where you can write up your calendar and organise your daily schedule similar to a paper organiser and diary. The service also allows a user to add their friends or public calendars to your calendar so you can easily see additional information. Google Calendar by offering both these features is providing both a very useful personal organising system for a computer user who prefers technology to paper and also allowing a method of social interaction where if a group of friends wishes to plan a party or event, they can do so via Google Calendar and perhaps discuss it on their blogs and the whole process is a lot easier than trying to coordinate over the phone or other means.

I found the Google Calendar service very useful in managing my daily affairs especially in keeping me reminded of assignment deadlines, and I also found it useful in deciding a time to plan a meeting for my Team Project and in doing so I felt quite connected to my peers. There were little privacy issues as when sharing my calendar I must authorise who gets to see it and I can make my calendar private if I wish to. Typical of a Google product I found it very usable and a very attractive concept for a digital person like myself, it offers a useful service with good awareness of my chosen network of calendars with a button to show or hide information from different sources I wish to see. I feel their concept of sharing calendars is a very successful one, you can allow multiple people access to a calendar by sharing it and allowing each user to edit it. This allows for a sort of collaboration where any group of people need to organise an event and this holds big possibilities for coordination in the workplace, and other team environments.

- An image showing the highly usable calendar selection widget. Through which your own and friends calendars can be added to your screen to view and edit.

Facebook

Facebook is the latest and most popular social networking site. Initially started by and for college students to interact with class mates on campus it has since expanded into the rest of the web and is now quite a large and popular site. It allows for all the standard features one would find on a social networking site such as friends, profiles and commenting, but Facebook also offers a unique feature with their ‘Facebook Applications’. These applications are small little third party widgets that a user can create or install others. They offer such interactions as sharing in a common interest such as a TV show, or the ability to rate if you think one of your friends is attractive or not, to take a quiz and compare your results to your friends, and to play games.

I think that Facebook has a great design that inspires interaction with other users of the service. This is accomplished by keeping a very clean, and professional looking and designed website that promotes a high sense of awareness and usability. A user is very much aware of what is going on their circle of friends through the ‘mini news feed’ and ‘news feed’ that appear in a central position directly on the homepage. I felt very highly connected to my peers as it is simple to make new friends through mutual friends, through applications, discussion boards, or searching. Using Facebook was a very positive experience thanks to it offering very enjoyable and attractive service and thanks to this I found that social interaction and contribution were very high. An example of the high awareness and interaction generated by the ‘news feed’ is shown in the image below:

- An cropped screenshot showing the awareness promoting ‘newsfeed’ on my Facebook homepage

Conclusion

One of the key criteria for a modern successful website is the level of user contribution and social interaction of a website and this is supported by a paper from Allison Lee et al entitled ‘Making Websites be Places for Social Interaction’. She found that her research results demonstrated “that social interaction websites are effective in sustaining interest and in fostering social interactions” and that these types of sites have a high usage rate. It is therefore imperative that social interaction be encouraged through good website design and practices such as increasing user awareness and making it easier for a user to interact with others by a site with good usability. The paper ‘Making websites be places for social interaction” also concludes that “A supportive infrastructure alone is insufficient to attract and retain user interests”. These findings are supported by my experiences in that the services that I was not inspired to use where the ones where there was little incentive to share in my experience, or because it was too complicated because of bad website design with things such as very poor awareness of my network. These conclusions were demonstrated to me by my affection for the service offered by Facebook or Google Calendar with their high usability, awareness, personal attraction to the concept and high levels of social interaction and contribution in comparison to the less liked and less successful Last.FM, del.icio.us and Blogger. In the future it is important for all websites to recognise these key criteria of success and implement them. The reason for this is demonstrated in the following article at http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/14/facebook-to-launch-instant-messaging-service/ that states that Facebook is now one of the most successful and popular websites on the web and was recently offered to be purchased for a price upwards of $1 billion and with new socially interactive features such as Instant Messaging.

References

Making websites be places for social interaction, Andreas Girgensohn, Allison Lee, http://www.webcollab.com/alee/papers/cscw02.pdf FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc, IBM TJ Watson Research Centre

Social bookmarking and exploratory search, David Millen, Meng Yang, Steven Whittaker, Jonathan Feinberg, http://www.springerlink.com/content/p46015057028m781/fulltext.pdf IBM Cambridge, MA, USA 02142, Sheffield University, Sheffield, S1 4DP, UK

Facebook to launch instant messaging service, Michael Arrington, http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/14/facebook-to-launch-instant-messaging-service/, techcrunch