Social & Mobile Computing

2011-02-09T05:39:00.002+10:00

Spimes

2009-06-18T01:16:00.004+10:00

Bruce Sterling talks on The Internet of Things: What is a Spime and why is it useful? This one relates to Everyware: Ubiquitous Computing lecture, although not as well as my previous post.

Emotional Design

2009-06-17T03:10:00.002+10:00

A talk by Don Norman on the three ways good design makes you happy. Ties in pretty well with the emotional design lecture.

TED Talk

2009-05-31T23:28:00.002+10:00

Thought this was pretty interesting talk by Dan Ariely. It is interesting how design can effect how we make decisions.

Real interface

2009-05-31T21:12:00.001+10:00

Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo.

JS-Blogger-Client: inserted post

2009-05-20T13:35:00.001+10:00

This is the body of the blog post. I can include HTML tags.

Apple buying out Twitter?

2009-05-06T00:35:00.001+10:00

Hi all,

Check this out...

Can Apple benefit from the twitting going on?

Or, is it going to be a flop purchase.. ?

What do you think? ;)

Regards,
Aaron

On Engineering and Design: An Open Letter

2009-05-01T16:22:00.006+10:00

Microsoft Research Principal Scientist Bill Buxton calls for engineers and user-experience designers to learn to appreciate one another

I mentioned Bill Buxton a few times in class this week. Here's an excellent piece by him on the need for engineers and designers to appreciate each others' expertise. If anyone is still wondering why I wanted project teams to have a mix of backgrounds and perspectives, here's great justification for it.

"Well-intentioned engineers often ask me how they can become designers, or how they can "do" design. A typical question might be something like this: "Can you please share guidelines for maximizing user experience while designing a UI? For instance: When should I use radio buttons instead of drop down bars [to minimize clicks] and so on?"

Read on...

Reflection on reflections

2009-04-19T23:46:00.002+10:00

Hi all,

After reading a heap of these reflective essays tonight (just before the comments are due...) I realise most people have mostly positive things to say about all the sites. This lead me to wonder: Will anyone continue using these sites?

Personally, I use Facebook every day, and will continue to. I also scrobble all my songs to Last.fm, and have for years now. I may peer in on Twitter once in a while, but other than that I will be dropping the rest of them.

What does everyone else think? Anyone fallen in love with these sites?

BECOMING A TWITTER-LEBRITY: THE LEGACY OF SOCIAL COMPUTING.

2009-04-12T12:49:00.002+10:00

INTRODUCTION

Social computing practices offer pertinent insights into social and technological interactions, in addition to the behaviors of users interrelated within these forums. They allude to a sense of connectivity on a global scale, with the promise of omnipresent users no longer divided by cultural boundaries. Users engaging with social software are in many instances, able to sustain relationships with others in diverse geographical and social contexts. Of genuine interest is how and why these connections are established, in addition to understanding the motives in maintaining these interactions. Also of precedence are the popularity of particular users and the rationale behind their social stardom. In a cultural environment heavily influenced by fame and the notion of celebrity, how much does the realm of social computing reflect this, and who are the online stars?

BACKGROUND

Within the current spectrum of social computing are a multitude of microblogging systems allowing users to broadcast short instant messages or micromedia articles featuring image and audio clips. While other social networking tools including Facebook and Bebo have now also incorporated status update services, Twitter is perhaps the most notable of these systems.

Since its inception in 2006, Twitter has reached great heights and become one of the most widely used social networking devices attracting over six million users to date[1]. “In its short history, Twitter has become an important marketing tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses, promising a level of intimacy never before approached online, as well as giving the public the ability to speak directly to people and institutions once comfortably on a pedestal[2].”

Free and readily accessible via the website or with mobile technology, Twitter invites users to “Tweet” by responding to the question “What are you doing?” and in doing so launches them into the “Twitter-sphere” where the replies of others are constantly streamed.

FOCUS

This investigation examines prominent users of social computing networks through a personal reflection of Twitter’s users and its content. Of consideration are the motives of both followers and the followed, with themes of voyeurism and connectivity of key importance. Posed are questions regarding the attraction to prolific posters, known in this instance as Twitter-lebrities, and how these users obtained such status.

REFLECTION

Prior to joining Twitter and becoming a Tweeter, if albeit a rather lax one, I had been mildly aware of the social scene created by its supporters. I knew of others who used it religiously and were dazzled by the results, but believing it required constant updates and, having owned a Facebook account for sometime without ever refreshing my status, I felt that Twitter was perhaps not for me. And then I stepped into the Twitter-sphere…

Strangely enough, my interest in Twitter did not lie with Tweeting. Perhaps it was my somewhat reserved nature, but the idea of publishing intimate details of my life filled me with a sense of dread. I feared that my accounts aided no real social contributions, and that the question of what I was doing was bound to be met with mediocre and staged responses. Broadcasting the contents of my breakfast or rehashing whimsical quips would never be within my grasp. Instead, occasional mundane anecdotes would be the sum total of my contributions to the world of Twitter. To date I have made just eighteen of these.

My Twitter experience began quite humbly by testing the premise of my updates. It was not until I became ill that I truly began to explore the scope that Twitter had to offer. Housebound for the week, I began to seek out familiar faces, and when confronted with a lack of these, I sought more popular figures. I soon discovered the likes of Stephen Fry, David Bowie, Martha Stewart and Russell Brand among others. Most enticing about this exercise was the ability to follow others and gain insight into lives far more interesting than my own.

Within a short space of time I learned that Martha (we were on a first name basis by this stage), was preparing lamb and artichokes for her Easter menu, and that Stephen’s extensive trek around the continents had left him suffering from a rather bad case of jet lag. Perhaps luckily for Stephen, David, Martha, Russell and the others, friendship and followers never have to be reciprocated on Twitter. Unlike Facebook, I can search and follow anyone with a public profile without seeking permission. In this sense, Twitter accommodates for a type of one-way social interaction, meaning that all of these folk remained blissfully unaware of my failed attempts to keep the globe informed of my whereabouts.

If it were anywhere other than within a digital realm, this behavior might seem a little stalker-like, and a restraining order would probably ensue. Given the context of these interactions however, this conduct is perhaps better described as virtual voyeurism, offering a chance to peek into the workings of the minds, or mindlessness in some cases, of those being followed. And whilst voyeurism implies that the viewer is gaining access without knowledge or consent, Twitter legitimizes this desire to pry into the lives of others with its’ public forum. From this perspective, I found that Twitter acted as my own personal news feed - one that is not shaped by tragedy and destruction, but by human transponders. And for me, this is at least part of the universal fascination with Twitter, and gave clue to the totality and rise of the Twitter-lebrity.

New found Twitter fame for those now referred to as Twitter-lebrities, seems to be largely based on large volumes of postings and large numbers of followers. The rationale it would seem is one of quantity not quality. Britney Spears is perhaps the best example of this. Constantly appearing in Twitter’s most followed list[3], her updates are always featured in the third person and detail what can only be described as trivial information about her current tour locations and links to the sales department of her website. The attraction to Britney’s lackluster postings is questionable, as too is the ever-growing popularity of so many others prone to proclaiming such trivialities. Within the Twitter-sphere it would seem, there are no limits on frivolity. Perhaps we find comfort the consistent constant droll of information, or maybe it is the chance at some kind of connectivity with those so distant from us that provides the true attraction to the Twitter-lebrity and the legacy they leave behind.

CONCLUSION

As we locate ourselves along the linear narrative of history, Twitter draws our attentions to the present, with an almost obsessive microscopic accuracy. Streams of information enter our consciousness on an incessant basis, and regardless of the apparent myopic and somewhat vapid nature of these postings, we are drawn to this engagement.

The Twitter-lebrity offers many a chance to forge relationships and partake in conversations that are altogether different to those maintained outside the Twitter-sphere[6]. It is a chance to connect with anyone, anywhere in the world regardless of social status or cultural taboo. And it is this desire for connectivity that has made the concept of the Twitter-lebrity so appealing[4]. Requiring little more than a high frequency of updates, Twitter stardom can be achieved by all and any. It is challenged only in the notion that Twitter-lebrities are required to maintain an existence that can sustain the attention of others, and find the time to Tweet about it. As surmised by Abraham in his writings on becoming an overnight Twitter success: “Growing a social media profile is like growing a coral reef: after seeding the reef, there are so many things that need to happen before a reef blooms. There are many things that can aid the reef: safety, cleanliness, warmth, nutrients, oxygenation, however, the most important things are time and commitment[5].”

Finding said time and commitment is perhaps where the greatest challenge prevails. Maintaining such a profile is indeed a permanent occupation, as witnessed by the awakening of positions for Twitter Ghosts. Described by Cohen[7] and Frommer[8] as recession proof roles, this new means of employment promises that true Twitter-lebrities no longer have to find the time to write about their own fantastical lives, but can pay someone else to do it. And therein lies one of the shortcuts in reaching Twitter stardom: Outsourcing – be it for talent, time or the desire to have someone else constantly Tweeting about you.

REFERENCES

[1] S. J. Stevens. (2008). Twitter Explained. [Online]. Available: http://tweeternet.com/.

[2] The New York Times. (2009). Twitter. [Online]. Available: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/twitter/index.html?8qa&scp=1-spot&sq=&st=nyt.

[3] Twitterholic. (2009). Top 100 Twitterholics Based on Followers. [Online]. Available: http://twitterholic.com/.

[4] R. W. Lucky, "To Twitter Or Not To Twitter? - [reflections]," Spectrum, IEEE, vol. 46, pp. 22-22, 2009.

[5] C. Abraham. (2008). How To Become An Overnight Twitter Celebrity. [Online]. Available: http://chrisabraham.com/2008/12/07/how-to-become-am-overnight-twitter-celebrity/#more-5322.

[6] B. Solis. (2009). The Ties That Bind Us: Visualizing Relationships on Twitter and Social Networks. PR 2.0: The Future of Media and Communication Starts Here [Online]. Available: http://www.briansolis.com/

[7] N. Cohen. (2009). When Stars Twitter, A Ghost May Be Lurking. The New York Times [Online]. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/technology/internet/27twitter.html?_r=2.

[8] D. Frommer. (2009). Celebrity Twitter Ghost Writer: Hot Job For The Recession. [Online]. Available: http://www.businessinsider.com/celebrity-twitter-ghost-writer-hot-job-for-the-recession-2009-3.

Reflection on Social tools and how they let me convey my prefrences.

2009-04-06T22:55:00.001+10:00

Student ID : S4131322

Reflection on Social and Mobile computing tools.

Introduction

The following is a reflection on how the various social tools available would satisfy my needs . It explores what works and what does not work for me as an individual.

Background

The idea of this report is to evaluate the social tools available and see how they fit my lifestyle as well as evaluate the usability and function of such tools.

Focus

The focus on this article is about will be on preferences. How my choice of music ,food and lifestyle is being communicated to others and the other way around . This article will also examine the extent of how such tools help me

Reflection

The key for this reflection is ‘like’ . Do you know what I like?, Do I like what my friends like ?. How do these tools use my preferences in ways that I want it to.

I would like to be able to have all my preferences in one location that is easily accessible and allows me to integrate it with other tools that I use as well as discover new music or websites that my friends like.

Last.FM

I got hooked onto this tool really easily. It starts by letting you enter your favourite artist and then recommends other artist based on your preferences. Isn’t this what ‘Genius’ in ITunes does already?. Well Last.FM is similar but it lets you explore its vast list of music which you can sample. It would be good to have a more social element to this tool. Perhaps to see what my friends like or disliked. Maybe If I knew who else liked The Presets we could all buy the tickets to go and see them in June (as it says in the Events list on Last.FM).

I feel that this tool has real potential, as people would inadvertently start to like it because of the great music you can find on it. Just like the way people who love their iPod. They love it because of the music they put on it.

Does it meet my needs ? : Yes, this tool is excellent. I will start to use it more and explore my taste in music as well as experiment with other genres of music.

Delicio.us

Delicio.us is a social bookmarking tool. It lets you add links to websites and share them amongst your friends. This is a great way for me to share links of websites that I like with my friends, if only they were on delicio.us too. The fact most people are not using it is a strong enough reason for me not to use it. After all tools like Facebook already have similar functions.

Does it meet my needs ? : No, Im not to sure if I want an application specifically for social bookmarking to express my likes and dislikes for websites.

Twitter

I knew that Twitter was big in the US but had no idea what was so great about it. I created an account and went twittering away. I felt that the application was great for communicating bits of information. It just adds another dimension to traditional sms systems where you can broadcast a message to a group of people.

I liked how you could connect your mobile phone and other applications to twitter, it would be a cool too to use if all my friends had it. Again universality ( how many people are using it) seems to be the factor that prevents me from using it further. I am already using Facebook and so are all my friends.

Twitter lets you communicate everything, it does not however focus on your profile or your preferences and your likes and dislikes.

Does it meet my needs ? : No, This is a great idea but im not sure if I want a dedicated tool.

Facebook

When people stop asking you ‘Do you use Facebook?’ and instead ask ‘ What’s your Facebook?’ you know that Facebook is used by almost everyone. This makes it a powerful platform for implementing new social tools. The initial concept of Facebook was to model our social interactions and relationships that we have in the real world to something that is based online and not create something superficial.

I am able to ‘shout’ (Broadcast) what I am doing to everyone around me as well as comment on what others are doing, this functionality overrides some of what twitter offers.

By joining groups and completing my profile, I can communicate what my tastes are as well as meet likeminded people. It does not however give me the ability to explore similar music like

Does it meet my needs? : Yes, its universal and I am able to express my tastes and preferences in a convenient way.

MySpace

My Space had the lead at one time but it isn’t any more. I feel that it took personalisation to a whole new level,a level which made it quite annoying at some point. I liked how you could add what music you liked onto your profile and let others sample it but giving users full control of their pages isn’t a good idea.

Does it meet my needs? : No, too much flexibility isn’t a good thing.

Conclusion

I realised that most of my choices were based on two main themes, Universality and Function.

Even though applications like Twitter were useful, I didn’t want something that only provided a small subset of functions when I had something else that provided a broader range of tools and functions.

I was also not prepared to become a user of a particular tool for the reason that most of my friends are not using it. I am not a fan of the ‘herd mentality’ but I’m not going to start a revolution either.

I would also love to see Facebook and Last.fm integrated together in some way as they would both complement each other.

Us-Tunes: How CSCW Brings Musicians Together.

2009-04-04T02:25:00.001+10:00

By Marek Skalczynski

So you just bought yourself a shiny new guitar. You spend a few months learning to play a few songs and suddenly you decide that you have the talent to jam with the greats. The inner rock god screams a killer vocal line, if only you had a band. You must create this song, but how? Do not fear. The field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work has grown to such tremendous proportions that it can support the weight of your brilliant ideas. The internet today, is alive, with tools that will guide you on your journey; you need only look. Soon you will be the envy of your neighbours.

One of my prime passions is music. The internet has allowed me to network and share with other artists both real-time and asynchronously. Wether trading ideas, asking assistance, or collaborating on a project with multiple people, there are ways to work socially with music. I will be detailing my experiences with a variety of social applications which I have used to communicate and collaborate with other musicians; both locally and around the world. I will talk about these softwares from both a design and technology perspective showing where they succeed and where they fail. I will also cement some thoughts for what I see in the near future, as well as avenues I would like to see developers explore.

There are certainly many software solutions out there. To start off let’s examine the CSCW groupware matrix and see how different music creating/sharing software systems fit in. One of the greatest thrills of being an aspiring musician is the ability to play at the same time with other people who share a passion for creating music. Guitar Hero: World Tour, an interactive and physically involved game for the PlayStation console, allows you to do just that. The software gives the user the option to create their own songs, record their own vocals and upload them for others to download and play. This is a true example of CSCW as cooperative play as well as being a prime example of a same time/same place application. When offline, players of the game are present in the same room and play in cooperative environment to achieve the goal of a perfect performance. The physical feel of the instruments make the user genuinely invest their emotions and contribute to the micro-community of four. However, even with the ability to create custom songs, this is not a serious music creation tool.

We can move away from the physical aspect of same time/same place and consider that a place may be a virtual. Given this, there are a few applications that spring to mind. Particularly, any application that allows the (near)-real-time transmission of sound across the internet. The most famous of these is Skype. Many a time I have used Skype to jam (play or practice together) with friends across the globe in a shared audio space. However the problem with any real-time transmission of audio over even short distances is the latency of the sound. It may be manageable in other real-time internet application domains, such as gaming, but in music it is a kill-switch. One of the fundamentals of music is timing; when two layers of a song (e.g. two instruments) are desynchronised even by a fraction of a second, the resulting combination sounds terrible. This is an example of technology not supporting the activity and instead defining the constraints on the activities that can be performed. The underlying technology is intrinsically linked to the social interactions it can support. This is a serious coordination problem for any real-time music collaboration tool to solve.

However, there is an application called Fruity Loops Collab that gives some hope. It is an extension to a music creation package that allows the user to create everything from drums to vocals and generate an MP3. The Collab extension allows the user to collaborate on a file real-time with others from different places. The key difference between this application and Skype is that Fruity Loops uses loops not streaming audio. The end result is that users modify a looping track which may contain hundreds of layers that always stay synchronised . The sound is generated by the client computer, not transmitted across the network. Only the actions on the sounds and the loops (either a sound file or a format a synthesizer can recreate) themselves are transmitted. The actions in the software are still affected by latency, but the end sound is not. Since the software has been specifically designed for music, the developers have thought about latency and engineered around it. Comparatively, Skype was intended as an internet telephone application and the designers never considered the implications of users trying their software in the music domain.

The Fruity Loops Collab add-on is a good step in the right direction to supporting the need for real-time music collaboration. However I’m finding that people are not using this tool. I know from my personal experience that music creation on the computer is a very time consuming and repetitive activity, unlike live music, where preparation is made beforehand (practicing). Since it is difficult to have long collaborations of many hours, Collab is used more as just a curiosity or a toy to play with, not as a serious tool like the designers intended. Another limitation of Collab is that it will only work for music created digitally or pre-recorded instruments. If bands wish to play live with instruments over a network, then there is no tool to support this kind of collaboration due to the latency issue.

Returning to the Groupware Matrix, let’s examine some Web 2.0 software that allows musicians to communicate at different times in the same (virtual) place. There are many sites out there that support this. These are music sharing sites specifically geared around collaboration and education, with a strong focus on social translucence. My favourite ones are CTG Music, Trax In Space and Sound-Click. They all essentially do the same thing but slight design differences shape the communities in different ways. CTG Music has a strong emphasis on reviewing songs. Users must review 3 other user’s song for every additional song uploaded on the same day. This has created a community focused around a Tic-for-Tack (“you review mine, I’ll review yours”) review system and a strong emphasis on quality. TIS (Trax In Space) has a up-front quick commenting and rating system, making it easy to just post a quick thought on a track. TIS users are more inclined to give feedback on songs compared to CTG users, who prefer to write lengthy reviews less often. Sound-Click, the third site I mentioned, has a very robust ranking system that updates daily based on plays and downloads. This has created a community obsessed with getting high on the charts and staying there. It is interesting to see how the communities are different, not because of the people, but the design choices the developers made years ago.

These sites all have a few things in common that really drive the communities to critical mass, and why they are so successful. Each user has an individual page, like MySpace or FaceBook. Users upload or link songs on this page and are then included on a micro-blog system on the main page. Whenever they update with a new song, they are added to the top of this list. Everyone can have awareness of what their friends are doing using this microblog and the inbuilt friend list feature. This allows every user to at least get some exposure, something that doesn’t happen on MySpace Music; where once an artist profile is created, it is lost to the vacuous search space, never to be seen again. The communities created on music sites are centred on sharing content and collaboration. Close friends can easily be made since they mimic the design of social networking sites. In comparison, social network sites (such as MySpace and FaceBook) have different social etiquette and this can block some interactions due to the way the system is designed. On music sites, each user is contributing their tracks to a community music library, there are more avenues for making friends as the community has a shared presence.

There is one final category in the groupware matrix. This is user interaction at different times in different places. Although it is difficult to differentiate what is the same place and what is a different place when thinking of virtual spaces, I think that Last.fm can fall into this category since most interaction happens asynchronously and in no specific location. In addition to the listening features of the site, a musician can upload their music to the Last.fm servers and have it broadcast across the internet. I’ve found this is a good way to get exposure, but the community does seem isolated among artists. This is a good application for sharing music tastes with friend’s (something that aspiring musicians do a lot), but so far I haven’t found that it that great a tool for sharing your creations. Although there is a feedback interface implemented, the system is centred on music sharing and doesn’t provide much support for musicians to collaborate outside of feedback and messaging. Rather it is more suitable for musicians to sell their albums or promote themselves.

I have examined a few applications that are out there for budding musicians to get their hands dirty. A lot of these applications have focused on a few key concepts and the communities have sprung up around those features. It is obvious that the technology involved also limits the interactions, such as Guitar Hero limiting the user to how they can contribute (due to peripherals), or Skype limiting the user to what cooperative activity they can perform. I expect that in the future there will be more interfacing between instruments and computers, and the lines will blur between digital and physical, allowing more opportunities for interactions between musicians. I think Guitar Hero is an early example of this. I also believe that near-real-time audio applications can work in the music domain if incoming streaming audio is synchronised to a tempo. I also would like to see more mash-ups to reduce the walled-garden effect. This is already happening in social networking sites, but music networking sites are definitely behind in this area – communities are happy in their isolation.

Finally, I would like to see developers taking a more active interest in how people are using their application and allow the users to effect its evolution (For example, Twitter). This is difficult given the limitations of certain technologies, but technology is always changing and many novel solutions await us.

References

Turner, B. & Turner, P., & Turner S. (2005) Designing Interactive Systems, Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Limited.

Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Retrieved April 3, 2009, from the Wikipedia web site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_supported_cooperative_work#Different_time.2Fdifferent_place

CTG Music. Retrieved April 3, 2009, from the CTG Music web site http://www.ctgmusic.com

Sound Click. Retrieved April 3, 2009, from the Sound Click web site http://www.soundclick.com

Trax in Space. Retrieved April 3, 2009, from the Trax in Space web site http://www.traxinspace.com

Reflection by Sam Handyside 40277518

2009-04-04T00:10:00.000+10:00

My reflection is concerned with the motivation behind joining and utilising social networking sites (SNS), as well as the risks and benefits of doing so. From my experience, I was reluctant to join sites such as MySpace or Facebook, believing that too much personal information would be revealed. I was less apprehensive about sites like Last.fm or Flickr as they require more specific information but, generally speaking, it is less sensitive and I can choose which content I supply. Not having had any experience with Twitter, I was not sure what to make of it at first. Based on personal experience and research into the area, I was able to better understand the attraction of SNS and the needs they fulfill. However, I was alarmed at a number of privacy and copyright issues involved, and these confirmed some of the dangers I suspected these sites harboured.

Background
The Web 2.0 revolution put the users at the forefront; sites were created around the idea of user-created content where people are encouraged to share their ideas and opinions, and their needs are what drive SNS's. The main sites I'll be referring to are Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm.

Facebook
I imagine the majority of people reading this blog know about Facebook. It is intended to facilitate socialisation and sharing of information, as well as providing third-party applications. These applications extend the functionality of Facebook, enabling people with similar interests to form groups or participate in various activities. Facebook was not required as part of Social & Mobile Computing this semester, but I already had an account and have had the most hands-on experience with this site. Having said that, I am not a heavy user of Facebook. I check two or three times a week, most weeks, but have been known to go over a month without checking it.

Twitter
Twitter I had only learned about at the start of this course, but in the intervening weeks it seems to have grown more and more ubiquitous. Being a microblogging service, with a limit of 140 characters per message, it requires very little time and effort to use, so the barrier to entry is remarkably low. It is further lowered by the openness of communication it offers; there are no set topics that must be addressed, and no strict norms nor procedures that must be followed (Bouman et al., 2008). My personal experience with Twitter is minimal but it has been a major focus of many studies, with some very interesting insights into the social nature of people and will be used to demonstrate an example of some of the dangers to privacy that online sharing can introduce. Ironically, the ease at which information can be gathered from Twitter means there is a wealth of real-world statistics to analyse.

Last.fm
Last.fm primarily allows users to upload their music playlists and then offer suggestions of other bands and songs they may enjoy. I personally liked this idea as I have started to grow tired of my own collection and wanted to explore other musical alternatives. While anonymity and confidentiality can not be assured by the site (http://www.last.fm/legal/terms), I felt safer using this site as I only needed to supply the kind of music I listen to, and it also led me to further research into the benefits of social networking.

“Who gives a tweet?”
The purpose of this reflection is to elaborate the attraction to SNS's and the implications they have on personal privacy. When I think of sites like MySpace and Facebook offering me a chance to share my life with the world, I would always ask myself “Why would anyone care?” Being rather reclusive in nature, I don't enjoy sharing many details about my life to someone unless I know them fairly well. How many of you know where I went to school, what my hobbies are, or when my birthday is? However, after some convincing, all this information is now on Facebook and can be looked at by anyone rather than being known only to those closest to me. Facebook, like Twitter, offers an opportunity to learn more about a person, albeit in an impersonal way. There is now less reliance on direct communication to find out what kind of music someone likes, or what someone did over the weekend. Through SNS's, I find that I know more about the activities of my friends (my actual friends, not the miscellany that occupies my 'friends list') without needing to engage them directly. I therefore appreciate the usefulness that these sites offer, but I personally feel that the benefit is limited to my circle of friends, and have little desire to see or be seen by people I don't know.

Who can see my information?
However, it concerns me that by offering personal information so freely it gives someone an opportunity to view this information and use it to cause me inconvenience or perhaps harm. You would think that that would mean I would thoroughly read the Terms of Use to know who had access to my personal information before agreeing to them. I, like many others, simply did not bother (Krishnamurthy & Wills, 2008). I instead naively trusted that Facebook would not allow my information to be viewed by anyone outside of my friends list: those I explicitly gave permission to. I also recently learned that all the content that I post is copyrighted by Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/terms.php), technically giving them the right to treat that content as theirs. This means they are essentially free to sell any information I give them, should they decide to do so, however that act would undermine the premise of Facebook, and I consider it unlikely given the response to the proposed change to their terms of service (http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5757485.ece). I remain particularly wary of third-party applications that, while seemingly harmless, require access to your full profile despite only needing a portion of the information (Krishnamurthy & Wills, 2008). As such, I tend to avoid much of the extra functionality that Facebook provides through fear of misuse of personal information.

What can they do with my information?
Another cause for concern is that it is possible to infer the identities and glean more information about users by cross-referencing various SNS's (Motahari et al., 2007, Narayanan & Shmatikov, 2009). To take our esteemed lecturer as an example, I used information from LinkedIn, Twitter, the UQ website and a few others to research his life. I was able to deduce the names of his brother, son and daughter, where she attends school and what grade she is in, where and which night his son has soccer training, his home phone number, his home address, as well as his educational and vocational experiences all in the space of a little under an hour. All this information is found in the public arena and I broke no laws, but I honestly felt as though I was intruding on his life and did not want to venture any further. I can only imagine what someone could find out if they had no such qualms, and what they then may do with that information.

Benefits of sharing
To be fair, there are benefits to sharing information online. By sharing when and where I went to school I was able to catch up with people I had not seen in years. This, for me, was the most useful aspect of Facebook. It was easy to add a few friends, and then see more friends that they had added to quickly find all the people you like. It also helps with organising social events and keeping in contact with friends who live interstate. It was not surprising to me to find that most social networking relationships are based on pre-existing relationships (Java et al., 2007). These are not always 'friendships' in the traditional sense; many followers in Twitter are fans of blogs, celebrities, as well as following online radio stations and news outlets (Krishnamurthy et al. 2008). This aspect of Twitter I find unappealing. Apart from the very few entertainers who I can respect, there are no celebrities whose thoughts I would ever want to hear. Interestingly, Twitter has expanded from its original design to incorporate more features as driven by its users (Java et al., 2007). Apart from the typical updates of what people are doing, it is also used to share links and spread news (Java et al., 2007). The response times for breaking news stories can be well ahead of the recognised news media (http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2008/05/06/breaking-news-twitter-style/). In this way, I believe it is possible to think of the posts as a current, constantly adapting Zeitgeist; at any given moment it is a snapshot of what people are doing and thinking across the globe, or at least North America (Krishnamurthy et al. 2008).

Honest representation
Up until this point I have been treating the idea of users' information as accurate and honest. Yet the relative obscurity offered online means you can present yourself as you want to be seen (Bouman et al., 2008). I know I chose to omit some of the more controversial musical selections from my Last.fm profile. My general username, too, was chosen not only because no-one else would think of it, but it also represents an aspect of my character I am willing to share. SNS's allows people to reveal only certain features about themselves and may fulfill some need to appear a certain way to others (Bouman et al., 2008). I understand why people do this, but I can't help but think it is counterproductive to the openness of the social networking ethos. However, in the real world people also present a certain social identity, and online networking is just an extension of that (Bouman et al., 2008).

So why do people use SNS's?
While I can't say for sure why other people use SNS's, from personal experience I use them as a way to augment my, admittedly limited, social life. Despite the risks, it is convenient to have a reminder that there is party coming up, who is going to be there and all of the necessary party details. It helps that a few of my closer friends and family members use Facebook, or I doubt I would ever use it, as researchers confirm (Java et al., 2007).

Conclusions
Despite my initial apprehension about using online social networking sites, I can see why they are popular and will continue to use them in the future. I still have concerns about what information I reveal and who may have access to it, but I think the risks, though quite real, are unlikely to affect me. As with all technology, it is the people that use that define its place in the world. SNS's are there to augment, not replace or diminish, one's current social life. After all, socialising can not be done with technology alone.

Bibliography
Bouman, W, Hoogenboom, T, Jansen, R, Schoondorp, M, de Bruin, B & Huizing, A 2008, 'The Realm of Sociality: Notes on the Design of Social Software', Sprouts: Working Papers on Information Systems, vol. 8, no. 1, pp.3-25.

Java, A, Song, X, Finin, T & Tseng, B 2007, 'Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities', Joint 9th WEBKDD and 1st SNA-KDD Workshop '07, August 12, San Jose, California, USA.

Krishnamurthy, B, Gill, P & Arlitt, M 2008, 'A Few Chirps About Twitter', WOSN'08, August 18, Seattle, Washington, USA.

Krishnamurthy, B & Wills, CE 2008, 'Characterising Privacy in Online Social Networks', WOSN'08, August 18, Seattle, Washington, USA.

Motahari, S, Manikopoulos, C, Hiltz, R & Jones, Q 2007, 'Seven Privacy Worries in Ubiquitous Social Computing', Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, July 18-20, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

Narayanan, A & Shmatikov, V 2009, 'De-anonymizing Social Networks', http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0903/0903.3276v1.pdf, last viewed 3/04/2009.

Online Identity and Cross-Sex Relations

2009-04-03T23:48:00.000+10:00

...in 70 140 character chunks.

This article outlines key features of online identity and details a personal experience creating an online identity of a different gender.

Considering the subject of this course, I'll experiment being cohesive & expressive within the 140 character constraints of a Tweet or SMS.

Account and password combinations are the cornerstone of identity in the read/write internet.

It's not long after starting to use the internet you will encounter a website requiring you to register an account with an email account.

Many websites lock down access to features which allow you to add/edit content without creating an account with them.

An email account is your online id card/passport. It provides a central identification point from which you can create other identities.

An email account is usually the only sure means a website can communicate with you external to their own communication systems, if any.

This is safe under the assumption: only you and people you authorise, have the account + password combination to access your emails.

Why do sites want users identity before you can participate?

● Statistics Gathering
Knowing more about their users allows websites to provide better service or to send them (un)solicited information.

● Prevent Internal Identity Fraud
One account per pseudonym & per email address. This only negates fraud within the system though.

● Accountability
Positive activities are encouraged if reputation or other rewards can be gained, as is explained here: [1]

A practical example is Q/A website http://stackoverflow.com which makes use of quantitative 'rep' to grant additional features to users.

Malicious activities may be deterred (not prevented) if users' actions are directly linked to a user's email accounts. [2]

There have been cases where this has been used to reprimand users: http://tinurl.com/2btnu See the entry below 'no more tears'. Warning NSFW.

● Barrier of Entry
User investment deters thoughtless participation. The negative effect is restricting use by some legitimate human users. [3]

Registration processes should prevent access by simple spambots. Adding additional measures such as captcha can thwart most spambots.

You DO create unique passwords for every site, right?

As users increasingly utilise more online accounts, either recall of usernames and passwords becomes an issue, or security becomes an issue.

Tools are becoming available to reduce barrier of entry and memory load issues by unifying online identity. Many sites, one login.

EG Blogger allows login with a Google account, flickr with your YahooID. Up-and-coming OpenID is similar, but not tied to a specific vendor.

Unified online identity is interesting: until now, a user's activities and identity couldn't be tracked reliably across websites.

Whether this ability will have an overall positive or negative effect for users will be seen when these services gain higher adoption rates.

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

This Peter Steiner cartoon was published in The New Yorker, June 5 1993: http://is.gd/qkqD
The inherent anonymity in technology-assisted communication allows us to invent identities to present to our peers, across many communities.

Unlike real life, online registration usually requires very little, if any, background or fact checking, unless of course, money is involved.

The internet gives every user absolute freedom to create identities that conflict with our 'in real life' (IRL) identity.

This could be likened to the manner in which comedian Barry Humphries plays the contrasting personae of 'Dame Edna' and 'Sir Les Patterson'.

The relative anonymity and ease of creation/destruction of online identities is one of the major draw cards of online communication. [1]

By creating a number of corresponding online accounts and media, I created a convincing alternative online identity for myself.

“You play video games, you make dance music and you're hot?”
“I also drink beer”
“Omg I love you”
(Paraphrased from a real online chat)

In the summer-break of 2004, I saw little of my flatmates or my friends, so I longed for social interaction and some competitive violence.

Enter Soldier of Fortune and Counter-Strike. These games provided much of the competitive violence, but too little social interaction.

I was quite talkative within games, trying to make conversation with my fellow male gamers but none were particularly receptive.

To encourage interaction I simply changed my name within the game to that of my current girlfriend Amanda, the beginning of my new identity.

I was simply me, but people perceived me as a girl. “Amanda” was a friendly, easygoing musician who drank beer and played video games.

This persona came quite naturally: aside for a few alterations to make me believable, I didn't pretend to change my gender, just my sex. [4]

Initially there was some doubt about my sex, but I negotiated to have real Amanda speak on my behalf on Ventrillo, a VOIP system for gamers.

Upon hearing that “Amanda” had a female voice, even the most sceptical were convinced. I wasn't the first player to make such false claims.

The effort I went to being convincing was extensive. I evolved the identity for over a year, actively using email & social network accounts.

This 'female gamer' identity opened many gaming doors for me. For the first time ever I was invited to join clans, play in tournaments, etc.

Relationship of False Pretense

Through “Amanda” I developed close friendships with many gamers. We exchanged original music, chatted and battled. Though it was not normal.

I just thought of them as friends, but the regular suggestive, rude comments about removing my garments and taking photos was disconcerting.

The rude comments got me pondering, how do women tolerate this onslaught of pickup lines and whether any self-respecting woman is convinced.

“Amanda” also made close female friends too. Chatting with them over MSN, I noticed: girls do not speak to girls the way they speak to guys.

This might be obvious to some, but it was real eye-opener, experiencing this from a female perspective. No judgement or defensive reactions.

If the conversation's premise is “trialling you as a potential partner”, conversation can be less like communication and more like a battle.

This experience is a good example of the uneasiness that uncertainty & sexual tension creates in many cross-gender relationships. [5]

Meeting new people occurs regularly online, so this tension is more prevalent, as there's the constant looming thought: “Is he/she the one?”

Assimilating “Amanda”

Eventually, playing as “Amanda” became a natural thing to do. I would forget I was not different, just a guy playing a game with other guys.

When another girl logged in, I would be relieved: “Great, another girl playing online.” only to realise “Hang on, what am I thinking?”

It became too strange one day when I unthinkingly gave my number to a guy so we could get beer someday. “Hang on, what if he calls?” He did.

Only after a confusing conversation to an unknown caller, I realised what happened. I was busted and “Amanda” disappeared completely.

Reflecting on the experience, the draw-card was having a reputation. Taking on a female identity instantly made me stand out from the crowd.

I stopped playing those games, it just wasn't the same experience starting anew under a fresh nickname, with no reputation.

Conclusion

This article demonstrates how simple it is to create and live a fairly complex social life, through a completely fabricated online identity.

It was an interesting social experiment, raising some questions which could be researched further:

How much do we take for granted that the people we meet online and in real life, really are who they say they are?

How much evidence do people need to provide before we believe, especially when we have no reason to doubt their claims.

In real life people can detect cues, like timbre of voice, to tell if you're lying, while creating a lie online is relatively unproblematic.

Immersing myself in an alternative identity allowed me to socialise from perspectives I would not normally be capable of experiencing.

I wonder if in the future, unifying services like OpenID will become more policed, forcing one to one relationships between user and person.

On communicating within the 140 character maximum: I feel I've been effective. It forced me to be concise with my ideas and avoid rambling.

It allows only for a regular sentence followed by a short sentence, or for one long sentence. Extraneous details had to be left out.

Working within these constraints has been a good exercise and I feel like my writing has improved because of it.

Tim Oxley 2009

[1] Grohol, J., “Anonymity and Online Community: Identity Matters”, A List Apart Apr. 4 2006
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/identitymatters/ (2 Apr. 2009)

[2] “Reputation Parent”- Yahoo! Design Pattern Library http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/parent.php?pattern=reputation (2 Apr. 2009)
[3] Lessig, Lawrence “Code: Version 2.0” Basic Books, 35-36
[4] “What is the difference between sex and gender?” Monash University 11 Sept. 2006 http://www.med.monash.edu.au/gendermed/sexandgender.html (2 Apr. 2009)
[5] “On being 'Just Friends': The frequency and impact of sexual activity in cross-sex friendships” (2000) 226-227

Reflection on Social network

2009-04-03T23:46:00.002+10:00

Van Hong Quan 4187853

Introduction

The rapid development of information and internet has lead human to a new era of social communication. Human are trying to find vary of method to communicate with other more efficiency. From physically communication, people gradually switch to digital interaction and together with internet, it expend in a dizzy speed. Internet relay chat( IRC), instant message, and now social network, human has entered, joint and now spread themselves into the world of internet. It plays an important role of bringing people closer.

As human lifestyle is becoming faster and faster, we find harder to physical communicate and exchange information between each other, therefore social network is created as a part of the information link between people. With the assistance of social network, information is updated faster and more efficiency.

Studying CSCW and experienced in some of social network provides me some idea about how these community impacts human’s life, how these tools are able to support our connection and affect to the world

Background

Twitter
Twitter (2) is a micro-blogging which was built to answers a very simple question: ”What are you doing?” (2)Twitter is a famous service that people choose to use as a method to communicate with their social online. By using twitter users are able to notice their friends what they are doing via SMS. Twitter message is based on text message which allow user to send only short message in 140 character, therefore it often be describes as the “SMS of Internet.”

Delicious
A very powerful online bookmark tool which allows users to tag and save their favorite sites online. Delicious (4) represents your taste of World Wide Web. Through Delicious users are not only able to add and manage bookmarks but also able to view and compare with others. The website that you save is subscribe to several tag therefore Delicious can provides you other website related to the tag or other user who had tag the same website as you. From there users are able to build their network includes friends and other users who has some common tastes.

Flickr
Flickr(3) is an online gallery that allow user to upload, display, and share photos with others. Flickr is a greatly social community to “Share your photos, Watch the world”. It provides user a lot of functionality such as upload image, create Flickr stream to display on web-blog. Moreover, Flickr is not only and online store but also a tool for user to edit their images online. Recently, this famous sharing site has launched new features which enable its user to upload their short video clips.

Last.Fm
“Based on what you listen to. Last.fm recommends you new music.”(4)
Last.Fm(4) implemented a “scrobbler” to keep track of what are you listening on your player to understand your listening music and compare with other to provide you some recommendation. Last.Fm built database of its user’s favorite songs, arties genre. Based on that database, Last.Fm is able to compare the taste of listening to the music of different user and then recommended them other user’s that has some common tatse.

Blogger
Blogger is a personal webpage service which provides users a place to build profile, upload and share article or writing about themselves. Blogger is known as an online diary which users can write and post a blog about their daily activities or feeling. Blogger also provides a lot of tools and effect so that user can modify to decorate their page. Blogger is also known as a site which compatible with other social network community. Users are able to install a Last.Fm player so that their friends can listen to their favorite songs. A Flickr photos stream which update the latest photo that user want to share is also able to display on Blogger. Delicious account is also be able to subscribe as a RSS to post on blog so that whenever your friends go to blog would know what you have just bookmarked.

Focus

People attempts to use anytime by any means to communicate and share information with each others. These 5 sites above is not everything belong to social communication network but they are some of the most impressive sites that contribute a bigger part of the market. In this article based on my experience in these tools, i will focus on how they impact human life and how people use these tools to join themselves into the World Wide Web.

Reflection

Twitter
By using twitter users are able to notice their friends what they are doing at anytime and anywhere. Twitter is a silly idea if you actually consider it as a machine that has only one mission is to ask answer “what are you doing?” However, the idea just not only this, it is the way people get close to each other. Try to see thought then you will understand the role of Twitter. When you are intend to do something important and need encourage from your friend. We might not know how many people are actually reading your message, and how many people are really interested in it, but human always think the good side therefore the more people are following them on Twitter, the more people know what they are doing which also encourage them so much.

People are using Twitter for many purpose but most of them are fore individuals. I have had a very little experience in using Twitter therefore I’m using Twitter as a RSS where I can update the latest information of very few of my friends and some people that I concern. After a few weeks interact with Twitter I realize that it is not only a tool for people to upload information but also an efficient method to search information and update information. The information I searched on Twitter is not highly accurate but some how it is the latest news.

However, Twitter is being abused. Users are using Twitter to send ridiculous or spam information. Twitter player are spending a lot of time to reply their friends in order to get connect with their follower while their families are getting tired of being witnessed their relative addicted to message and neglect the work.

Flickr
In the era of digital, taking a thousand of photos is not a problem. With a digital camera, it cost you nothing you to take as many picture as you want. However, the problem is how do people are able to share their photo with friends and family. It is inconvenience to send the image through email or portable hard drive and Flickr is the solution. Flickr users are able to upload their images and share with other friends from everywhere. Flickr provides a lot of feature to support user upload and display their images online.

Flickr has changed human lifestyle in many ways. Before, pictured was taken by manual camera and people had has to print in order to view them. And even with a digital camera, we still had to print out to send or share with friends in other places. Internet helps us to send photos through email but it still not enough for sharing. Since Flickr was developed, people are able to share a huge amount or maybe unlimited of picture. Flickr has provided their users emotion to get more and more creative in taking pictures. Photograph on Flickr not only has spiritual value but also actual value. “Mr. Klein said that Getty charges on average between $500 and $600 for “rights managed” images”(1)

Last.Fm
If blog is your feeling then last.fm is your listening. Last.fm represents what you are listening to and what is your music taste. Last.fm builds profiles based on user’s habit. Therefore the first time after installed Last.fm into my computer, I tried to listen to the music on Last.fm but all I got was some random song that I never heard they did not related to my favorites at all. Last.fm disappointed me at first so I stop to listen to it and switch to listen to the music on my own library. However, after a few weeks when I bored to listen to my outdated library, I tried Last.fm to find something new for me and I was really amazing about it, the music now are much better, there is some songs that I had loved but I not even on my computer. Since then I realized that Last.fm profile is not what music you storing but what song you listening. The more you listen to the music, the more accuracy your recommend.

Last.fm was first build for user to share music, there for without social communication, it is nothing. What made the website popular is the way it provides you music. Last.fm analyzes your habit of listening to the music, compare with other users then recommend you to listen to other user playlists. It plays an important role in broadcasting your hearing. By using install “audioscobbler” in your computer, you are agreed to upload your information of hearing, your friends and other users are able to view your profile to see how your music taste.

Delicious
Delicious helps you to express your taste of internet. “Surf net” is now becoming a part of our life. Word wide web is another world for me. Everyday I have to search a lot of information of internet but it is hard to remember and keep track of all website that I’m interested in. Hence, what I did before is that I added to favorite or bookmark of the web browser for later usage. As the time gone by, my favorite collection became more and more messy and it was difficult for me to remember and search the link that I need. It’s even worse when i used other computer or after I restored my hard-drive; everything gone. Life is much better for me I found Delicious is very helpful for me to manage my bookmark. The problem has been solved in a simple way.

Delicious also support user in sharing and searching for information. I have never thought that I would be able to share all my favorite sites to my friends as well as view theirs such easy as it is now. My friends do not even have to ask me whether i have any website that might interest them. All they need is to explorer my collection on their network. Explorer my bookmark collection my give them some idea of what I am concerning and my habit of surfing net.

Using Delicious search sometimes may result much faster and easier than Google. I am able to either search by tag or explorer my network to the results which is more specific to my concern than Google.

Blogger
Blogger is your home on the internet world. It is where you express yourself, your characteristic and feeling. A blog is where people know as your profile. It contains information about you, It is considered as a daily which might be private or public to share with your friends. At first I felt shy to post blog to expose myself on the internet, but then I realized that every time I post a blog about my feeling, I get feedback from my friends, which means much for me. It show me that my friends are always beside and aware on me. Since then i started to writes blog about myself but in a humorous way so that my friends will get more emotion on reading my blog-posts and it give me not only memory but lot of laugh when I read them.

Using Blogger I am also able to expose my characteristic. I lot of feature that help me to connect my blog with other social network such as Last.Fm. I normally, add a Last.Fm player on my blogspot to share my favorite music with my friends. Flickr also provide a Flickr stream which a can share some of my picture to my friends and it is automatically updated every time I add new picture on my Flickr account. Blogger is the most efficiency tools for me to express myself onto the world of web 2.0.

Conclusion

People are becoming increasingly dependent on internet social network. A research based on 1,000 Internet users, said that most of these people can not live without internet more than 5 days. The electronic equipment for information exchange occupies an important position in human life; it dominates almost our daily activities. Rely too much on the internet makes people become passive; they spend hours using the Internet to update information about themselves but get rid of other usual relationship. Concentrate virtual life lead human to the negative sides of social communication network. The more time people consume on internet Consume a lot of time on the internet the further they get to the real world. The purpose social network is no longer connecting people but carrying them further to the physical interaction.

Reference

1. Miguel Helft – last modified 2008 – Available on
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/great-photo-on-flickr-getty-images-might-pay-you-for-it/

2. Twitter – Available on
http://twitter.com/

3. Flickr – Available on
http://www.flickr.com/

4. Delicious – Available on
http://delicious.com/

5. Last.Fm – Available on
http://www.last.fm/

6. kochm - last modified 07-Jun-2004 – Available on
http://telekooperation.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/cscw/

7. Mr.Tweet- “What is your use for Twitter?” – last modified 23-March-2009 - Available on
http://blog.mrtweet.net/what-is-your-use-for-twitter

8. Anonymous - last modified 3 April 2009 – Available on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

9. . Anonymous - last modified 3 April 2009 – Available on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last.fm
10. Bogdan Popa - People Can't Live Without Internet - last modified 6th of December 2007
http://news.softpedia.com/news/People-Can-039-t-Live-Without-Internet-73037.shtml

Managing Social Clutter

2009-04-03T23:45:00.000+10:00

Adrian Cahill- 41223370

Introduction and Focus

I am normally a quite private person but manage to keep a basic Facebook profile to communicate with friends and family; which is not an unusual situation (see fig 1). In terms of this reflection it is important to keep this in mind when considering my perspective on features and experiences as they would undoubtedly be different from those of a person that has more experience with (and inclination to use) such programs and sites.

Fig 1- Mean responses to how likely respondents were to do the following. Higher scores equal more likely. [1]

The purpose of social software (from the perspective of the example sites listed below) can be thought of as primarily to achieve a certain communication goal; such as shouting your immediate thoughts or posting pictures from a recent holiday. From the viewpoint of a user of these types of social networks, the cost of the time and effort entered into the system versus the benefits of increased social connectivity and the achievement of certain communication goals must be weighed.

Given this, the main article intends to inspect the profit gained by social networking sites, measured by increased social connectivity and happiness, whilst considering the time and energy requirements required to maintain them. I intend to show how for a basic user such as myself, there is a disparity of work and benefit when maintaining a large number of separate, specialised social network profiles on different sites and that given this background; it is a superior practice to maintain a smaller number of sites with a greater number of more simplified applications. This is justified with an example showing that with the increase in the number of applications used; a user is restricted to communicating in less detail or less frequently then would be desirable. A contrasting example is also shown where I have been required to communicate in more detail which is used to explain that the simplest solution is not necessarily the best, and that a balance is needed for optimal use of social software to occur.

The following sites are used as examples of social software that achieve particular communication goals:

Flickr- http://www.flickr.com

Flickr is a photo and video sharing website, but does include some social aspects such as adding friends and organising groups to form networks. Adding photos and videos is an easy task in this program though I found little reason to do so other than to distribute large numbers of photos to family and friends simultaneously. Regardless it requires very little maintenance

One important difference with using Flickr over grouped social sites such as Facebook is that you can view uploaded images/video without having an account with the site, which is important if you wish to reach an audience outside of people you personally know (or otherwise have social connections to).

Blogger- http://www.blogger.com

Blogger performs a function which is really quite self-explanatory; it allows you to blog. In a social context, people can read, comment, co-author and manage blogs but it is a simple concept for a simple application. However I can see no real reason for maintaining a blog on this site for social reasons, other sites with blogging capabilities (such as Facebook) have vastly greater social capabilities.

Twitter- http://twitter.com

Twitter provides an outlet for your simplest, instinctively posted thoughts and has grown a reputation as being an ungodly waste of time and energy, attracting people to “randomly brag about their unexceptional lives” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w). While this is the sort of communication I use social networking sites for most, having a profile that only does this seems unnecessarily inefficient.

Yahoo pipes- http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

This site can be used to fiddle with feeds from other sites. It can be considered a way to organise data rather than having a social aspect. It is mentioned because when combined with the previous example sites it provides very similar functionality to Facebook (described below), however it is not examined in any great detail.

Facebook- http://www.facebook.com
Facebook is the social networking site I am most familiar with, and is used throughout this reflection as an example of a site that performs a (very) large number of generic functions to its users. The sites main purpose is to form social networks alone, and this is represented well by the features it uses to link people together such as a tool that displays your friends-friends in a very 6 degrees-esque fashion. All tools easy to use (around 85% stating ease-of-use to be easy or very easy [2]) and readily approachable; asserting the success of the site.

I use this site to stay in contact with friends and family. I can choose to do this by making short comments on my mood (like twitter), blog posts (like blogger), uploading photos or videos (like flicker) as well as many other things that are the sole focus of other sites. In addition to this, applications can be installed to extend the functionality even further. It takes very little of my time to keep this site up to date and that is quite important in the context of this article.

It should be noted that when I discuss Facebook throughout this reflection, I refer to sites with grouped social software as a whole, not just this site alone. There are many other sites that are based on a similar premise such as Myspace or Bebo that can be used almost interchangeably, just as there are alternatives to the other examples. I refer to Facebook specifically as it is the program to which I am, as stated earlier, most familiar.

Reflection

“Products should include both the functional pragmatic aspects as well as the positive ‘emotional’ and ‘hedonic’ user experiences to be successful”[2]. This is the balance that is the main focus of this article. While maintaining websites for social reasons, a person should both be able to achieve communication goals and enjoy the experience at the ratio they choose. For me, that involved simplifying the ways in which I communicate through these sites, discussed below.

The first, most obvious comment to deal with is that maintaining a simpler portfolio of social profiles is that it is easier and more time efficient then maintaining multiple profiles across multiple websites. Also, assuming that each site has separate passwords for security, the added headache of remembering login details (including changing passwords on a regular basis) can get out of hand if you want to achieve anything more than the most simplistic of goals with basic security; however many are known to forgo security in the sake of ease of use. However, a perspective often overlooked is the sheer quantity of data that would need to be processed from multiple sources which I have experienced at my expense.

Over the internet in the past, email had been widely used as the primary source of communication. With the advent of social software however this has changed dramatically in recent years (see fig 2) and I have personally experienced a large increase in the amount of information I have to process on a regular basis. At one point I was maintaining simultaneous profiles on MSN (Hotmail, messenger, games), Gmail (email, groups and other posting sites), Yahoo (games and as a junk mail box, UQ (email, Sinet and all the other lovely applications), Facebook, Photobucket (similar to Flickr), several MMORPG accounts, Twitter, a blog and with the digitisation of many company’s help desks, various bank, insurance and with other mundane businesses. I am not a social person and have known people that maintain many more.

Fig 2- 2007-2008 Internet population ratings (Nielsen Online’s ‘Member Community’ category includes both social networking and blogging websites)

It eventually got to the point where I simply did not have the time to check all accounts and update all my details. I lost contact with relatives and old school friends, some accounts even became inactive and a major reason for this is that I was simply unable to maintain them effectively. The only answer I could find was to simplify; restricting myself to single accounts that provide multiple features. For instance Facebook can cover social networking, blogging, twittering and picture and video uploads, while a MSN email account can cover personal email, a login for Google Groups and reluctantly a junk mail inbox. Of course comes at a cost of lessened functionality, and restricts the amount of people that can view your information, but I did not need the features I lost which is the idea behind this article.

The end result is that that I now am in regular contact with friends and family, and I am not stressed by the amount of work I have to do to keep my social networking applications up to date.

Facebook, as described above, provides all of the basic functionality of the example applications, so the question is why would people use these alternatives at all?

Take another personal experience as an example, my needs of social software are usually small, yet recently I needed to distribute a sizeable (over 500 Mb) amount of photos and videos to a group of friends and family. Now it should be obvious enough by now that I favour Facebook, but most of the people in this group did not have an account, which would mean that they would have to sign up, and add me as a friend; which I doubted many would bother to actually do for such little perceived benefit. The functionality I needed, however, could be filled by Flickr, which allows direct linking to the stream of photos without logging in. This way both people using and not using Facebook could view these, which is an example of when user needs are exceeded, needs which can be filled by other, more detailed programs and which is the exact opposite of simplifying.

Conclusion

It can be seen that specialised use cases can arise when the simplified needs of a basic user are exceeded and additional functionality is required to perform a more specific goal. However this need is in conflict with the initial need for greater simplicity in the methods of communication within social networks. While these two examples contrast the need for simplicity, with the need for functionality, they also show that there is no clean, absolute solution to this problem. As the needs of a user change, so does the amount of effort they are willing and able to provide to this form of communication. Providing a solution to these competing problems is far beyond the scope of this reflection, it is merely meant as a discussion of the problems operating in this environment presents. It is left as an exercise to the reader to find a happy medium for themselves.

Bibliography

[1] Lampe, C., Ellison, N., Steinfield, C. (2006) A face(book) in the crowd: social Searching vs. social browsing, Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work, Table 2, p3

[2] Hart, J., Ridley, C., Taher, F., Sas, C., Dix, A. (2008) Exploring the facebook experience: a new approach to usability, Proceedings of the 5th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: building bridges, section 3.3 p2, "Pleasure" p3

[3] Nielson Company (2009), Global Faces and Networked Places. Figure 1, p3

Marketing by tweet! The future?

2009-04-03T23:35:00.001+10:00

s4144082

William Eggleton

When I first was told about what it was that twitter does I resisted joining strongly. Until doing COMP3505 and having to join I was very much against the idea of useless updating of “What are you doing?” all the time and just filling up everyone’s head with more pointless rubbish. However after signing up I found myself ‘tweeting’ all the time. There are many mislaid ideas about the productivity potential for micro-blogging sites, in this case twitter. Twitter provides both an individual and commercial communication tool. I’m going to explore a bit about the idea of twitter being used as a commercial communication tool.

For those of you who don’t already know, Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that allows users to answer the question “What are you doing?” constantly, within 140 characters. Some people do use twitter to report the uninteresting rubbish that they are actually doing like “doing the dishes” or “walking to the bus” but many others use it for sharing links of interesting things they have found on the web as well as a little bit of personal/business info.

Many commercial applications of Twitter are already evident, including politicians positing updates like Barack Obama did throughout his campaign. The BBC, Apple, online retailer Woot, and many more post regular updates throughout the day. These are just a few of the companies that already use twitter to promote their products. The sort of things businesses can use twitter for are: news items, special offers with coupon codes, business news etc.

Twitter also provides a search function which most certainly is a very useful tool in both personal and commercial instances. For instance today I found out that BMW made a customer unhappy and he Twittered about it. I learned that Weather Underground has some really cool iPhone application and that the chocolate cake at Macaroni Grill is deadly.

As a business, researching if your company is getting any tweets can provide invaluable feedback from actual clients if they like/dislike your products or service. This is just another feature of twitter that can be used highly effectively to research for your commercial gain.

When creating a personal brand, the key is not to see it as an individual post more an overall impression and value that is made over time. Each entry is just the beginning of an idea for the overall picture.

Twitter is the fastest growing member community destination online in the last year as seen below.

Fastest Growing Member Community Destinations in February 2009

RANK	Site	Feb 08	Feb 09	% growth
1	Twitter.com	475,000	7,038,000	1382%
2	Zimbio	809,000	2,752,000	240%
3	Facebook	20,043,000	65,704,000	228%
4	Multiply	821,000	2,394,000	192%
5	Wikia	1,381,000	3,758,000	172%
source: Nielsen NetView, 2/09, U.S., Home and Work

Seeing these figures clearly shows the potential influence of successful implementation using twitter as a commercial communication tool. The average user goes to the site 14 times a month and spends average seventeen minutes on the site. However as well as this twitter offers another feature, tweet by text! In January 735 000 different users accessed twitter via a mobile phone, this gives twitter a whole new mobility. The text messaging offers another platform for consumers and businesses to utilise to their advantage.

The wide range of users can be seen by the following table:

Unique Visitors to Twitter.com by Age Demographic

Age Group	Unique Audience	Composition %
2-17	250,000	3.6
18 - 24	**	**
25 - 34	1,379,000	19.6
35 - 49	2,935,000	41.7
55+	1,165,000	16.6
65+	477,000	6.8
source: Nielsen NetView, 2/09, U.S., Home and Work **These demographics have insufficient sample sizes

This shows the variety of users and again illustrates the potential, if used correctly, to connect with a very large audience.

So even though when I started using twitter I thought it was mindless drivel, I have come to understand and see how much influence it can have if you keep in mind the bigger picture that your tweets portray. It can be a very effective marketing tool for connecting with a very wide user base.

You should think of Twitter as a means to get instant public messages out to your audience, whether it is an audience of colleagues or potential customers.

The key focus is the instant messaging, the wide user base and the invaluable research it can give if used to your advantage.

I hope this will all open your eyes to the possibilities of the use of Twitter.

Below I have provided some links I found useful and also some that are just interesting, enjoy!

Additional resources on using Twitter as a networking, PR and communications tool can be found at:

Rafe Needleman: Newbies Guide to Twitter
Caroline Middlebrook: The Big Juicy Twitter Guide
Jeremiah Owyang - What The Web Strategist Should Know About Twitter
B.L. Ochman’s What’s Next Blog: How to Write Kickass Twitter Posts
PR Squared: Using Twitter To Create & Inform Communities
WebProNews: Microblogging What’s it Good For?
University of Maryland, Baltimore County: Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities
Red66 - Using Twitter as a Marketing Tool
Eleven Marketing- Add Twitter to Your Internet Marketing Toolbox

Tools to make your “twittering” more productive:

Twitter Groups - Allows you to tag your followers into different groups. Then you can send a message to those groups without needing to send the message to each person one at a time.
TweetVolume - A frequency search tool to see how often a unique name (person, brand, etc) is mentioned on Twitter.
Twitter Tools - A huge collection of Twitter tools by platform as well as plugins, web services and widgets.
All Twitter Tools and Mashups in One Place - Maybe not all, but a very large list of desktop clients, mobile apps, mashups, plugins, tools and widgets.
Twittown Unofficial Twitter Community which includes Twitter Forge, a listing of Twitter plugins, Ttools, mashups and services.

Reflections

2009-04-03T23:29:00.000+10:00

Ryan Smith
40749529

Introduction

Social networking sites are not a new thing, but with the increase in public awareness and advances in mobile computing over the last few years, they are becoming an important part of many people’s day to day life. This blog post will reflect on some of my experiences with using these social applications over the last couple of months, in particular it will focus on last.fm, twitter and facebook.

Background

Last.fm
Last.fm tracks the music that you listen to and provides you with recommendations based on your listening habits. The site also offers more social options like journal entries about your listening habits message boards to discuss music.

Facebook
Facebook is one of the most widely know and used social networking sites of the last few years and is intended to help you keep up to date with people that you don’t see on a regular basis.

Twitter
Twitter is a message system that allows you to announce to anyone who wants to follow your account what you are doing at any given time.

Reflections

I have always been reluctant to use social networking sites and there are two main reasons why, I am not comfortable with sharing information online and I have never seen any real advantages over email, instant messaging or actually talking to my friends in person. It has only because it’s compulsory for this course that I have actually given any of the myriad of social networking sites out there more than a second glance.

I have been using Last.fm for as few years now and I have never thought of it as a social application, I tend to think of it useful application to keep track of what bands I listen to and some of my favorite artists where recommended to me by Last.fm and it is probably my favorite social application because it doesn’t seem to push the need to be constantly posting and checking your profile to get the best use out of it.

After resisting for a long time I signed up to face book at the beginning of this year, as I thought it couldn’t hurt to try and get back in touch with people that I don’t see very often, but I was never able to embrace the idea of online social networking. So after setting up my facebook account with very minimal amounts of information and the privacy settings on their most restrictive levels, it wasn’t long before I realized that there wasn’t much point in using the site if I wasn’t willing to use it properly. The real problem I had with the site was that I don’t want to present the same information to everyone in the same way, so I let my facebook account lapse and went back to using my phone and email to keep in touch with people.

Twitter is an interesting concept and I am still unsure about whether it is something that I want to use. My first impressions of twitter I couldn’t understand why people felt the need to announce everything and anything that they were doing to whoever was willing to listen and while I am still not keen on announcing what I am doing, I think I will find it easier to share small meaningless parts of my day with everyone rather than share more important information with my contacts on facebook.

Conclusion

After using some of these applications for the purpose of this course I have come to understand some of their appeal and while I still don’t see a great deal of benefit to using most of these applications, I can see myself using some of them beyond the end of this course, but I don’t think that I will ever be completely comfortable with sharing personal information online.

Will Negative Impacts of the Technology Stop You Using Social Sites?

2009-04-03T23:20:00.003+10:00

By Fatimah Az Zahra, 41910764

Introduction

The rapid change of technology grown over a past decade more or less has shifted the way how human interacts. One of the technologies is the Web 2.0 which has evidence in a history of World Wide Web where the use of the Internet put more focus on the interaction of the user. Inevitably, for the last several years, as one of the effects from that, the number of users of the social networking website has risen considerably as stated in article entitled Social Networking Sites Show Worldwide Growth (author: K. C. Jones, 2008) [0], “The number of new social networking site users has grown by 25% in the last year”.

Background

In order to write this reflection, I have observed some of the social networking site which might support these following paragraphs. The first one is Facebook, a huge social networking site which allows the users to join networks, share what’s on their mind, share multimedia files, create groups, and also send messages. Another one is Blogger, one of the largest online blogging tools owned by Google. It permits users to write their opinions or share their knowledge and then their writing will be published in their personal pages.

Focus

My focus is on showing that the negative influence of social networking sites as the effect of the growth of technology is not that horrible, based from my experience and a bit of observation using them. Because I believe there are a lot of good things by using social software and I think sometimes people over critic the use of social networking sites without comparing it with good things existed.

Reflection

What attracts me is that the number of Internet users in developed country is merely unbelievable. Based on the Internet World Stats [1], the estimated Internet users are approximately 1.600.000.000 for 31 March and those are most occupied by Asia region. According to the article titled ‘The Dea[r]th of Human Understanding (author: Neville Holmes, University of Tasmania, 2008) [2] ,

“China now has more Internet users than the US and Internet use is growing rapidly in many developing countries. At this stage, much Internet usage in poorer parts of the world occurs via mobile phones, often at the level of text messages. This can be beneficial to Third World people who can access such services. Indeed, the development of cheap but powerful mobile phones will mean that within a few years the majority of personal Internet and Web traffic will flow through such devices. However, the significant danger is that once the Internet and Web become so much more widely used through cheap mobile devices, the many more people using them, particularly the young, could become less understanding. In less-developed communities, where personal relationships are more crucial to daily life, lessened understanding could be disproportionately harmful.”

China now surpasses U.S. in number of internet use and that occurs mostly through mobile phone since there are a lot of mobile phone providers give services that easily permit us access the Internet. Also, the appearance of the affordable-priced mobile phones but are compatible with that services make the traffic of Internet use in poor area of the world keep raising.

Seeing evidence above, the possibilities for computer scientists to develop that kind of technology or such are widely opened. And also, more scientists dig it deeper as the worldwide market is quite promising. For instances, nowadays we often find mobile phones provide a Wi-Fi service that allows users to access Internet anytime from their mobile phone. Additionally, more and more people use their CDMA phone as a modem for browsing Internet.

Inevitably, the rise of number of Internet users causes the number of users social networking sites booms. This is a phenomenon. However, besides the gutsy computer technology I have mentioned, there are also disadvantages of widespread of the social networking services as there are more and more people criticize the use of social software and such. One of disadvantages is a behavioral degrading and its relation to antisocial behavior as an influence from additivity which stated by the author in that article,

“As a consequence, face-to-face social interaction, when it occurs, tends to be competitive rather than cooperative, based on satisfying individual needs regardless of its effect on other people. Other people are seen as threats and constraints rather than as potential friends.”

Or, for more precise, this is the article whose author trashed out the 7 deadly sins of Facebook [3].

Let’s take a look. Mostly, what they want to stress is the implication of the interaction between humans which has already replaced by the online social networking so there are deviation of the behavior which can cause social disintegration. But is that the case? Then we start minimizing the use of the social networking sites? I don’t think so.

Facebook

To be honest, I am not such a person who is addicted to Facebook like young people elsewhere. I am not quite enjoying to accept hundreds invitations, reading a lot of junk mails, or actively commenting in friend’s photos just because it can somehow expose myself since there is a notification feature provided by Facebook can be seen in the homepage of our friends. And, yes, it makes Facebook really good in terms of awareness. With that, users will know what happened to their wall, groups, photos, friends, etc. It also supports the users’ conversation through the wall --which allows allow user not only sending a text but also a gift—super wall, or even instant messaging.

Anyway, I have an experience using one of the features called notes in Facebook. At that time, I had to invite friends (wait, the words invite and friends don’t refer to Facebook term) formally in some events which enforced me to let them know about the details of the event. As usual, I put an invitation in our mailing list and waited the response to that invitation, whether they could or couldn’t be there. Surprisingly, an unusual thing happened, there were no comments after 24 hours waiting. This thing had prompted me to do something different; wrote note in Facebook and tagged them one by one. And it worked! Just after tagging them, most of them replied the notes and the communication happened. What a different!

Another case was still continuing the invitation part which was uploading photos. It was a quite new thing to upload our pictures in the Facebook since my friends and I have already had storage for our pictures which is in our mailing list. As my friend request, I uploaded the photo to that storage and after waiting a couple of day there were no comments on it. Everybody kept silent to that photo, unlike usual, but that was not that surprising as I’ve experienced in inviting them. What I did is exactly the same and the response was also the same. Wow.

Those two things were just examples I want to show you and there are so many good things starts from Facebook.

What I learned from that experience is, this is the time we can’t hide from the gutsy of the technology. It will adjust us and we will also adjust it. Such as Facebook which I think a very superb one as it can do what other social software do, such as, posting the status, creating groups, sharing multimedia files, tagging, and so on. Most of social networking site are intentionally aimed to support certain group in the society so that they can interact comprehensively. The point is, if we already have a community that uses certain social software, it can integrate by itself. And that’s how we live in this era

Blogger

Blogger is one of the largest online blogging tools, owned by Google. It is free and quite easy to use since it provides some templates that can be used by the beginner users. It permits users to write any topics they like with any ways they want in their personal pages. It also allows other people to put comment in their post since it support the conversation a la blogger.

This blogging idea is raised for some reasons. The first reason is a media for those who love writing. The second reason is some groups of people believe that blog can enhance their life because they not only can share their opinion but also their knowledge which can be useful by others. The third reason is some groups of people, especially the youth, who loves their personal story to be publicized and being read by other people finally find a quite simple media which can do what they want. Another one is blogging is one media for campaigning, or, perhaps, for gaining money as the use of internet has shifted and reached business area.

So, what the negative side of blogging?

When I used Blogger for the very first time, I found it easy to use as it provides some templates which can be easily chosen and directly seen in our pages. With just clicking a wanted template, I have already made my pages look more beautiful and attractive. Blogger also keep the navigation of the blog easy since it has a dashboard containing buttons to manage the blog including create a new post.

As I said above, Blogger also supports comments related to the post which can be managed by the users from the Settings. Unlike blogging tool provided by multiply where only a registered user can give comment to a blog posting, Blogger allows non-Blogger users, people with open-ID, or even anonymous to give comments for certain post. From my experience, I found it quite interesting since I can prevent my blog from unwanted comments addressed to my writing just with a couple simple steps. You will find it more interesting since Blogger also maintain the privacy issue of the writer such as creating comment moderation.

The enjoyable of using blogger suddenly disappeared when my blog was hacked, in other words, my Google account was also stolen. The content of the blog was changed to something irrelevant and tend to humiliate me while I couldn’t access my account and there is no one to ask for help. She or he also changed the registered email address in it which made me didn’t know what to do. This happened for about couple of days until I finally found the form provided by Google which can help me tackle this problem. And yes, it took about ages to find appropriate form.

I realize that this was one of the bad effects of cyber world that might be harmful anytime, anywhere. And as a blogger who already had a community, I can understand how the other bloggers changed their attitude to me. But, there was a time when all the situations came back as usual. Where I am not afraid being a blogger anymore.

Having that experience, I didn’t directly conclude that I didn’t want to use that kind of technology anymore. The most important thing is how we learn from the past. I am still a blogger who has community that communicate each other with responding not only the content of the writing but also the appearance of the page such as widgets and plug-in in it. However, I still consider Blogger as one of a learning media since I found so many tutorials, or even lecture materials.

Conclusion

From those paragraphs above, I can conclude several things. The first one is, we have to realize that we are not living in the past, meaning that the technology has grown so fast and we have to face it. One of the evidence is the growth Web 2.0 which more or less shifts how the people communicate through internet. The second one is, while a group of people may keep talking about the drawback of Internet use, I still believe that the social networking sites have more positive influence on social life since it can support the needs of the group existed in society since we are all social creature. And Yes, I will still using social sites because actually, the drawback of technology can be managed by us.

References:

[0] Jones, K. C. "Social Networking Sites Show Worldwide Growth." 2008. 3 Apr. 2009 .

[1] http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

[2] Holmes, Neville. "The Dea[r]th of Human Understanding." The Dea[r]th of Human Understanding (2008): 106-08.

[3] Hoskins, Guy. "The Seven Deadly Sins of Facebook." Helium. 2008. 3 Apr. 2009

[] Viller, Stephen. "Introduction to CSCW."

Stalkers Powered Up via Social Networking Websites

2009-04-03T23:10:00.002+10:00

Bill Giang "ImNotAsian" 41078422

Technology today is an ever growing realm of new age gadgets, fancy designs and the race to capitalise on the next big craze. It seems that in earlier years, it was more about power and performance as users who were more up to date with the current technological advances were able to perform tasks more efficiently. However, what happens when that power was no longer needed to perform the tasks people wanted today?

The emphasis has greatly shifted from dependencies on the technology at hand to the users who will interact with it. As great as a high end PC is, that can run the newest games with all the settings set on maximum when you can’t play WoW, which would be completely redundant if there were no users. It would simply defeat the purpose of the MMPORG genre.

If we were to dumb the technology down further and really focus on the users, what type of interactions would occur that would cause what could be seen as a revolution in technology? At this point, the term “social technology” can be introduced, as the middle ground for these interactions with the aid of technology. What we are more interested in are the types of interactions that occur here and how they may differ from real life interactions – the good, the bad and the strange.

In today’s society, most (if not all) people are at least novice users of computers for either work or leisure. It is difficult to move about your regular routines without having been exposed to some of the current fads and internet crazes, one of which being facebook.

Founded in February 2004 [1], Mark Zuckerberg created what was then known as “thefacebook” [2]. It was originally only available to students of Harvard College at the time. After multiple expansions and the purchase of the domain, “facebook.com”, facebook was relaunched in 2005 and made public internationally [3].

With major corporations worldwide offering up to $1 billion for purchase of the social networking application [4], it was clearly confirmed that facebook had become quite revolutionary in its field and far exceeding the creator’s intention.

What exactly does facebook do that can generate this $1 billion interest? Facebook is a social networking website that allows its users to interlink between various networks. With the base functionality of searching and adding friends, messaging, and profile updating, it also offers much more with custom applications custom created by its users, most of which having one thing in common: a method of social interaction.

Even for myself, I originally signed up to facebook just to play tetris (now known as Tetris Friends [5]) and beat all my friends’ scores (which I did by a large margin in the end). I am not the type to sign up to any or all of these social networks but an external application within facebook gave me incentive to… that is, to play a game I liked with friends.

Initially, I had no intention of utilising any other functions that were available but now I find myself somewhat reliant on facebook to keep me up to date with what my friends’ status, activities, and announcements. I use facebook now as a segway between my friends simply because I don’t have the time to see everyone.

Having said that, this then presents the question of what or why do people use facebook? I see my own use of facebook as common and I would fall into the category of the typical user. Many of my friends are what I would describe as facebook addicts who spend much more time mainly for purposes of socialising and to a much lesser extent, exploring other applications.

“Social network sites provide simple, inexpensive ways to organize members, arrange meetings, spread information, and gauge opinion. As more systems emerge, there will be greater capacity for groups to organize and participate in collective action, a hallmark of civil society.” [6]

Since then I have signed up to various other social networking websites sampling what other services may appeal to me. These include Delicious (social bookmarking), Flickr (image sharing), Last.FM (music recommendation), Yahoo! Pipes (combining RSS feeds), FriendFeed (combining other social networking feeds) and Twitter (microblogging).

Of those listed, I found delicious and Yahoo! Pipes to have almost no social activity. Delicious would serve as a more powerful tool within interest groups as a method of sharing online resources. Yahoo! Pipes on the other hand just seemed redundant as FriendFeed offers similar results with less setup time. Perhaps this just deterred me (and possibly other users) to using it.

I could already share images and photos with facebook so Flickr was also made redundant (unless I wanted to share high resolution images – which I never did anyway). Last.FM was interesting as I could share music with users of similar music tastes without having any personal connection to them. It was purely for interest in the music. I did not generate any relationships with anyone nor did I care to. It simply served its purpose and continues to do so with minimal social interactions.

This brings me to the last two in FriendFeed and Twitter. As a social aggregator, FriendFeed was created late 2007 in order to consolidate updates from multiple social networks via RSS feeds.[7] It can already aggregate content from most of the major social networking websites such as facebook, MySpace, twitter, Last.FM, Delicious., just to name a few.

Although having limited experience with FriendFeed, I can see its potential in aggregating content from many sources in an incredibly efficient manner. However, with the amount of (personal) information available, this does present issues of privacy and security.

At first glance, Twitter seems to be facebook’s status function on its own – a smaller tool within a larger one. But at a closer look after sampling its functionality, it brings a whole new dimension of interactivity as updates are now sent to my personal mobile phone.

Founded by Jack Dorsey in 2006, Twitter allows users to send and receive others’ updates known as tweets [8]. These are displayed on their online profile for anyone to see. Users may then elect to receive these updates straight to their mobile phones, thus increasing the level of social interaction. Updates can be made via the Twitter website or through various other applications such as Tweetie, Twitterific, TweetDeck and feedalizr.

With all the other social networking websites, the one thing that kept me from getting too immersed into each world was the fact that it was still being accessed through a computer where the interaction stays. Twitter however forces its way past the realm of a computer terminal and straight to the user wherever they are.

Of course there are other things that do this but since twitter was the first to do it, it had a much bigger impact on me. Was my own personal space being invaded by a random message from someone via twitter? Obviously I am over dramatising the actual events but one can imagine the possibilities.

My first exposure to Twitter saw particular users, not only expressing their stalker-like behaviours, but embracing it as this marvelous tool opened many doors for their “extracurricular” activities.

This issue being raised here is the same for any tool whether it is a physical object or a virtual application: what type of restrictions or control is required or enforced on tools possessing the means to harm others? In reference to a physical object, it is unfair to blame the manufacturers of any vehicle if a motorist was to speed and inadvertedly be the cause of an accident resulting in fatalities. That is why road rules are set in place to control the drivers of the vehicles.

However, what are the implications of enforcing such strict rules for the use of social networking websites like Twitter, FriendFeed and even facebook? Users can raise the level of security of their accounts by not allowing others to follow them without their consent but what happens to those who do not have that setting in place?

In the design of Reno, a location enhance, mobile coordination tool and person finder [9], researchers investigated two security related issues; one of which focused on “the usage of the application within deception and denial practices common to mediated social communication.” [10]

Essentially, the design Reno supported acts of deceit that abused privacy features of the medium in an unauthorised manner. This matter was dealt with by interviewing test users of Reno. These interviews revealed that users would have been able to use Reno within denial and deception practices. With the control that Reno provided, it was sufficient for achieving plausible deniability.

This of course would not hold for misuse of all these social tools given the amount of control imposed on its use and the implications on the users. The only suggestion I can offer, with my limited knowledge of the laws or regulations that govern internet related non-compliant behaviour, is to protect your own interests at hand as information is so readily available at your finger tips.

References

1. "Executive Bios", Facebook.

2. Seward, Zachary M. (2007-07-25). "Judge Expresses Skepticism About Facebook Lawsuit". The Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118539991204578084.html?mod=googlenews_wsj. Retrieved on 2008-04-30.

3. Williams, Chris (2007-10-01). "Facebook wins Manx battle for face-book.com". The Register. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/01/facebook_domain_dispute/. Retrieved on 2008-06-13. |

4. Delaney, Kevin (2006-09-21). "Facebook, Riding a Web Trend, Flirts With a Big-Money Deal". Dow Jones. p. 1.

5. Tetris Friends, http://apps.facebook.com/fbtetris/play.php

6. Nicole B. Ellison, Cliff Lampe, Charles Steinfield, “Social network sites and society: current trends and future possibilities”, ACM, Volume 16 Issue 1, January 2009.

7. “friendfeed.com” , FriendFeed.

8. Strange, Adario (April 20, 2007). "Flickr Document Reveals Origin Of Twitter". Wired News (CondéNet). http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/04/flickr_document.html. Retrieved on November 5, 2008.

9. Giovanni Iachello, Ian Smith, Sunny Consolvo, Mike Chen, Gregory D. Abowd, “Developing privacy guidelines for social location disclosure applications and services”, SOUPS '05: Proceedings of the 2005 symposium on Usable privacy and security, ACM, July 2005

10. Giovanni Iachello, Ian Smith, Sunny Consolvo, Mike Chen, Gregory D. Abowd, “Developing privacy guidelines for social location disclosure applications and services”, SOUPS '05: Proceedings of the 2005 symposium on Usable privacy and security, ACM, July 2005 p.8

Reflection

2009-04-03T23:09:00.001+10:00

41282948

Yinghui Yu

Introduction
With development of social software, Web2.0 has changed the time of web1.0 users "read-only" status, will become the website to open up a two-way interactive service platform can read and write. A number of users experience in different type of social software. Social Software [1], are built on information technology and Internet-based applications, be able to reflect on the function and the promotion of real social relations between the development and the formation of activity, the activity of people with the software integration. This article will basic on my personal experience to reflect on the trust, privacy and influence beyond social software (especially Flickr, Twitter and Del.icio.us).

Background
Over the last few weeks, I have been experienced and investigated several social softwares. The following are some of today's popular webs of social software, and will basic on these to reflection.

Flickr: is not just a photo album, which more emphasis on the concept of community. Not only is its stability and 2G of storage space per month (or 20MB), but also it provides a opportunity to communicate with other people and sharing. Users look through the eyes to discover the beautiful world of other peoples’ hearts.

Twitter: for the Internet and friend relation, twitter not only satisfies users talk at any time, but also deepens friendship via frequent contact and communication. It let users always feel that there are numerous friends around, users’ heart open up to friends though their thoughts were published.

Del.icio.us: is a software society which browser-sharing similar to IE's Favorites feature. As a society of software, the most important feature is that it provides a powerful information sharing.

Focus
The following reflection is basic on my personal experience, evaluation and research to point out my views on the social function of software and analyze how this effect to the user group.

Reflection

Flickr
The successful social software is that users will love it when they will experience at first time. My first time experience is my friend sent me a Flickr link. Then I am enamored of it. Flickr is not seemed other photo sharing website, I am able to see my friend picture without registration. For the storage, sharing and organization of image, flickr is definitely revolutionary. It is very convenient for the management of images, and able to handle coordination. It also provided a lot of features, such as guestbook, comments and tags for your photos. It allows to release on any blog. Compare with the photopuket, Flickr more focus on sharing pictures. But according to the statistics [2], the market share of Photobucket was up to 40%, far exceeding the filckr owned 3.1%. Most users which were researched will still be just in the eyes of our entry phase: they do not need tags, ajax, society, and require any element of web 2.0, they only want a photo album, a simple operation, can provide the most basic function of storage album.

However, as typical social software which has successful experience in using the technology of web2.0, Flickr is the first social tool that introduces the concept of comments into its system. Users can give suggestion and opinion about photos. Photopuket does not have ability to provider this platform to communicate with users group.

Twitter
Users post at most 140 words to the twitter webpage though Google talk, MSN, mobile etc. tools, and can also browse by computer or mobile. They can clearly know what their friends are doing.
(Example in the following picture)

Due to the simplicity and flexibility, Twitter was considered as a “mini blog”. It is an effective way write down notes. However, information overflowing phenomena become negative effect of this situation. Initially, I use twitter to connect with COMP3505 students to experience. Meanwhile I add some people as friend in the past few weeks. There are a mass of tweets over the webpage so that I am not willing to patient read all tweets.

Users are able to binding their own user account with mobile phone to1gether. As long as the flowers updated their information; users can realized information of their friends, it is in order to get friends’ latest information immediately. This function helps users to get to know what they friends are doing, what they are thinking, and who is always around me in my circle.

Chirag Mehta[3] point out that social media from social software provided a wealth of information, but the authenticity and accuracy of the information has to consider more. For example[4], A message on Twitter that Twitter users request the Indian government not to publish the news of the terrorist attacks, so as not to affect the Government's anti-terrorist action. Then a famous news website reproduced this message, and reported that terrorist realized the situation outside and the trends of Indian security forces. Therefore, twitter is very useful tool to obtain information, but news resource can not be trusted, just for entertainment.

Actually, Twitter has an effective ability to gather people together. Especially some people like me lived abroad alone. For this group people, Twitter is able to improve their friendship and funny their daily life.

Del.icio.us
Each del.icio.us users have a web page where they save their favorite web tags. So it is convenience to each users, therefore, users can get their favorite tags through the network. Each tag has its own web page, which describe content of tag. Users can subscribe to tags, such as political or music. Users will be notified when label increasing. They also transfer to others website or del.icio.us internal systems through subscribed RSS. In addition, each link consist of content of other users subscribed, thus users are able to know the link who subscribed.

Information aggregation as a significant element allows Del.cio.us become successful social software. Google provides the information aggregation feature enable users’ fingers to shuttle in different web pages. However, Del.icio.us is effective way to find valuable resources through internet consist of all users of Del.icio.us. For example, sometimes I could not find webs that I am interest in, so it is best way to visit Del.icio.us of my friends or someone else to find. In addition, during this process, users can find a few people who are congenial, as well as create their online users community as long as they are willing to share their favorites and the links they think that might be helpful to other users.

Del.icio.us also allows users realize the value of the content of web through the tag. For instance, if 100 people save with the bookmark and add tag, there is no doubt that these users discover the value of the tag. However, in my opinion, users seek for the value of themselves through function of tags Users during the process of saving bookmarks to find the value of their own. With increase in number of users, people will acquire more of their own values. By contrary, if everyone is desire to establish the value of the social network, everyone in network society must discover their own personal value. And then probably are able to make it own contribution to improve value of the entire social networks. Therefore, the most successful experience is Del.icio.us to be an effective way which enables the value of social network focus on the individuals.

Form my personal experience, Del.icio.us does not offer the convenient platform to add comment about the website. When users favorite the bookmarks, they would like to write down simple description. Other users after they read comment, then decide whether visit or favorite this website or not. However, everything has its two sides. Because Del.icious does create a communication platform, enable users have never problem about junk email, advertisement or false website.

Conclusion
In conclusion, taking a few social networking tools as good example, such as Flickr, Twitter, Delcious, there is a significant impact on our social life with those kinds of social tools. Users can discover the value and worth of themselves, so as users become a basic element to contribute the value of social network. Through my research and experience, enable me realized the function of social software.

Reference:
http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/opening_education/Social_Software_report.pdf[1]
http://www.deanlee.cn/reviews/flickr-vs-photobucket/[2]

http://cloudcomputing.blogspot.com/2008/08/social-computing-in-enterprise-software.html[3]

http://www.cnbeta.com/articles/70955.htm%20[4]

My Reflection

2009-04-03T23:09:00.000+10:00

Name: Cheng Ming Wen
Student Number: 41436620

Introduction
Internet, as we know, it is an important and useful source in part of our life. The functional capability of internet started with sending and receiving emails, searching for desired information and downloading wanted files. With the great developments and improvement computer-wise these days, the internet becomes more than just surfing on internet but social interaction and applications.

The web 2.0 is an example of social computing interaction and computer supported cooperative work. Users are able to use the brand new type of internet services and enable themselves to have social interactions with other individuals. For example, “blog post” allows users to share and express their feelings and thoughts, whereas, users can make more friends globally in the “face book”. Consequently, as there is a noticeable increase in users of social interaction and application, the analysis of this phenomenon such as awareness, reflections, usability and user experiences are vital.

Background
After experiencing and testing of these social networking websites, discussion within this article will focus on the two social tools, blogger and facebook.

Blogger
Blogger allows users to express their comments, as well, provides reader to respond on internet stage. A unique and personal blogger can be easily created by users without professional knowledge and skills. Furthermore, users can post and quote articles, upload images or design the layout. Any subject and comments in the blogger can be immediately found by using search function. Blogger fascinates users not only by joyfulness when sharing own writings; the personal device function took the main role to attract the users.

Facebook
Facebook is a social networking website which allows users to communicate with their own friends and make new global wide. Users are able to know their friends better by communicating through comments and posts, uploading photos, sharing interesting links and videos.

Focus
The article focuses on several points. By using own experiences and internet research, the privacy issues of both web services, Facebook and Blogger, are analysed. Through personal experience, positive and negative outcomes are then explained.

Reflection

Blogger
Blogger is a web service that is trendy and regularly used by people in the community. It is a personal diary website that can be easily updated and written on day-by-day basis. Users are able to present and post articles and pictures. The contents do not certain limitations. It can be diary entries, comment on certain events or writings involving commercials. These articles are posted on the blogger and are open for the public to view. The viewers can also make comments about them after reading the articles.

In my own experience, the Blogger’s “post” tool can be very powerful force and positive outcome for social interactions on the internet. Take advertisement campaigns as an example, when a popular blogger post any commercial articles on certain product in the site, the information for the product can be seen through the internet globally. The efficiency of these kind advertising campaigns is more effective comparing with ordinary ads on Televisions or magazines. Creating a popular blogger involves a great amount of efforts being put in. Many facts have to consider and think about before constructing a well-structured and good communicating blogger. The contents of a “good” blogger have to be attractive. As well, responding comment made by people who read the article is also important. The responses also have to appealing and attractive to maintain the current viewers. After considering the facts suggested, without doubt, a successful and popular blogger can be formed. The negative outcome of “post” tool would be posts that have unreal and harmful content information. The naïve viewers cannot recognise the truth and would be influenced negatively.

Another positive experience is when using Blogger in this course. In comp3505, when posting comments and using “links” tool in blogger, a great amount of helpful information can be obtained. As well, any works can also be discussed with peer groups.

The last point would be privacy issues. When users post their personal information in the blogger and used “hide” tool, the information can be viewed by certain people. However, in my own experience, this tool cannot fully protect this “hided” information. Although the improvements by the web service provider on the protection of blogger can be seen day-by-day basis, the privacy issues is still a problem at the moment.

Facebook
In the Facebook, the users are able to post album, videos and any interesting links. These information and contents are then shared with friends. Original design of facebook was aimed at replacing contact list by using internet devices. As internet was being regularly used, facebook gained its reputation between every senior high school and universities. Initially, it was limited to schools and campus network to join. Every user’s email was restricted to send emails to outside group. However, after this social networking service became more popular in the public, it then removed the restrictions and allowed any groups to register. This change then made facebook to have this great result in the community.
In my own experience, I have not use Facebook before. However, after being part of it for two weeks, I am getting to use to go on the facebook and check for friend’s comments or upload files in my site. This kind of attraction may be the main reason why the Facebook can be popular and developed speedily in the community.
When using the facebook, I noticed that there are some functions that other networking services do not provide. In the facebook, the “Find Friends” tool can allow you to invite your friends. Facebook will ask you to enter your email and password such as Msn messenger. Facebook will then find out your contact list and send invitation emails to your friends. After your friends agreed the invitation, they are then able to communicate with you on your facebook site.

Another social interaction and application of facebook is that it is able to share the content of your site. After you login Facebook account, you are able to view your friend’s current status. You are then capable to go to your friend’s facebook and invite people in their facebook to yours. They are then become one of your friends. Through this kind of social interaction, there is a great increase in users of Facebook. However, users can still encounter the fore-mentioned problem, privacy issues. As you are able to view other people’s photos and personal profiles, your information is also uncovered in facebook.

Conclusion
Combing both of my experience in using both social interaction networking services, Facebook and Blogger, a conclusion is made. To construct a good social interaction network services, attractive and appealing tools have to be used to lure the viewers in the public. As fore-mentioned above, Facebook has a “Find Friends” tool which can invite more people to your facebook site. Thus, users, who are desired to share their thoughts and feelings, are attracted by this effective function. On the other hand, by posting interesting articles or videos, it also draws people’s attention on to your site. However, the privacy issue of both Facebook and Blogger is still a problem that users will encounter. The protection is not 100% safe. The service providers are trying their best to minimize the risk of giving out privacy and allowing users to use the services comfortably.

Reference
1. Charlie Bermant , “Facebook changes interaction between the public and its servants” 13 Mar 2009 http://www.pnwlocalnews.com/kitsap/poi/lifestyle/41120219.html?period=W&mpStartDate=03-19-2009
2. Linda Leseman, “a blogger gone pro at the LA Times” 16 Mar 2009
http://beatblogging.org/2009/03/16/tony-pierce-a-blogger-gone-pro-at-the-la-times-part-2/

Social Software: Are We Who We Think We Are?

2009-04-03T23:03:00.002+10:00

by Matthew Cross

1.0 Introduction
Social software is many and varying. Certainly there are thousands of different applications out there, all purporting to allow users to interact. It seems that these days there is a social application available for nearly every niche activity. Over the past few weeks I have interacted with many such types of software. My experiences with these were in general positive, however one thing did bother me throughout the experience and that was the way in which we represent ourselves online. In this paper I will explore this issue across a variety of social software systems and present my views on such matters.

2.0 Background
2.1 Twitter
Twitter; what are you doing? This, as many know, is precisely the question posed to users of Twitter. Now at first, the author perceived this form of micro-blogging to be little more than a simplified version of its bigger brothers, such as Blogger. This however proved to be exactly opposite, Twitter it seems satisfies the user, in that it allows the user to express ideas, not suitable for a fully fledged blog. Take for example the simple sharing of a video from youtube. This would, by and large, be quite a trivial thing to post on a blog, given the brevity of simply posting a link, but Twitter is almost perfectly suited to the task. Now I am certainly not advocating Twitter as a method for posting everyday mindless drivel, however I did find that it enriched my ability to share some things, which I may have otherwise not bothered with. Now certainly it can be said that delicious offers a similar system, but its problem lies in its limitation to bookmarks alone.

2.2 Facebook
Facebook is by far the social software in which I paid the most attention. Yes Facebook certainly has its flaws; in fact it seems with each new update users become more frustrated by how confusing it is becoming. Despite this, Facebook still provides one of the best user experiences I can recall. The fact is that stripped of all of the clutter of additional applications Facebook has a very useable interface. Its advantage lies in the fact that it strives to present a social interaction with people that is as representative of true conversation as possible, with users able to interact in many different ways. This in my belief helps to form an online community that is closer to that of offline.

2.3 LastFM
LastFM is a very different form of social software because one can make use of it with almost no input. The strength of LastFM lay in both its simplicity, and its impressive song recommendation algorithms. I did find that unlike Twitter and Facebook, that it LastFM placed less of an emphasis on active interaction. This did seem strange to me, however LastFM does provide a way for members to become of good standing and thus it is possible to enrich ones experience of the software [1] and encourage users to become more actively involved.

2.4 Identities
Given the aforementioned it may seem as though I have had nothing but good experiences with the social software I sampled. Well, it is correct that at face value there is essentially nothing of any major concern that I can say against these softwares. The problem is that, whilst I was able to interact, in my belief this interaction was somewhat skewed to that of real life. Even social software that tried very hard to create an accurate image of a persona, such as Facebook, provided me with only a representation of a person and not, in my view, a very accurate one at times.

3.0 Focus
The advent of Web 2.0 saw coincided with a massive increase the number of ways that people can communicate. These methods whilst not conceptually different to precious communication models [1], have dramatically changed the way people interact with one another. A great many people these days shun face to face interaction in favour of the digital kind, and certainly no longer do people need to have physically met in order to know one another. According to Dourish and Bly awareness requires knowledge of the people, events and interactions of people around us [2]. The focus of this article is on the people; do users act as they would in an online social setting as they would in a face to face situation, and hence do we as users form correct images of others we interact with in an online social setting. Thus can people be truly aware based on online interaction alone?

4.0 Reflection
4.1 LastFM
During my exploration of social software, one thing intrigued me very much. This was the willingness of users of programs such as twitter and LastFM to share what are, in some cases very intimate personal details, simply due to the nature of the medium on which they are shared. Taking a closer look at LastFM for instance, reveals what is essentially an advanced surveying system working in the background. Certainly very few would be willing to indulge a complete stranger to monitor them whilst listening to their music and then telling all the surrounding people what that is. The question beckons, why do people accept such an invasion of privacy when presented in a digital form, when most would recoil from the idea were it presented as a face to face system. In my view it is attributed mainly to the fact that “one feature of computer mediated technology is the ability to assume identities” [3]. It seems that the assumption of identity is enough to persuade users, who would likely not participate in another context, to allow such “without the usual assumptions and restrictions of face to face communication” [3]. This shows how the taking on an identity, which may or may not be close to accurate, acts as a buffer for people in situation in which they would normally feel uncomfortable.

4.2 Twitter
Another software system that was clearly an excellent piece of work, but somehow not quite right was Twitter. Twitters main problem is the way in which users interact with the system. The fact that twitter is primarily a one-to-many messaging method prompts user to share information that is not truly reflective of their social nature. This brings about the various users who, whilst they would not cause the conflict to social norms by say, calling all of their friends just to tell them they are “doing the dishes”, feel it is necessary to “tweet” about it. This causes a change in identity which in most cases is that of a broadcaster, this creates a feeling of anonymity and which, in correspondence to Milgrams viewpoint, provides users freedom from routine social ties [4]. Now I know that Twitter does support one-to-one interaction, but unless the user takes the inititave to interact using these features, they are likely to create an identity that is not true of the person behind it.

4.3 Facebook
Facebook in my view has tried very hard to be in line with Shirky's design principles[1]. The user is certainly given a good handle; their own identity. As stated by Facebook “requires all users to provide their real date of birth as both a safety precaution and as a means of preserving the integrity of the site. You will be able to hide this information from your profile if you wish” [5]. They are furthermore given good standing, with any reference to themselves linking back to the user, providing a history of their interactions. Certainly there are barriers of protection as users must in some cases make requests in order to be granted access to certain features. Finally it scales, as whilst users can gain huge amounts of friends, individual conversations are still the primary way of communication. So what then is the problem with Facebook. Well it has to do with the imperfection of the users handles. It seems that despite the fact that Facebook strives to ensure people create an online persona that reflects them accurately, it does not completely succeed. For instance, a friend of mine is listed as being engaged on Facebook. Now this is meant to be a bit of a joke, however to new users trying to develop some knowledge on my friend’s persona, this is indiscernible from fact. This shows how even very well implemented social software can still lead to failures in presenting a true image of a user.

5.0 Conclusion
Social software has certainly made much progress over the past few years. The birth of Web 2.0 saw a massive surge in the uptake of social software. It should be clear, however, that no social software can present a completely true representation of a person. Indiscretion about information revealed through social software can in fact be detrimental to the user’s social interaction in the real world. Just as in real life, people must make assertions of who the people they interact with really are. The fact it that the ability for to take on personas not entirely representative of themself is part of the reason social software has become so popular, just think of MMOGs. However it is important for users to be able to recognise that even in areas where the change is persona is not explicit, there is often an implicit difference from the offline user. Just as mobile phone users would not randomly dial numbers in order to make friends, it is my belief social software should not be used as a method for forming social relationships, but instead advancing them.

6.0 Bibliography
1. C. Shirky, “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy,” 2003; http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html.
2. S. Viller, Introduction to CSCW, The University of Queensland, 2009.
3. S. Viller, CSCW Design Concepts, The University of Queensland, 2009.
4. S. Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: Essays
and Experiments, McGraw Hill, Inc., 1977.
5. Facebook, “Facebook,” 2009; http://www.facebook.com.
6. J.W. Sin-Hwa Kang, Sasi Kanth Ala, “Social Copresence in Anonymous Social Interaction Using a Mobile Video Telephone,” Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM.

To Share and Share Alike or Will I Be Left Behind?

2009-04-03T22:57:00.002+10:00

Introduction
In 2009, the Internet plays an enormous role in both my life and the life of my friends and peers. As a very computer oriented person (read: geek) I have spent numerous hours whiling away online. I have noticed over the past two years that my offline friends, as I like to call them, have increasingly left behind the mentality that the Internet is a research-only tool. No longer do they judge me for reading web forums and communicating with people in far away countries – social aspects of the web which predate the Internet itself.

This change is due to one thing: the rise of the social computing aspect of the Internet. With websites such as MySpace and now Facebook, allowing people to network online, I have noticed my best friend is never more than an hour without checking her Facebook. This also reflects on the mobility of the web now – I arrived home from New Years 09 at the respectable hour of 5am to find my friends had already uploaded and tagged all the photos from that night, direct from their phones.

This article will provide a reflective review, from one point of view, on the next generation of social/community sites. These sites move away from straightforward networking and include at least one other specialised element, for example sharing musical tastes. The websites reviewed are:

Blogger
Flickr
Last.fm

These sites will be contrasted and compared with the traditional and arguably most popular social site online, Facebook. Facebook is a fair yardstick to use as it encompasses many facets of these other websites.

Site Backgrounds

Blogger
Blogger is a website designed to allow users to write journal entries. The content hosted is at the users’ discretion and ranges from virtual diary entries to logs and information on team projects, such as software projects. Blogger is owned by Google and uses their credentials to log in. In addition to this it has several advantages over other blogging sites including multi-authored blogs and integration with Microsoft Office products.

My experience with blogs extends back to 2001 when I signed up for a LiveJournal. As a member of an enormous online community based around creating content for The Sims, I naturally followed the other members to sign up for a blog. It was not long before my blog fell to the wayside and was forgotten (though it is still there, however no one wants to read the ramblings of a teenaged me).

Blogger brings a well thought out site design with many useful features, such as those mentioned previously. This plays a major role in its success as many people must share my frustration with poorly designed text inputs – i.e. MySpace’s terrible excuse for a blogging tool.

As a rule, I find blogs a tiresome thing. Reading about my friends’ day online will never allow me the same pleasure of sitting on my balcony having a cold beer or twelve with my best friends. Coupled with the rampant outpourings of emotions and impotent rage makes me wary of the whole blogging community. That said, I can also appreciate reading postings by people whom I have never met and would not have conversed with otherwise – bands studio or tour blogs for example.

From a social standpoint, I would never make friends with an online blogger. I don’t feel at home in such a community and quite frankly do not want to. That said, however, people I have met from other such social circles could be bloggers and as such may make me reconsider such a statement – but most of my friends feel similarly to me, so I might never know.

Blogger helps people keep in contact with and track their friends (both online or offline) in a similar way to Facebook. The difference is blogger is more a publishing tool to the masses, whereas Facebook is geared towards your network of friends and sending individual messages to them. Blogger is also able to be embedded into other websites for use by non-individuals; however Facebook has revamped their ‘pages’ to allow a similar sort of publication from groups and organisations.

In conclusion, Blogger is a well thought out website and has a thriving community of bloggers. I feel using a blog to catalogue or follow some sort of process (Microsoft’s Windows Live blogs are quite enthralling) is a use of blogs which I feel justifies any negative feelings towards them I harbour.

Flickr
There are many image caching resources on the Internet including ImageShack and Photobucket, however Flickr has risen to popularity due to its community based idea of image sharing. Users not only upload their photos for sharing, but to tag them to allow users to see similar photos and pictures by searching for keywords. Flickr was purchased by Yahoo! and as such uses their authentication credentials, which I find to be a bit excessive – forcing one to choose a username and then creating a Yahoo! email address for the user.

As someone who does not own a camera and is not a graphic artist, I had not signed up for Flickr or any similar photo sharing site prior to undertaking this subject. To share any pictures which I may have I use Facebook (and previously MySpace). This allows my friends to see my debauchery in all its glory, while maintaining a level of privacy from future employers, parents and those who dabble in pacifism.

I found Flickr interesting in the vein that it has many features of a social networking site such as Facebook, however these all seem to have evolved around the sharing of media. For example: creating a group for a wedding, and then allowing all attendees to share photos from the event. This permits the hosts to have all the images from their event in one central location, as opposed to dozens of galleries on friends’ profiles on Facebook. Another interesting tool Flickr provides is geomapping – any user may upload a photo from a location and tag it as such. This allows people to virtually visit spectacular locations globally from practically every angle imaginable. These photos range from amateur tourist snaps to professional landscape photographers.

The social interaction of this site is geared mainly towards those who are in the graphical media industry, or hobbyists. Photographers can share their creations with peers and receive criticisms and praise, much like the artists website DeviantART. This level of interaction is unrivalled by Facebook, which allows groups to be created, but the quality of the media sharing is quite poor in comparison.

As a layman in the visual medium, I did enjoy browsing Flickr and searching for tags to see what images I could find. On a personal level, I found one of my favourite bands created their own unique tag name for fans to tag lives photos of the band’s performances. This allowed those in-the-know to view an endless supply of band shots, and connect with those who attended the same concerts. Although I did not actively join the Flickr community, I did enjoy my time as an anonymous ‘lurker’.

Last.fm
Of the sites reviewed in this reflection, Last.fm is one which I have been involved with for a significant period of time. I signed up in early 2006 on the recommendation of an online friend, and installed the AudioScrobbler. I enjoyed viewing my weekly musical charts and watching how my musical tastes changed over time, mostly moving away from the aural equivalent of Hades opening the gates to the underworld to something more pleasant.

After a year of simply embedding the charts on various online profiles, I ventured deeper into the world of Last.fm. I read reviews of my favourite bands, and read about similar artists. I found the tagging of bands to be very useful to me, and the wiki articles containing band biographies have often helped me identify obscure songs I have heard online. More recently, Last.fm has launched an internet radio site.

With regards to the social aspect of Last.fm, for the most part I have not taken part in this. I have tagged one song, and joined one band’s fan group. I know my brother has communicated with several users in other countries who expressed interest in local Brisbane bands due to their tagged status. This shows the site provides a method for music fans to be able to contact one another, something sorely lacking in genre specific web forums which often contain members who ridicule fans of a lesser level of fanaticism to themselves.

I do find, however the social side of Last.fm is largely similar to the Facebook group phenomenon. People join groups to show they are a fan or agree with the group title, but then rarely utilise the group for its intended purpose. There are exceptions to this, and I believe those who do take part in these groups find it a sincerely rewarding experience.

Finally, I find Last.fm is a fun tool to allow anyone to view your musical tastes, however embarrassing (or not, Avril Lavigne comes a close 6th after Swedish death metal bands). The added bonus of finding new music through it was really helpful, as is finding people who also enjoy listening to obscure bands. The social side is not as thriving as in other online communities, but on a smaller scale it is just as useful and successful as music is something that brings people together in a unique way.

Discussion and Conclusion
The three sites which I have introduced above all provide a niche for a community to evolve, based solely on sharing. Communities evolve around likeminded people, and these sites cater for many groups to spring up around their services. I feel it is a testament to the creators’ ingenuity to provide a service before most of their current users even knew they would come to rely on it as heavily as they do now.

As mentioned previously, my friends who are not completely computer oriented could never understand my involvement with the Internet. I grew up relating to people in communities which only existed online, and as such have a fairly large network of friends of whom I have never met. With the rise of MySpace, and more so Facebook, people understand the fun of communicating with their friends and sharing moments with them from both near and afar. I often leave posts on my flatmates wall on Facebook just for a laugh, and I communicate most with the people I see every weekend.

With the rise of (our ever favourite buzz word) Web 2.0 and the collaborative Internet it can be seen that there are those who may be left behind if they do not wish to adapt. The concept behind all three of the sites reviewed is sharing. You put a part of yourself out into the Twitosphere, the blogosphere or any number of other spheres, and read what others have themselves shared. What becomes of those of us who do not wish to share? We can observe from the sidelines and be a leech on the community, or not be involved in the community at all. The former is still a member of the community, and can take the knowledge garnered by listening in and utilise it elsewhere. The latter misses out completely.

I know for a fact, when I organised an Anzac Day bash at my house last year, I did away with the offline invites. All my friends were on Facebook. Or so I thought. Two friends of mine do not have a Facebook and as such almost missed out on the party. This was when I realised there is an increasingly growing divide between those who embrace this online life, and those who do not. Just this morning I had a conversation with a quite attractive young lady on the train to work about Twitter. She did not understand what it was, or why it was popular. She had heard there was a way to tweet song requests to Triple J, and so I explained how she could accomplish this.

The Internet for me is both a place for work, but mainly a playground. I enjoy finding interesting and amusing websites and content immensely, and subsequently take pleasure in sharing these findings with my friends. Not everyone has access to these tools, and as such I view them as an enhancement to my social life, but not as a necessity to them. Since the Web 2.0 explosion of Internet users, I can safely say I have not made any more online acquaintances. The web forums I frequent now are drying up, as people now turn to other mediums to communicate.

Once you have decided to share your life with the Internet the question of what is too much arises. Online profiles allow you to find out information about your friends you may never have known before. This, however, may come at a cost. How much can you know about someone you cannot see, what truths are they telling, and what fallacies? What information are you sharing which may affect you later in life? Kyle Doyle apparently almost lost his job by announcing he was calling in sick from work due to hangover related illness. Personally, I can relate to the Internet’s ability to provide a social camouflage. In the few weeks I have been signed up to Twitter, I have amassed a gross amount of followers for no other reason than I share a name with some radio personality. I get messages from people via Skype, Facebook, MySpace and now Twitter asking if I am in fact Hamish Blake. I always reply yes, because I am, but this just furthers their confusion. Some even become openly hostile and call me a fraud or impersonator. Should I not share my name?

With the exception of Blogger, which would allow a user to share anything they desire about themselves, the other two sites will not catastrophically affect the lives of those who do not use them. With Last.fm, one might discover a friend’s secret love of the Backstreet Boys, but ultimate sharing too much would not be a bad thing. Flickr, as with any image site, gives the user the opportunity to share too much with regards to personal photos, but the intuitive website is there to aid the user in their organisation of photos to prevent this.

The interactive revolution of the Internet is in full swing, however unlike the revolution that produced telecommunication devices, I do not feel sitting out on sharing will cause anyone the loss of a full life. Though, they might not be able to let the world know their lack of sobriety on a bus and that is a damned shame.

References
Blogger (2009) Available from http://www.blogger.com Accessed: 03/04/09

Ellison N, Lampe C & Steinfield C () ‘Social Network Sites and Society: Current Trends and Future Possibilities ‘. The Potential for Technology Enabled Connections. Issue Jan + Feb. pp 6 - 9

“Facebook 'sickie' guy facing investigation” NineMSN News (2008) Available from: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=651937 Accessed: 03/03/09

Flickr (2009) Available from: http://www.flickr.com Accessed: 03/04/09

Last.fm (2009) Available from: http://www.last.fm Accessed: 03/04/09

McFedries P (2007) ‘All-a-Twitter’. IEEE Xplore. Oct issue p84

Socializing by using the net

2009-04-03T22:48:00.000+10:00

Mobile and social networks are booming. People who get involved vary from general users to military staff, from truck drivers to job seekers, from music fans to travellers, from college students to healthcare professionals. The aim of this article is to describe some of the most popular social networks and the reasons behind their popularity.

We live in the decade of the internet revolution. Nowadays internet is widespread and affordable to just about everyone and everywhere. The content of the websites has greatly evolved from its infancy of simple HTML into applications with rich interfaces and streaming multimedia. As a result we are experiencing unprecedented growth of internet users and an avalanche of things to do on the net. Such internet applications with rapidly increasing popularity are the social networking websites. They link people together in online communities to share common interests or activities. In most cases these tools are free of charge, requires authentication, interaction between peers happens asynchronously - i.e. it does not require immediate response, and it helps members keep track of each other’s connections. Members who have never met in the real life are no longer strangers and can communicate with ease.

The following is a description of some very popular social networks as for today: Twitter, Blogs, Delicious, Flickr and LastFM.

Twitter

Thanks to Twitter it is possible to share short updates about your life and follow the updates of people that matter to you. "What are you doing?" and "How has been your day so far?" are questions we often ask our family, friends and strangers. These messages are short, under 140 characters, and reveal situations of our everyday lives that we would not usually say in blogs and emails. An interesting application of this tool is the one that allows a registered user to see the updates of a popular person or event of interest. Twitter became so significant that it is used by celebrities to keep the attention of the crowds, by businesses to provide information about their products or services, by news agencies to broadcast their updates globally, and by governments to release press conferences.

From my view I found it somewhat difficult to search for available channels. Looking up channels is an area that could be improved.

Blogs

Blogging is about making news and expressing opinions. Traditionally, when news happens reporters write the stories and a then a tiny group of people, the editors, decide what will appear on the newspapers and broadcasted. Blogs allow everyone to be a reporter, an editor and a publisher. In addition, blogs have the possibility to leave comments on the news by the readers, and that could initiate a discussion. Blogs make sharing news on the web much easier. Applications of blogs are endless - news, expressing opinions, advertising your business, etc.

On a personal level I got really interested in the blog site IDE.LI which is an online community for people who live overseas or in a foreign country and share their personal experiences. The articles describe more than 30 countries and the focus is to compare the quality of life in different parts of the world. This blog started about 10 years ago and has attracted a large audience and some of the posts have initiated passionate discussions with strong agreements and disagreements. As a side note, I personally got to meet the initiator of this community who also happens to live in Brisbane.

Delicious

Internet is a global network with billions of web pages and each page having its own URL. Browsing web pages require remembering these unique web addresses. Traditionally, links are remembered by bookmarking from a web-browser. The drawback is that all those bookmarks are saved locally to the specific computer and not accessible from another computer. There is a new way that does not use a browser to make bookmarks, but a website. These are called the Social Bookmarking sites and a popular one is Delicious. Bookmarks saved by a user can benefit other people as they go public and everyone can discover new relevant and related materials. These bookmarks made by users create a network that consequently produces a stream of classified and useful websites organized by tags.

Flickr

In case of a fire in the house, the first things that comes to our minds to save are the important papers, the inhaler, and the photo albums. [1] These days most photos are taken digitally and stored on personal computers and laptops. Even if a fire burning a house is not often a real threat, failures in computer hardware or mistaken file management happen very often, and they may erase all of our pictures forever. Flickr is a popular website for safe keeping digital photos where everyone can backup photos by uploading them to the site. Because the photos are uploaded to a website they might as well be publicly shared. Photos can be titled, tagged, indexed by popularity and commented. Easily sharing photos encourages people to take more pictures. In the past I didn’t take pictures at all. Now I always have a camera with me because I want to show my friends all interesting places I visit. Another example for the social side of Flickr is when a friend of mine uploaded impressive photos with a professional camera. I linked those images and two of my friends got very interested in finding out more about the camera brand and lenses used to take those photos, and through their comments they eventually got to know each other thanks to this particular file sharing which would not have happened otherwise.

Last FM

Last FM is another social website where the user experience is entirely spinning around music. More specifically, what music people like and what tracks they own and play. In fact, it is the largest site of its kind with over 12 million active music lovers.

On a personal level I noticed that using Last FM had two major user benefits. First, there is the fun of getting connected with other music fans who share a similar music taste. The second is that through the connections made and also through the services offered on the site I was able to discover new music and learn more about the artists that I already knew. As a music lover, Last FM has now become my main tool I choose music from.

Considering the variety of popular social tools it is easy to imagine that there might be many more tools to come. People are social beings. Socializing with others is part of our nature and the internet opens up a new horizon of possibilities. Present-day software technologies make it possible and inexpensive to create and experiment with totally new sorts of social websites. The hard part is having a good idea that is not already online. It is a challenging field but it could make anyone a new millionaire. An example for a unique idea is the system of an acquaintance of mine who is still a university student in Europe. His WiseLine site was set online a year ago and now it has tens of thousands of registered users. A short video demonstrates what WiseLine is about and it is available on the main page of the site www.wiseline.com Indeed, it sounds appealing and encouraging to implement new unique ideas for social communities and it reminds me that even Facebook started small and that the original idea behind Flickr was to be a side tool for a failed massive multiplayer online game. [2]

Internet gives us new and exciting possibilities to keep in touch with our families, friends, and to make new friends. Because the number of regular internet users is massive and socializing is part of people’s nature, the social networks are growing exponentially. There is a potential danger for unauthorized misuse of personal information, not to mention the long hours seated in front of a computer which could lead to health issues, but no matter the drawbacks social websites are quite fun, open new possibilities for socializing and will certainly continue to lure enormous audiences. Meanwhile, the social networks will strongly influence system and software developments in the years to come. [3]

References

Ripley A., “What to Save From a Fire”, Time CNN
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1675600,00.html?cnn=yes

Graham J., “Flickr of idea on a gaming project led to photo website”, USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2006-02-27-flickr_x.htm

Wang F.Y and Zeng D., "Social Computing: From Social Informatics to Social Intelligence", p 82

My Reflective Report

2009-04-03T22:41:00.000+10:00

Student Number: 4128289
Student Name: Zhu,Lin

Introduction:
With the fast development of the web 2.0 in modern society, more and more social interaction and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) are involved in the internet. As distinguished from the traditional web technology, human-beings are likely to play a more and more important role. During the period of Web 1.0, internet was working merely as a vast information store, where people could gain their desired information. Today, a lot of social interaction has been involved in the virtual internet society, which means you can meet friends, date and chat through the network.

In order to examine the relationship between social tools and social life, a couple of specific social computing tools have been tested by myself. The experience about those softwares which I used during the last few weeks will be demonstrated in the following paragraphs.

Background:
Facebook: It is a social networking site designed for supporting groups and communities. With the network, users can add each other as friends who are in different cities, workplaces, schools, countries, and interact with each other as well. It is a good platform to share peronal contents of your social life.

The reason that I focus on the Facebook is because that I have been using it for a long time, and I think it is good to show that how life is socially organized and how those tools can support it.

Focus:
I will focus on two aspects: One is the interactive functions of the Facebook, while the other is how the functionality impact on their specific users and users’ social interaction in particular context. All standpoints are based on my own experience.

Reflection:
Facebook:
Since 2006, Facebook has been innovated and developed significantly. One of the new functions introduced by Facebook is called news feed. Regarding the function, a great variety of newly updated information, which includes news about friends, new events, friend’s birthday, various online information and so on, will be displayed in chronological order and users are able to see them as soon as they enter their homepage. With this function, I do not need to spend all day to visit each friend’s homepage and find out what is happening these days, instead, I could read all the latest information easily in my own homepage.
However, one of the problems of the new function, which Mark Zuckerberg who is the designer of Facebook did not conceive, is privacy. I still remembered that when the function was introduced, my first reaction was "panic", because all my newly updated information was “exposed” in front of all my friends, which brought me inconvenience. Gradually, a number of users were against to the new function as well. Some people complain that some of their own information which they do not want other friends to read will still be published to others. Thus, personal privacy could not be guaranteed with the new function. In this case, Mark Zuckerberg has to come forward to apologize, and also quickly make the corresponding solution, which is to customize the privacy control for News Feed.
After the News Feed function was improved, I can now decide what to share with my friends and what not to, which considerably protects the users’ privacy.

“Facebook also redesigned the home page for you and your social graph. Now you can visually experience all that is shared by your friends and connections, as it happens. It also provides you with additional control by allowing you to filter what you see and from whom”- Facebook Swims Its Way into Your Lifestream: What the Facebook news means to you
As shown in the figure 1 above, this is the homepage we use now, which is in the latest version. In terms of the layout of the Facebook homepage, all the functions buttons are located in the left-hand side; the “Status” function and the latest news from friends are put in the middle of the page; the advertisements are located in the right-hand side. In addition, other information such as the friend requests and other requests is arranged in the top of the web page.
“One way to think about this is as a timeline–or a stream.” –Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the new look for profiles and home pages on the hot social-networking service, March 3, 2009

Shot at Mark Zuckerberg's 2008 F8 keynote
http://www.flickr.com/photos/briansolis/sets/72157606335164322

Facebook is trying to improve the quality of information transmission between groups and communities globally, which could eventually improve the quality of interpersonal communication. The ultimate goal is to provide a universal society relationship management tools and platform. Specifically speaking, if your information storage tool, such as your address book, cell phone, or notebook hard drive, are unfortunately destroyed or lost, all data would be gone, but you can still get in touch with your friends through Facebook. No matter how your life changes, no matter how long it pasted then, it will always help you to maintain and manage the social relationships, and the information management style is unique, interesting, and colorful.
Everyone can use Facebook to manage their friends into different categories according to social networking relationship, and maintain the relationship in a unique interactive form.
The functions of “Status” and “News Feed” are the core of the interactive concept. On the one hand, the “Status” function could clearly tell my friends what I am doing and what I am thinking through the “status” function. On the other hand, with the “News Feed” function, I could see what my friends are doing, what is happening to them, and what they are paying attention to these days, which is good fun actually.
Furthermore, Facebook has a number of additional applications - Widgets, which provides various forms of interactions, such as “Super wall”, “Poke”, “Hug”, “Gift”, “Ilike” and so on. The examples mentioned are the ones which are the most frequently used in Facebook. These tools not only realize good interactive communication among users, which help the users convey their own feelings, and maintain a close relationship with their friends, but also set up a multi-dimensional interactive dialogue system, which helps people communicate and interact with each other well, so as to achieve the maintenance of the social relation in the modern time.
There are about 700 different applications in the Facebook. Each of these has magical power and can make people’s lives colorful within the internet network. Nowadays, Facebook is becoming one of the fastest growing search engines. On the one hand, the social network provides information from outside networks. On the other hand, it provides something more within its own network - access to the personal lives of other people and experience their life and information they are willing to share in your circle. Regarding this issue, Chamath Palihapitiya who is the vice president of product marketing of Facebook explains: "I see Facebook as becoming more essential than search."
The following link is clearly shown that the Facebook is becoming one of the fastest growing search engines.
The Potential for Facebook Search Kicks Twitter’s Butt by Jesse Stay, published on March 22nd, 2009
http://staynalive.com/articles/2009/03/22/the-potential-for-facebook-search-kicks-twitters-butt/

Facebook is a typical “life Stream” application. The definition of the “Life Stream” is: “In its simplest form, it’s a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline.” (Brian Solis，March 06, 2009.) At the same time, similar to globalization, the “Life Stream” of the Facebook is also likely to “globalize” the large network and bring a smaller world to the people who use the application. Within the small village, where people get together from all over the world, everyone knows each other’s social life, and it is hard to lie to someone else, because there will always be someone who knows the truth in the small village, and they will never lose contact with their friends. It is probably more accurate to describe the scenario by using Marshall McLuhan's "global village" concept. Facebook congregates the “Life Streams” of the social networking together, so that the real world is almost compressed into an integrated village. Moreover, people, who are living in the “Global Village”, are free to share each other’s “secret”, and this gives people an unprecedented “cordial feeling”. This might be the reason why Facebook is becoming the most popular social software to the young generation.

Conclusion:
The real world has been compressed into a small virtual interactive computing world, as the social tools start to play an important role in the modern society. We can organize and maintain our social relationship well through the network.
The relationship between social life and social computing tools in details in the reflection part has been analyzed in this report. Taking Facebook as a good example, it shows that the new interactive social computing tools are absolutely necessary to exist in our social life. It helps support people’s interaction in a sense.
I can always keep in touch with all my friends, and see what they are doing, what happened to them, what they are paying attention to, which is a big deal to me to catch up with my friends always, and guarantees the relationship never be lost in the real world.

References:

The Potential for Facebook Search Kicks Twitter’s Butt by Jesse Stay, published on March 22nd, 2009
http://staynalive.com/articles/2009/03/22/the-potential-for-facebook-search-kicks-twitters-butt/

Mark Zuckerberg's 2008 F8 keynote
http://www.flickr.com/photos/briansolis/sets/72157606335164322

By ANITA HAMILTON, Nov. 21, 2007, Is Facebook Overrated?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1686825,00.html

Marshall McLuhan's 'Global Village'- Marshall McLuhan, 30 Dec 2008
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/bas9401.html

“Facebook Swims Its Way into Your Lifestream: What the Facebook news means to you”- Brian Solis，March 06, 2009.
http://www.briansolis.com/2009/03/facebook-swims-its-way-into-your.html

2009-04-03T22:31:00.003+10:00

Reflection on social networking websites

Name: Yanling Han

Student ID: 41331949

Introduction

Web 2.0, improving websites’ diversification and personalization by expanding the information source of Web 1.0, has opened up a new prospect for modern websites. For many years, internet users can only browse articles or do other limited activities on the websites the content of which can only be modify by website owner. Comparing to traditional websites, in the Web 2.0 era, social networking websites have offered greater convenience and usability for internet users by giving them the rights to own and control the data themselves. Social networking websites not only improve the website performance, but also provide a terrific platform for internet users to interact with each other, which is the most important contribution they bring to us.

In this reflection, three typical and popular social networking websites: MySpace, Facebook and Twitter are chosen to discuss. I will give a laconic description on what these social websites are. Then in the reflection part each social networking websites will be discussed with my suggestion attached to the end of each section. Conclusion will be made after the reflection part.

Focus

This reflection will focus on finding out the reason why social networking websites are so popular based on the research I have done in the selected social websites. Moreover, these websites’ unique features will be discussed during the discussion.

Background

Following is the description of three social networking tools I have chosen to look into:

MySpace: One of the most popular social networking website with an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos for teenagers and adults internationally. Its development is the most successful story in the Web 2.0 era.

Facebook: The most famous social networking services around this planet. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people by updating personal profiles, sharing photos, playing web based games in Facebook system.

Twitter: A social networking service which allows user to send their updates to cell phone or some personalized websites in the form of messages while other users can read their updates.

Reflection

MySpace VS Facebook

Being considered as the most successful case in Web 2.0 era, by 2006, after four years’ developing, MySpace hits 100 million accounts.[1] Now in 2009, it has more than 200 million accounts. April 2008, Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors and became the most popular social networking websites around the world. [2]

Even though most of Facebook’s user growth is in international markets – MySpace still dominates the markets in North America, which, in my opinion, Facebook will beat MySpace sooner or later.[3]

Features which are almost the same:

Both of these two social networking websites are excellent websites for making friends. Many functionalities these two social networking sites provide are pretty much the same such as blogs, groups, videos, music and comments, etc.

These two sites both have the friend searching system. You can search friends by name, age, school, city, etc. Additionally, these two websites both support searching friends by user’s own email address. If you go to a friend’s website, you can see the list of his/her friends which give you the chance to know more people and enlarge your circles of friends.

Another beautiful functionality which I want to mention about is video recording. Both MySpace and Facebook support making self videos. It is very handy for a user to record his own video clips using a PC camera and then share with his friends.

The photo tagging tool is a really creative feature in these two sites. When a user is uploading or editing a photo, he/she can add tags to his friends. It is a much more easy and effective way to introduce their friends to other users.

Different features:

Some features, however, vary between these two social networking websites. Take advertisement for example, I think nobody like advertisements on the websites because they distract our attention when we are browsing websites. Facebook’s performance is much better than MySpace at this point. You seldom see any advertisements on Facebook while sometimes you will get annoyed with the ads that flashing around in MySpace webpage.

Comparing to MySpace, a large amount of interesting and interactive applications makes Facebook more competitive. Furthermore, Facebook provides a tool that allows users DIY their own applications. I guess the playability of these fascinating applications is one of the important reasons why most users joined Facebook. MySpace is imitating Facebook’s way in this respect; however, there is still a long way for it to catch up.

In my first exploration in MySpace, I found an amusing feature that Facebook does not provide, the “Photo Cube”. Instead of normally uploading photos to your albums, “Photo Cube” allow you to create a cute photo cube using the photos in your albums as source. The 6 photos selected will be pasted on the 6 phases of the hexahedron you created and the hexahedron can be set as your picture shown on your home page. Though it is just a simple application, it makes our websites more vivid and attracting.

Suggestions:

The embedded instant messenger adds vitality to these two social networking websites. We can find it in the corner of the webpage. It greatly enhances the usability for these two web services. It means our communication will not be limited to use traditional instant messenger like MSN and ICQ anymore. I felt so excited the first time I was chatting with my friends using the Facebook’s embedded instant messenger until I wanted to have a video chat. It let me down because it does not support that function at all. Finally a web chatting tool called “Tokbox” can be embedded as an application in MySpace and Facebook solved this problem.[4] Alternatively, a firefox plug-in called “TokBox Voice and Video Calls” can also fulfill the chatting needs in while chatting using Facebook’s IM. Even though these problems can be solved by installing third party plug-ins, I still strongly recommend MySpace and Facebook develop their own video chatting function in order to make it more convenient for users.

Twitter

I still remember my feeling the first time I used Twitter, bored. I even thought it was useless. It looks like a bunch of people who don’t know each other talking about some meaningless things. I do not understand why numerous people spend so much time on it. After several days’ digging into it, however, I realized Twitter still has its own advantages.

Why is Twitter everywhere?

Unlike MySpace and Facebook, Twitter does not have that many attracting tools and applications and function. What it has is only a text-based post of up to 140 characters and a social network formed by people following each other. So what makes Twitter so popular? If Twitter is too simple comparing to other social networking websites, if all the functionalities can be found in other social networking websites, why bother to use Twitter? I guess the answer would be: “The simplicity”. Let me ask, what is the most important phase in our daily life? The answer should be conveying information and exchanging messages to each other. Do we have to send photos to each other to describe things that just happen? No, not necessary. Chatting, however, is the original and fundamental communicating approach which must exist. That is the reason why text messaging service in mobile becomes so popular. Meanwhile, it explains why so many people get indulged in Twitter. Let us take another look at MySpace and Facebook, the most valuable information that users are interested in is the text messages they sent to each other after removing all the stunning features such as games, photos and videos. Twitter is an advanced version of text message. It can be sent across different platforms including internet, cell phone and other devices. Let us image we were talking to each other while sitting around a table. We listen to someone saying something we are interested in while we still can hear other people depicting something we do not care about. Even though most of the time the topics we talked about are meaningless, this is the most natural way of communicating and it is exactly what Twitter is doing. Twitter becomes a successful social networking system because it perfectly represents a normal social life.

Is Twitter useless?

I believe anyone who dares to say “Twitter is useless” will definitely get drowned in all “radical” twitter’s spittle. The main concept of Twitter is “What are you doing?” Users share his status and thoughts with all his followers. I used to think it is useless until I saw a woman asking “I wanna go to new york! What do u guys think?” Then I recognized that Twitter is not limited in sharing thoughts and what users are doing, it can also be used to gain suggestions. In real world, you always ask friends for help when you are in trouble. It is exactly the same in Twitter. Since I have not been to New York before, I looked into her other followers’ reply and I saw lots of suggestion they gave her. That’s it! In Twitter, you have millions of brains working for you if you have millions of followers.

Suggestion for Twitter

I have been following a productive user who updates his thoughts every half hour. Some of his updates are valuable to me but most of them are worthless. All his trivial updates bother me so much and my home page is full of his updates. I want to stop following him but treasure some of his opinions. I would suggest that a filtering system be embedded in Twitter so that users can filter the information by their preferences.

Conclusion

From the discussion above, we can have a clear picture in mind what a social networking website looks like. They are mimicking almost all human behavior that we can find in the human society. Social networking websites are virtual world without blue sky and firm ground; however, they are so real that users can do most of the things they behave in the real world such like chatting, playing games, voting, etc.

MySpace and Facebook are the two leading virtual social networks of the world. They provide users with their creative features while Twitter sticks to its particular thoughts about human’s original ways of communicating. There are several reasons for them being so popular. First, their concepts are brand new comparing to the websites in the Web 1.0 era. Second, they are supported by the latest internet technology such as AJAX, XHTML, etc. Last but not least, they are building a real human society on the internet that greatly facilitates the communication between people.

References

[1] P. Cashmor, "MySpace Hits 100 Million Accounts," http://mashable.com/2006/08/09/myspace-hits-100-million-accounts/, 2006.

[2] M. Arrington, "Facebook No Longer The Second Largest Social Network," http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/12/facebook-no-longer-the-second-largest-social-network/, June 12, 2008.

[3] C. Beam, "How Facebook could crush MySpace, Yahoo!, and Google.," http://www.slate.com/id/2168872/, June 22, 2007.

[4] K. Nicole, "TokBox Brings Video to Facebook IM Chat," http://mashable.com/2008/07/02/tokbox-facebook-cha/, July 2nd, 2008.

My Reflection about Twitter and Last.fm

2009-04-03T22:29:00.007+10:00

Name:Zhou Fei
Student Number:41282902

Introduction:
From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, human beings play a more and more important role in the network. With the traditional web model, people could only seek information they desire from the internet, and the internet is nothing but the information storehouse to most people. As the Web 2.0 developed rapidly, the situation has been ameliorated. Vast human & social interactions have been linked with network. People are able to make friends, chat, share and date on line. “Social Computing has radically changed the way people interact with both information and one another on the Internet.” Because of the convenience and advantages it brings to people’s lives, this type of technology is becoming more and more popular today. The phenomenon with diverse aspects, such as human conversation, group coordination, awareness and so on, will be introduced in the following paragraphs.

Background:
In the last few weeks, I have tested and worked over some specific interactive software and websites. Based on my personal experience, two websites, which are prevalent in worldwide scope, were chosen in order to support my reflection.
Twitter is a different type of Instant Information, with which users are able to post their latest trend and their ideas in less than 140 characters.
Last.fm is the largest social music platform in the world. Users need to install software, which can be downloaded from the homepage of Last.fm, onto their computer to track what music they are listening to. Data has been recorded then be uploaded to the Last.fm website for data collection and recommendation. At the same time, some other functions are also available in the site of Last.fm to satisfy users’ social interaction and communication.

Focus:
In the following reflection, I am delighted to share my personal experience, my opinion and also my survey about these interactive websites. I will emphasize on some specific interactive functions of these websites, and also how those affects their users.

Reflection
Twitter

In terms of the software - Twitter, I have never heard of that before. However, it is quickly becoming one of my favorite social networks. Being different from most interactive tools, Twitter has the simplest interface. Novices just need to spend a few minutes to learn how to use it, and after that you can use it expertly. With the software, you could read all the announcements updated by your friends, and you can also upload your own.

First of all, I would like to talk about a special function of Twitter, which is that, the concept of ‘friends’ has been eliminated and replaced by the form of ‘followers’ instead. I have to say that I really love this design. As a social interaction system, the word ‘follow’ gives me a sense that somebody is following me or I am following others. Being different from ‘friend’, there is no relationship between a ‘follower’ and a person who is followed by others. They could be friends in real life, and they could also be strangers. For this reason, I will be happy to follow anyone on Twitter without considering the relationship between us, or whether they are following me or not. You can always find a group of people sharing same interests, activities, or achievements on Twitter.
Another fascinating function of Twitter is that users can bind their Twitter with their cell phones. Due to the restriction of 140 characters, which matches the character limit of SMS in cell phones, every update on Twitter can be sent to users’ mobile phones by SMS. Users do not have to sit in front of the computer, because they also could read the information of their ‘followers’ from their mobile phones. ‘Knowing who is around, what is happening, and who is talking with whom. ‘I think this function of Twitter is the most suitable example to demonstrate the awareness of social interaction system.

Comparing to individual users, the users who have their own groups have more advantage in using the Twitter. As I learned how to use Twitter, I invited my group members of IENV 3000 to have group meetings using this tool. Each one of us follows others, thus, all of us could be quickly gathered in the same group, and communicate freely. With Twitter, we are able to update any of our ideas come from our minds and do the brainstorming together, which demonstrates the concept of coordination in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).
Considering the applicability and easiness of Twitter, Twitter could be used in different fields such as business, meetings, services, news etc. In addition, the social interactive system in association with mobile technology have an underlying advantage, and the future of the system is positive.
Last.fm

Last.fm is a website for music addicts sharing, recommending and searching their music tastes. Other than traditional music sharing websites, which publicize recommendation opinions that are brought forward by evaluation experts, Last.fm collects wisdom from the users instead. In other words, Last.fm represents music tastes of the populace.
Similar to Twitter, the Last.fm is easy to use as well. Users only need to download the small setup file from Last.fm’s homepage, then install into their own computer/laptop. After the installation, when you listen to the music, the software will record the information including artist, musical style, albums and so on. The recorded information will then be uploaded to the site, calculated and finally provided to other users as ‘Top Artists’, ‘Top Track’ and ‘Recently Listened Tracks’. The finalized data plays a crucial part for people to communicate with each other on the music platform. Taking myself as an example, when I browse other listeners’ sites, comparison to theirs will be indicated on the page. I am very happy to follow suggestions from the Last.fm’s to add those users as my friends, sharing them with my favorite songs, artistes and albums. If you want to recommend some music to your friends or discuss with them, you could talk to them via shoutbox and comments. All those functions demonstrate the social interaction of Last.fm.
Another social functionality of the Last.fm is the ‘Neighbours’ feature, which can guide people to other listeners’ sites who have similar musical tastes to them. Browsing other users’ profiles is like visiting their houses in real-life. When I browse my neighbours’ sites, I will also pay attention to the music they listen to even different to my taste. Involuntarily, their likes and dislikes will impact on my taste, and also some of my neighbours will be influenced by my musical taste. This only happens when people have interaction and communication together through network.
To meet other requirements of social computing and coordination of the users’, Last.fm also features ‘Journal’, ‘Groups’ and ‘Forums’ for individual users or groups. The ‘Journal’ function, which is my most favorite part on Last.fm, is really special. The function enables people to use multimedia elements, such as music and video to represent their mood. For example, if I have a really bad day and do not want to type too many words, I could insert a sentimental song into my journal. When my friends browse my journal, they may not read my words carefully, but when they are able to understand my mood with the music I illustrated. There might not be direct textural communication between two people. However, communicating with music is also another kind of social interaction.
Being contrasted significantly to other social tools and interactive websites, Last.fm provides an indirect conversation and coordination by using musical elements, which on the one hand is the strongest point, while on the other hand is the restriction of Last.fm. With the rise of Web 2.0 technology, varied social tools with musical feature start to appear, such as Blogger, MySpace etc. Comparing to Last.fm which only focuses on music enthusiasts, those other social tools are more open to all type of users. Fortunately, music will never ever be unfashionable or obsolete. Thus, although Last.fm may never be as popular as other interactive tools, such as Facebook, Blogger etc, it will still have a lot of immovable users who love music very much.

Conclusion:
Those two social websites both have simple interfaces, which do not need that much time to learn, and have specific interactive functions to satisfy users at the same time. Seen from the development of the two tools, it is easy to find out that every improvement on these tools is aiming to provide better and more powerful services of social computing and interaction for users. “Ordinary people are capable of directing messages through their network of acquaintances to reach a specific but distant target person in only a few steps.”As the rise of Web 2.0 technology, a lot of similar tools or websites are created. The competition is becoming more intensive. Thus the designers have to keep improving their social computing concept ceaselessly. However, no matter how the tools change, the soul of social networking and interaction is always about the human behavior. Meeting the requirement of users, then you will be successful.

References:
1. Rob Koplowitz, G. Oliver Young (2007) Web 2.0 Social Computing Dresses Up for Business
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,41867,00.html

2. Duncan J. Watts, Peter Sheridan Dodds, M. E. J. Newman (2002) Identity and Search in Social Networks
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/296/5571/1302

Two worlds collide!

2009-04-03T22:09:00.008+10:00

Julian Foley
32421857

Two worlds are about to collide and we might all be the better for it!

The world of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) research and the new world of social networking are coming together to offer a fresh take on how best we can work together online. This might be a new direction for the field.

Or it might be a costly distraction.

Let’s look at this by tracking the potential impact on the huge and mobile workforce of the community sector. The more than 700,000 workers in this sector visit older people and people with disability in their own homes to offer healthcare and support with daily living. They work with kids on the streets, homeless people and women escaping domestic violence. They are mobile and often work alone. They may be on call 24/7.

These workers sometimes have access to a collaborative corporate internet – MS SharePoint, for example - at their home base. Sites like these have emerged from decades of CSCW research and they work well in large enterprises, especially where there is a consistency in goals and strategies.

But the community worker spends much of their time on the road, sometimes with a mobile phone but more usually only a sheaf of paper forms on a clipboard as their primary link to their corporate base!

Should the sector devise a new system to keep these workers connected? Should it borrow tools from both the social networking world (after all, networking is at the heart of community sector work) and CSCW (after all, so is cooperation!) to frame a new mobile solution?

The head office would still run a corporate site – all of the agency staff need to work well together across a wide area (there is a community sector organisation in practically every community across the continent). But it may not look so corporate. CollectiveX has bundled Web 2.0 tools into a “groupsite”[1] that offers much of the SharePoint functionality, but can be configured as a congenial and personal social networking experience.

How would this be extended to the workers in the field?

The community worker works in the community! This is a world of sights, sounds, stories and snippets of information which the worker can use to build an authentic picture of a client’s needs or how a response might work best. So why not give them all the tools to capture all these inputs?

For example, freshen up the information flow with a link to Twitter. Tag the posts to an agency (or just a small team within it; as Shirky suggest, “spare the group from scale”[2]) and workers can swap information on the road as they visit their clients and meet with their networks. Or they can quickly act together in an emergency.

Configure the location in a Google map and share that, too.

Better still, why not set up a Tweeterfall on the site and organise the tweets by topic and place? Link the workers in the office into the conversation.

Capture recordings of client interviews and upload them to AudioBoo (sure, it’s only for iPhones, but that might be another part of the solution!) The folk back in the office can use these recordings for case coordination meetings and then discard them. Or they may store them as evidence of client agreement and quality practice.

While you’re at it, enable a direct link to an agency YouTube channel and a Flickr photostream. A video of a discussion among at-risk youth can spice up a funding application wonderfully.
And if you don’t think the original video is up to it, offer staff a link to a video solution platform like Kaltura and challenge them to mash it up into something more decent. You’ll get surprising results from the younger staff!

Bringing all this functionality together makes for a pretty active looking site, and some functions will immediately appeal. But is that all there is to it? Does this then constitute a collaboration site? Have we broached the social-technical gap – “the great divide between what we know we must support socially and what we can support technically”[3]

Sadly, far from it.

The field of CSCW is pretty clear about the parameters required for a true online collaborative experience.

One of these is that the site has to be engaging for the user – the term “entrainment” is more precise. This means the user’s “level of desire to use a system and whether they will continue to rely upon it for performing routine work”.[4]

A good level of entrainment is reflected in a critical mass of users which shows the site is a useful place to exchange information with many others.

Another big issue is awareness. A person can’t work well in a group unless they are aware of who they’re working with. “User-interfaces have to be built in such as way that they always indicate if people are either working alone, in one of several possible sub-group constellations, or with all members of their teams or organisation.”[5]

Shared goals are another question. The field worker and management have very different experiences of their work and may need to constantly re-negotiate shared goals and strategies. Shared meaning and histories are key here and it may be important to configure this into the way the site works.[6]

Users will quickly come up against what is known as the privacy problem.[7] A lot of information will flood through this site and the user has a wide network of others who may want to access the information. How do they control the flow?

Concurrency is another issue. While field staff are working with distinct clients in dispersed locations there might be few occasions when several users need to access the same data at the same time. But bring several clients or workers together and this might rapidly change. Add to this the need for workers to access common organisation information, and the complexity compounds. Social networking tools haven’t had to seriously address concurrency but it is central to the CSCW agenda.

The conclusion? Simply bundling all this Web 2.0 functionality won’t build a collaborative site. But it might be a useful prototype.

Web 2.0 has offered up a host of new solutions that can be now considered as part of the CSCW toolkit. But unless they are shaped and evaluated through CSCW research frameworks, they are not likely to deliver collaborative workers who are fully engaged with the corporate direction.

[1] “Groupsites are collaboration communities that enable groups to communicate, share and network to make things happen. They do this by combining the most useful (but not all) features of online groups and listservs (like Yahoo! Groups), collaboration software (like Sharepoint) and Social Networks (like Facebook and Linkedin).” From http://www.crunchbase.com/company/collectivex (accessed 27 March 2009).
[2] C. Shirky, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. Blog post on http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/, April 26 2008 (accessed 29 March 2009)
[3] M. S. Ackerman, “The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility”, in Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millennium. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2002, p 303
[4] D. Ambaye, A Socio-centric Model of User Interaction, in Human-Computer interaction: Theory and Practice (Part 1), Volume 1, Mahwah, 2003, p 10.
[5] N. A. Streitz, P. Tandler, C. Muller-Tomfelde and S. Konomi, “Roomware: Toward the Next Generation of Human-Computer Interaction Based on an Integrated Design of Real and Virtual Worlds”, in Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millennium. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2002, p 554
[6] Boland – p305 HCI
[7] M. S. Ackerman, op cit., p 308

Have you typed your name in google recently?

2009-04-03T21:18:00.001+10:00

Jed Petralia
41418381

Have you typed your name in google recently?

When I typed my name into Google 9 out of the first 10 responses related to me, the other was a blogger from Texas who shops at Walmart every Sunday, he’s 75.

Yes, anyone who wanted to know who I was and where I lived would find out instantly that I’m 19, I live with my parents in Toowong, I listen to music, go to festivals and regularly update my facebook and twitter accounts.

But is this all that worrying to me? You will find the answer to this soon.

The aim of this blog is to reflect my experiences in using these social and mobile computing applications and how I feel about my digital footprint being broadcasted everywhere and to anyone online.

All in all I feel that all social and mobile computing applications are either very similar or the same. Your facebook profile is not much different to your Myspace profile; your twitter account and your Flickr profile is virtually identical to the photo album application you use on Facebook. Even Delicious is bordering on this idea with providing a site that houses all these sites on the same page. Last.fm tells a person on the other side of the world that your currently blaring Radiohead from your speakers at your home.

What users don’t understand, and this is where I want to emphasise my point, is that the entire social networking body is just one big blog of personal information about yourself that anyone can read. Often people ask what happens to all that information once your comment disappears or after you delete your account, it remains in the hands of the application providers, just read the terms and conditions. This was posted online by NowPublic Media on February 16th 2009: “Facebook has quietly altered its Terms of Service (or Terms of Use) such that they now maintain rights to any and all original content uploaded by you, forever.” Unfortunately for us the application providers are not making us read the terms and conditions of use after every single ‘submit’ we click. I challenge the bloggers of comp3505 to read the terms and conditions for yourselves.

Just like Facebook and MySpace, Twitter took the world-wide-web by storm, by providing an engine that allows you to post what you’re doing 24 hours a day. Who would’ve thought that such a simple idea would attract thousands upon thousands of hits, or are they tweets? A second.
From my excessive use of twitter over the past few weeks for comp3505 I think they are actually heading in the right direction. People are tweeting to each other online knowing full well that there tweets are going to be read by people from the other side of the world. Alas, some of users want to be heard from the other side of world. Facebook and myspace are the complete opposite. Users are “saving” personal information about themselves online by commenting to friends, by posting up blogs, by uploading images and not even realising that all this information is owned by the application providers.

Please keep in mind that I’m not trying to persuade you to delete one account and start up another because it’s a better service. If you don’t want people reading what you writing about, or if you don’t want your boss to see your drunken profile pictures from the night before then common sense tells you do not put it up.

This poses the question whether it’s necessary for these online profiles to even exist?

I think it is. In a day and age where everyone is becoming computer literate people want an easy way to talk peer-to-peer online. It’s by far the easiest, quickest and low cost way to talk to your friends, apart from seeing them in person.

What are the facts?
1. 41 percent of all Australian internet users have at least one social and networking profile.
2. 70 percent of them have more than one profile
3. 3 quarters claim they are posting pictures, half are doing emails and talking peer to peer online

People are engaging in this to a pretty huge extent! [Tony Marlow: Online Research Expert]

I was re-watching Triple J’s Hack program “MYFACE” online the other day and a girl explained that she loves her myspace profile because she “comes across more confident online, as opposed to real life”. She is sixteen year old called Sophie and has currently over 200,000 myspace friends and has created a virtual reality of herself online and is living inside it - Just like I am. The fact that everyone can read my profile and see what parties I attended to in the last week doesn’t worry me. But if I thought that it might decrease the chances of me getting my next job, then I would definitely think twice about what I put up online.

It has come to my attention that small companies and business owners are doing an online check up about the person prior to the interview. Gaynor Lowndes a recruitment manager based in Sydney stresses this even more on Triple J’s hack program, “Recruiters absolutely use your networking site to make judgements about you, so do potential employers. Offers of employment have been retracted. People are putting stuff up there that potential employers shouldn’t be reading. If you want to keep it private keep it of the web.” (2) Employers are even going as far as firing there employees due to facebook statuses. Kimberly Swann said she was bored at work and got fired because of it. http://criticisethat.blogspot.com/2009/03/teen-fired-for-saying-she-was-bored-on.html.

Solutions:

Facebook and Myspace alike should remind users that what’s being posted online will stay online, because they own it. Twitter users, should keep on twittering. This application has people purposefully going online knowing that there stuff is going to be read by heaps of users. But please don’t forget the major point here, don’t put anything online that you don’t want everyone else to know. Most networking site still have some or most of your information even after you delete it. Facebook will happily restore your account even though you deleted it almost 4 months ago.

Conclusion:

I will continue to use facebook, twitter, delicious and last.fm because it’s apart of my young and vibrant social life. Plus it’s required for comp3505! I have created myself a virtual online reality and I’m currently living in it and its not about to change. These applications are simple and easy to set up. There’s countless documentation online about how to upload content, what applications are possible with each account and what can you do where. Go read them if your having trouble.

What I’m aware about is the privacy issues that are involved with signing up to these sites. These sites are a thing of the future, hopefully when I google my name in a few months time only 5 out of the first 10 responses will be about me.

References

(1) http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/triplej/tv/hackhh_ep1_myface.mp4

Sharing with Social Software

2009-04-03T21:15:00.001+10:00

41175460 – Jamie Coleman

Introduction

Social software and the many forms that it now comes in provides us with many new and exciting ways of interacting amongst each other. Many aspects of social interaction can now be done through social software. It has the potential to totally change or even replace more traditional methods of social interaction.

In this post I will be looking at how social software changes a particular aspect of social interaction. What I will be discussing is sharing. Sharing as it is discussed in this post does not only include sharing of media but a broader spectrum of sharing that we do with one another. This includes the sharing of such things as opinions, knowledge, schedules and even friends.

In terms of scope I will mainly focus on more of the social side rather than the collaborative(CSCW) side. This is because I think that the motivations of such software differ slightly from the more 'social' kind of software and that the context in which it is used is usually different. To cover both would be too much for this post.

Another thing to note is that while email can be considered as part of social software I have decided to discuss email as a more traditional approach to social interaction as its been around for a very long time and is basically not to different from traditional mail/letters.

Background

Most social software and services incorporate some kind of sharing into their products. User created content and contributions are what web2.0 is fundamentally built upon. Essentially what we are doing more and more with software is sharing. Some of the sites that I will be discussing in this post are provided bellow with a short description of what they do.

Delicious: Allows users to store and share as well as search for bookmarks online. One of its key features and central to sharing is its support for folksonomy tagging.

Blogger: A blog publishing system which allows users to publish and maintain blogs.

Last.fm: A service that allows for users to share their tastes in music. Interact with people that have similar tastes in music, get music recommended.

Flickr: A photo sharing service that allows users to upload, store and share images and photos with others.

These software and the experiences I have had from them is where I have formed most of my opinions from. Each of these sites are unique in their own way and provide users with different aspects of sharing. For example Flickr allow for sharing of media whereas Delicious lets users share bookmarks and their opinion that certain sites are worth bookmarking. Blogger supports the sharing of ideas and personal events while last.fm lets users share tastes in music amongst each other.

Focus

What I intend to focus on in the rest of the post is how software is providing us with new ways of sharing and how these change how we share and are attitude towards sharing. I will reflect on how social software has changed the way I share and attempt to analyse why this is.

Reflection

I am finding that I share a lot more since my adoption of social software. I find it extremely easy to share and that it is a more routine task and casual task. With traditional methods I shared a lot less and only when I really needed or wanted to.

From what I can tell there are several reasons as to why social software is making me share a lot more. I also feel that sharing is easier and a lot more casual. The following are some key aspects of social software that have made it a lot easier to share things with other people.

Asynchronous Sharing

One of the key features of a lot of social software is that they allow for asynchronous interaction between users. This means that I don't have to physically meet people to share things like media. People can go through what I have to share at a time that suits them best. This is extremely important in that I don't have to worry if the other person is busy. People can come and read my blog when ever they want to.

Less Intrusive Sharing

This feature is related to the previous. Sometimes sharing via email or face to face can be a little to intrusive[1]. It sometimes feels like your forcing stuff upon people and then making them respond to it. This maybe fine with people you are close with but what about people you aren't so close to? There may be things you want to share with a person but email might just not be appropriate. For example if I went on a trip overseas and took some photos I would want to share them and my experience with people. Even if they're not that close to me I think that it might still interest them. This doesn't mean that I'm going to send an email to every single person I know, those close to me and those not so close.

Software like Flickr on the other hand allows me to share with who ever is interested and I know in a more subtle and low key way. This allows for me to share things with people that aren't that close to me as well as people that are close.

Inversion of Responsibility

With traditional methods it was the job of the person sharing and offering something to notify and send things. With social software this is often reversed. It is common for social software to pull users and not to push content to users as the pull model is a more people centric[2]. A lot of the time it is the responsibility of the receiver to find what ever anyone else is sharing. Receivers have the option to receive feeds for updates like in Blogger, or they can just make regular visits to places. This means that I'm not forcing anything on anyone and that who ever is viewing/sharing the content that I have contributed is doing so on their own will. If they don't like it they can go elsewhere. This is probably why many social sites feel less intrusive as it is the receiver that makes the decision to view content, it is voluntary.

I feel that this means I can share a lot more stuff since I don't have to worry about only sharing content that will be widely accepted.

Sharing with your self

One thing I find with social software is that they are extremely useful as storage or repositories for personal data. Social networking sites will allow me to organise my contacts/friends, Flickr lets me store photos, Blogger lets me organise my thoughts and record them and Delicious stores my bookmarks. Features like allowing to keep some content private like in Flickr really supports this.

Centralisation of Sharing

Everything is centralised, usually on to a single page or area meaning that what you share and the feedback that you get from what you are sharing are on the same page. This is true for sites like blogger and Flickr which allow users to leave comments. Having feed back from other people you share with in a single place is very convenient and gives you a clear picture of the kind of response whatever it is that you are sharing is generating.

When sharing knowledge in blogs with people your post can easily be referred to at a latter point meaning less repetition on your part. People can always view your posting again if they want to. You are able to answer questions in the comments section meaning you only have to answer once.

Keeping everyone informed is also a lot easier due to everything being centralised. Going back to a previous point, the fact that it is up to the receiver to check also makes it easier as there is only one channel/direction of communication.

Ease of use and the Change in the Environment

One of the key features of popular social software that I have observed is that it is easy to use. For example bookmarking on Delicious is about 4 clicks without writing comments. With last.fm you don't have to do anything. Blogger has an add-on feature called BlogThis! which allows you to blog from your browser without visiting Blogger. Clicking the BlogThis! Button creates a mini interface with the address of the page you're at in the text.

I feel that the ease of use make sharing a more casual day-to-day experience compared to how it was previously. If you had decided to write an email and share something it meant that you thought whatever it is that you were sharing was really important or interesting. Compare this to something like Twitter.

The environment and context in which we share has greatly changed as well. Essentially what social software often offers the choice to sharing while your doing something. For example last.fm shares while you listen to music. Many photo management software offer an option to export to Flickr. This means that Flickr then becomes easily integrated in to your regular process of managing photos. I have found that it feels extremely natural importing photos locally and then exporting them to Flickr through the same software. It just feels streamlined as it is a small extension to what I have always been doing. In fact I think it takes about two clicks to export to Flickr.

New Ways of Sharing

Personally I think that one of the reasons why blogs caught on and have become so popular was that it was totally new way of communicating and sharing ideas for most of us. If you think about it there really isn't any realistic way of doing what you do in a blog using the traditional methods of social interaction and sharing blogging is really unlike that of any previous social movement[3]. I feel that none of the traditional methods provide the right tool for what is achieved through blogging.

Sharing is Rewarding

Sharing is a two way procedure. You give and you get something back. This can be feedback or it can be other content. What a lot of the social software I have experienced offers rewards for sharing. The idea is that the more you share the more you can get out of it. This is especially true for software such as last.fm where sharing more means a greater chance in finding other people who like the same music or music that you would like.

Delicious also gives a lot back but in a less obvious way. The idea is that the more you and others bookmark the more effective the tags become meaning that searching for related sites becomes easier. It also makes finding sites of significance for certain topics easy[4].

Conclusion

In conclusion I feel that social software provides new and often, much more flexible options for the very same social interactions that were done traditionally. Sharing is one aspect of social interaction that has greatly benefited from the flexibility that social software provides. I personally feel that social software has made me more active in sharing as it provides easy to use tools as well as much more convenient model of sharing. This includes the topics that were discussed such as responsibility inversion and less intrusive sharing. It is my opinion that social software makes the process of sharing, whether it be media, knowledge, opinion or people much more rewarding than it has ever been.

References

[1]. G. Cormode et al,”Key Difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0”, AT&T Labs–Research, Febuary 13, 2008, Available: http://www.research.att.com/~bala/papers/web1v2.pdf.

[Accessed: Apr.3, 2009]

[2]. J.Hagel et al, “From Push To Pull”, Journal of Service Science, Third Quarter 2008, pg. 93 – 100, Available: http://www.cluteinstitute-onlinejournals.com/PDFs/1274.pdf. [Accessed: Apr.3, 2009]

[3]. A. Loewnstein, “The Bloggin Revolution Lands”, Antony Lowenstein. [Online].

Available: http://antonyloewenstein.com/blog/2008/08/23/the-blogging-revolution-lands/ [Accessed: Apr. 3, 2009].

[4]. C.Shirky, “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags”, Clay Shirky's Writtings about the Internet. [Online]. Available: http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html [Accessed: Apr. 3, 2009].

The good, the bad, and the "Why the hell am I using this?". A reflection.

2009-04-03T20:59:00.003+10:00

By: Julien Roche 41074255

Twitter is a social network service that allows people to check what other people are currently doing, this has its benefits and its drawbacks. While it might be of interest to "follow" individuals such as friends, politicians, or celebrities, most of my experience has been "Why the hell are you tweeting this?". I first learned of twitter from technology podcast, the pod-caster was commenting about how the service was consistently down. In subsequent episodes there was criticism about the ridiculous things that people would post to their twitter accounts.

I could understand this, I would not want tweets stating "I'm doing the dishes.", "Changing babies diaper.", and "Spring cleaning" to cross my screen. This kind of information I really don't care to hear about. My first tweet "enjoying a cold beer" was pretty pathetic, who cares if I'm enjoying a cold, crisp full-strength beer. If I had posted "I think I'm becoming an alco", then I could see how that would be important to someone(hopefully).

Having recently signed up for a twitter account I've come to understand why some people post useless messages, they feel obligated. Since signing up and having some friends follow me, I have had an itch to post something, anything, even the most mundane tasks of daily life. Luckily I’ve had the piece of mind not to post these, anyone following me should be thankful of this.

I feel Facebook is a better way of keeping track of people, I've been using this for a while to keep in touch with friends and family. I don't feel the urge to post something every day, just when I'm doing something special. The layout makes it easier to see the latest posts from people at a glance, using twitter, it can be cumbersome as the tweets are in a list structure. I found myself scrolling down the window past multiple tweets from the same source just to see what another person’s last tweet. Although it was nice to be able to see what was on peoples thoughts as time progressed.

One other factor that I consider important is the fact that I control who sees what I post on my Facebook page. While Twitter has a similar feature, it seems redundant to have to handle this on a second social network. I would rather just have one place to check up on the people that I want to. My routine includes checking 3 different email accounts (2 web based, 1 mail client based) and then maybe checking my Facebook friends, this way if I have time to follow up on anything interesting, I can, else it can wait. If anything really important has happened, they can use other means to get in touch with me.

Although the latest change of "What are you doing" to "What are you thinking" was irksome. It actually made me stop and wonder to myself "What am I thinking?". Unfortunately, I drew a blank, which made me feel brain dead. Some have speculated that this was done to be more “Twitter like”, to me, I think about the book “1984” by George Orwell.

<rant>

Speaking of “1984”, a friend of mine recently cancelled his Facebook account. His decision was based on the recent change stated above, and his belief that the government was snooping in on what he was posting. This made me wonder, what the hell is he posting that he is worried about the government finding out? Is he posting tax evasion tips or drug dealing on Facebook?

Do drug dealers have Facebook and Twitter accounts? I imagine what these would look like, “Hey, got some good stuff, will be at corner of 5th and Main.” or “Taking the new cigar boat out to make a pickup from Cuba”.

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The mobility aspect of Twitter seen as many to be a great asset to their everyday lives. While access to Facebook is limited to internet connections using browsers and applications, people can send and receive (only in limited countries) tweets from any mobile phone via SMS. I can see this as a benefit and as an intrusion, do I really want to know what the people I’m following are doing right when it’s posted? Short answer is: no.

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The first “I’m at the DMV waiting in line, watching some guy pick his nose.” tweet I receive on my mobile will be the next time I have to buy a new mobile. Can we say: “High velocity impact against a hard surface (probably concrete, actually, make that almost definitely concrete)”.

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The implications from being able to tweet from a mobile have been recently made clear as seen when a Senator from the US tweeted his arrival on a secret visit to Baghdad. This raised a few eyebrows among security consultants everywhere, wouldn’t stalkers enjoy the benefits if their targets always tweeted their current locations or where they would be going at any particular time?

In short, I will not continue using Twitter, but I will continue my usage of Facebook. Luckily I am not following anyone that posts tweets like the above examples, I just feel like it’s a waste of bandwidth. While some of the information that they post is interesting, they are talked about in podcasts/vidcasts, or I’ve heard this information through other means, i.e. Digg.com. This information is not essential to me, and I already have my necessary contacts as part of my Facebook account or I subscribe to their shows where they converse about the topics I’m interested in.