The Internet is evolving; a reflection

The Internet provides one with the ability to approach an age-old problem with a fresh and exciting angle, this being the problem of interacting and communicating with others. Whilst this can provide new and exciting methods in which to achieve communication, these ideas come with their own sets of issues in a variety of areas. This posting will delve into these issues, along with an observation of the more positive outcomes that are provided through this adaptation of technology to a social setting.

In order to take an in-depth look at this concept, several different tools have been selected to ensure a variety of experiences are had. The tools that have been selected for this examination are Facebook, last.fm, and Google Calendar. These tools have different aims for the types of information they store, and the way users interact with each other, but they all provide a method for socially interacting with people, regardless of their location.

From both the extensive use of these tools, as well as interactions with other users, we will look at a selection of issues. This selection includes the increase in the feeling of connection to ones peers, some of the security issues and fears that have arisen, as well as some of the positive outcomes that have come from using such tools.

Each of the tools that are being examined here serves a different purpose within the spectrum of social and mobile computing, but a common goal is working towards improving interactions between users.

Google Calendar can be seen as being different from other applications in this class, as from the surface, the interaction layer is not prioritised, and is a fully functional application in a single user environment, as opposed to others, which require interactivity as a core component of functionality. However, once you begin to utilise the shared features that Google provides, the calendars that are shared can provide a wealth of information regarding others that you can then put to use. For instance, a shared calendar can provide the ability for a team to share a common set of tasks and deadlines, or a social group to share information regarding upcoming events. This ability to form groups, as well as being able to follow information regarding others and their availabilities, if they choose to share them, provides avenues to know more about a peer and their activities, increasing the feeling of connection.

Music is an almost ubiquitous part of society today. Apple sold over twenty two million iPod music devices in the final quarter of 2007 alone¹, so it seems only natural that people can find a common interest in what their peers are currently listening to. Last.fm provides a service to upload details about the tracks a user is enjoying through a connection of a local media player, and the last.fm website. This detail provides graphs and suggestions based on ones own musical selections, but also provides a means to compare your taste in music to that of your peers. Through these tools, one is not only able to find artists that both you and your peers are commonly interested in, one is able to sample new bands that their peers are currently enjoying, through a sample service provided via both the website and the supplied end user client. With the ability to learn new things about peers, the connections one may feel can be increased with the discovery of a common interest; did you really know that your best friend also enjoyed the musical styling of Kylie Minogue?

Of the tools that we are examining, Facebook is comfortably the most well known, and is one of the largest social networking sites on the Internet. In comparison to Google Calendar, Facebook can be seen as almost a polar opposite, with almost all of its functionality dependent on the interactions between users. Without this interaction, the site is virtually featureless, and so even from this very high level; it can be seen as cementing the levels of connection between users. However, if we dig down into the program, many of its features are aimed at improving this feeling of connection. Logging into the site provides a news feed, which provides constant updates on the changes your friends have made, whether it is updating their status, declaring a relationship, posting some photos, or simply communicating a message to another user. Through these items, one is able to look into the changes their friends have made to their profile, and therefore feel more in touch with what is happening in their lives. These morsels of information provide a feeling of connection with a peer, and can sometimes provide details that one may not necessarily be made aware of in a normal social situation.

Ever since people began using the Internet, security has been an issue for many. Community sites, such as message boards or forums, have been around since a time prior to the advent of the World Wide Web, and have promoted semi-anonymous posting through hiding behind screen names, and not giving away personal information. This concept of promoting a different online persona has continued on many different websites, however, social computing sites have forced a change of perspective for many users. These sites rely on users providing personal information in order to function as a social tool, and with that comes a new issue of online security.

Facebook, for instance, attempts to force users to use their real names when signing up, and users are able to find each other using this information. Furthermore, one can provide all kinds of personal information as a part of their user profile, which can be visible to users that you are not friends with, depending on privacy settings. With this in mind, however, the fear of security issues are only there if you are careless with your information, just as in the past. Take the concept of personal domain registration. Your information may be as simple to access as a whois lookup, which may include your full name, phone numbers, and address. All of this information is required when you register a domain, but some people do not seem to think about where this information goes, despite the fact that it becomes accessible by anyone connected to the Internet. If you have posted a link to a personal website elsewhere, and identified it as yours, someone would be able to query this data. Also, the concept of anonymity on parts on the Internet can lull one into a false sense of security, and let one release information that is seemingly harmless, but someone determined can pick up on, and use to trace down your information. So whilst these new sites offer you the chance to place personal information on your profile, they can also be locked down as part of the site structure to people who would most likely know such information. So whilst some believe that their personal information is less safe because they have willingly placed it on the Internet, may have already placed it unwillingly on there previously, and without the methods to control access to said information.

Finally, we can look at ways that these items can enrich our lives. Whilst on the surface, it can seem that one is just pushing information into a black hole of the Internet, wondering who will actually use this, it seems that positive aspects have come out of the use of every tool talked about here.

Google Calendar has provided a method of managing events with multiple people requiring access to the information, for instance, the management of a shared household. Place a shared calendar item regarding a bill, add notes on what needs to be paid, and everyone is able to see the same information. A simple example it may be, but it provides a way to harness the power of a shared space to have a single point of management.

Last.fm can definitely be seen as pushing data out for the sake of it. Every time one listens to a song, the Internet is told that it happens. With this though, one can learn about not only the common musical interests one has with their peers, but can harness the data to expand ones musical taste. The last.fm site can provide not only recommendations of artists one may like based on the similarity to previously played tracks, but can offer the ability to sample this music through custom online radio playback, rather than taking the suggestions blindly.

Facebook has provided people with a very convenient way of keeping in touch. Whether it be a message to a single person, updating your status to let your friends know if something is going on in your life, or inviting a group of people to an event, it all has the ability to bring people closer than they may have been otherwise. This concept has extended from when Facebook was limited to certain groups of university students and changed into a open use tool, providing people with methods of keeping in touch with contacts from their past, even if it is in a limited form. Whilst it may not replace other forms of communication and connection, it can certainly supplement it in ways that did not exist in the past.

In closing, the era of social and mobile computing tools is an interesting one. Whilst these tools don’t directly provide a solution to a definitive problem that society faced, they have been able to deliver fresh and innovative concepts when trying to stay in contact with peers. Not everything that comes of these types of ideas can be positive, but, in general, the end user experience is positive as long as one is accepting of the shift in usage that these types of sites bring. That is to say, the user must be willing to typically share something of their own in order to find the true depth of them, as opposed to more traditional Internet forums that would allow someone to sit back and watch the ebbs and flows.


References:

1 - http://www.macworld.com/article/131874/2008/01/ipodsales.html

A Reflection by Corrine Donaldson

Reflection on social networking applications
By Corrine Donaldson 41165210

Online Social Networking is all about creating your own social networks with others with similar likes and dislikes. It's about connecting with others who share the same interests in numerous topics like music, activities, sports etc. When using Social Networking sites you can become "friends" with friends and family, as well as complete strangers who may also have the same interests. Social Networking users also "build online profiles and share media such as photos, music and videos" [1].

At the beginning of this course the only social application I actually used was Facebook. While I knew about the other applications, I was never motivated to sign up for them. Though now that I have signed up for applications like Twitter, Blogger, Google Calendar, Flickr and Last FM, I’m definitely enjoying the exploration stage of using the tools. Presently I’m constantly on Last FM and checking my Twitter page to see if anyone has updated their status. Therefore due to my attachment to those particular tools, I will share my experiences with my interaction. While lightly comparing them to the interaction I had with the other applications.

I honestly think the best way to understand how a new tool works and how to use it to its full capability, isn’t to ask some one who already knows but to actually sit there and explore it yourself. Test things out, make mistakes, click on random buttons etc. It took me awhile to properly understand how to use both Last FM and Twitter, but once I understood they have consistently been used.

Last FM

I must admit before starting this course, I was told about Last FM from a friend and urged to join. But of course I never got around to it and eventually forgot about it, until now. I now regret that I never took my friend more seriously.

At first it took me awhile to figure out how to use Last FM. I initially downloaded the Last FM application to my mac and tried to figure out how to listen to music. It asked me whether I wanted to connect with my I-tunes. Since I use I-tunes predominately to listen to music, I readily agreed. Unfortunately what I didn’t account for, was the fact that connecting to my I-tunes meant that it would display every song I listen to publicly on my profile. While normally I would be ok with that, however whether you like it or not it also displays the songs you listen to, that you’d prefer no one to know of. I’m talking about that one song that you can’t help but love, but due to your other musical interests it stands out like a sore thumb and defiantly not in a good way.

That small issue aside, after removing the scrobbling, I began to explore the Last FM website, it took me awhile to figure out how to listen to entire songs, as most artists only have 30 second clips of their music. Even if you do listen to the 30-second tracks they don’t appear on your list of recently listened music. After more exploring of the site, I figured out how it basically works. You enter a name of an artist you like into the search function of the listen tab, Last FM then plays a random song by said artist and from there each song it plays after that is by another artist with similar styles.

At first after entering one artist that I like and listening to the random song Last FM chose to play, it would go onto play another track by a similar artist, usually a song I already knew and liked. It then went onto play songs by bands I’ve never heard of, most of which I instantly enjoyed, others not so much. I’m always interested in finding and listening to music, so I application that does it all for me based on my current musical interests is perfect!

One thing I have to get over is the fact that when I listen to a song, I sometimes skip the song half way through without finishing it, to get to the next song. Last FM only acknowledges you listening to a song if you actually listen to a song. So if I want my recently listened list to actually show the music I listen to, then I actually have to listen to the whole song. I’ve learnt to listen to the “whole” song now and as a result it now appears on my recently listened music list on my profile.

In the social side of the application, it allows you to be add friends, and from there you can generate the ‘taste – o – meter’, which displays your music compatibility with your friends. At the moment I am mostly aware of the music tastes of my friends on Last FM, but its interesting to see it displayed on screen, especially if you already know whether your musical interests are similar or not. I also like the aspect that you can see what songs your friends have recently listen to, if you do have a high music compatibility with that particular friend then you can get an idea of what unfamiliar artists to listen to.

In all I think Last FM will be new favourite obsession. In fact I have it playing right now…

Twitter

When I first started using Twitter during the first week of uni, I really didn’t see the point in it. Though at that point I was probably only following 2 or 3 people, and unless they updated frequently, there really wouldn’t be much change day to day. However as more people from this course started signing up for accounts and began to update their status, it got a little more interesting. Personal for me to see the benefits in using Twitter, there needed to be a large number of others I know to become aware of the application and to sign up for an account, before it became interesting and useful.

It wasn’t till a week or so after I signed up for Twitter that I decided to connect it with my phone, so that I could get notifications sent to my phone as the people I followed posted them. I was a little skeptic at first, as an over thinker, I was worried that I would be charged ridiculous amounts of money to receive messages. It’s hard not to be skeptic with the ways people get fooled when it involves mobile phones and receiving something from a third party, like a ringtone or something as equally pointless.

That aside the results of connecting my phone to Twitter to receive notifications didn’t really become apparent till a comp3505 tute. During the second tutorial more people began to sign up to Twitter and as a result I was being followed and following more people. I didn’t seem the harm to click ‘on’ to everyone I followed to receive their status updates. Big mistake as I later discovered half way through the tute, where my phone would constantly go off every 5 seconds. The problem with social networking sites like Twitter is that it’s easy to get carried away and you can abuse the fact that people may be following you through their phone by updating your status so much that it actually acts like spam. So learning from that mistake, I changed my settings to only receive messages from a select group of people and only between reasonable hours.

On a positive note, I do like the idea that Twitter is considered micro-blogging. "Micro-blogging allows you to write brief text updates about your life on the go" [3]. Within Twitter it requires the user to update their status in 140 characters or less, which means as readers we don’t have to read through pages and pages of babbling text to understand the message the person, is trying to send. In 140 characters we can literally say where we are and what we are doing and either update it via text or web. "Everyone really loves it’s simplicity" [2], I completely agree, it's simple to use, just type a few words, post it and everyone who follows you will get an immediate update about your current status.

I must admit social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook allow for a certain degree of stalking. In those 140 characters of text we learn a little more about each person based on what they have shared to everyone. Unlike applications like Facebook, Twitter allows any users (even those you don’t follow or follow you) to read your updates. That aspect is definitely a bit intrusive, but with all social applications we as the users have to personally decide how much personal information we are willing to share with strangers. However Twitter is a great method to communicate with others it "makes existing professional relationships stronger and more intimate" [5]. By updating statuses we know where people are and what they are doing as the post it. It's a way of getting to know others that you normally don't socialise with outside of work or university. You can tell a lot about a person with the way they update their status, in terms of contents and frequency of updating.

In terms of updating my status it’s something that I’ve done in the past through either Facebook or MSN. As one source says Twitter "It’s really just a glorified Facebook status" [4], but with both of those applications, I tend to forget to change it, and basically leave it with the same message for several weeks. With Twitter however, because everyone is constantly updating his or her status, I too want to update my status. However now I literally hit two birds with one stone when it comes to updating my status on Twitter, now that I’ve connected my Twitter status to Facebook. The updates I write on Twitter now appear on Facebook, therefore making it easier to update my status on more than one application at the same time.

Final Words

Currently I find Last FM and Twitter slightly addictive, I don't know if it will continue to feel that way later on. At the moment I see Twitter as a novelty item. Something I like to use at the moment, but may lose interest in it. It's something that needs to be used constantly by everyone. Its one thing updating your own status, if no one else updates their own status then it loses usefulness. Last FM however may be also be a Social Networking site in terms of sharing music tastes, it is also a source of music. Personally I don't see it that important to make sure my friends are also listening to music, because listening to music is something I like to do alone (most likely due to the fact that I like to sing along with it) and it's not absolutely necessary that everyone else listens to their music using Last FM. Sure it's interesting to see what others listen to, but it's not vital for me personally to continue using it. Unlike Twitter, Last FM doesn't need to have a lot of people using it to see the usefulness and benefits of using it.



Resources

[1] http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/08/digging_deeperyour_guide_to_so_1.html
[2] http://www.dred242.com/?p=255
[3] http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/05/for_the_uberconnectedyour_guid.html
[4] http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/19/sxsw-showdown-dodgeball-vs-twitter/
[5] http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/03/15/eight-ways-twitter-is-useful-professionally/

My Reflection

Name: Peter Johnsson

Student Number: 40987590

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

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

• Del.icio.us – A social bookmarking tool

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

• Google Calendar – Google’s virtual calendar service

• Facebook – Social network site to interact with friends

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

Last.FM

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

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

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

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

Del.icio.us

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogger

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

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

Google Calendar

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

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

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

Facebook

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

References

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

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

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

Facebook: So I signed up to this last year purely to play Tetris. I won at that so I started looking around at what else facebook had to offer... found a bunch of friends I hadn't seen since highschool... yeah... everyone should start playing tetris :p

Twitter: Fortunately for me, Michael was bombarded with SMSs as I was decided whether or not to use the service. I think I made the right choice. I do enjoy spamming others though.

last.fm: Great concept and you find similar artists and songs very quickly... too bad you rarely get to listen to the songs you actually want. I'm not too into mainstream music so it's easier to bring in my own music.

Google Calendar: Don't use this often enough to find it useful.

Yahoo Pipes: As above. I often forget that pipes exists... that doesn't really help I guess.

eBlogger: ... only because I have to.

del.icio.us: As above.

flickr: I'll probably random add photos here if people don't have a facebook account. Remember, Captain Planet will always be there for you.

My thoughts on facebook

Facebook. What does it mean to us ? When I first heard of Facebook, I wrote it off as another Frienster type application. I was never very active on Frienster and the same can be said about Facebook. In general, I am not one who participates much on Frienster and etc. mainly because I think that it is a waste of time. Even though I say so, I still indulge in registering accounts on Frienster and Facebook for the sake of keeping a social network and keep in touch with my friends who are all over the world studying.

Now on with the story !
I have started using Facebook a tad bit more for the sake of understanding it better for this course. Well at least that was my intention at first but slowly after days of tinkering around with Facebook and its many apps, I have found it to be quite entertaining. I’m still not entirely sure how everything works but I honestly find it intriguing that one social website gives us so many things to do.

At first, I always thought one picture used as the display picture would be more than sufficient, but boy, was I wrong. The amount of pictures I see on all my friends’ profiles are just astronomical and the number of pictures keeps increasing day by day! Even for me, who is just pure lazy to upload pics, my pictures have increased as well. Even pictures of me during my birthday were uploaded by my pals instead of me doing it myself. Every time I go out with my girl friends who love to cam whore, during that night itself after the outing, I can expect to see the pictures of our activities up on Facebook.

Besides photos, there are a lot of other things to do and one can add extra stuff to their Facebook profiles which are called "APPS". These apps provide various functions such as games, messaging tools and etc. Like I said in the introduction, I am not one who fancies social applications like Facebook and etc but I have to honestly say that regardless of what I may have thought, I am starting to get interested in it. Once upon a time, I used to spend a total of maybe an hour a week on Facebook mainly because I have to catch up on messages sent by my friends as well as maybe post a few messages back to them. Besides that, I normally just click ignore all request and be done with it so I do not have to see the hundreds of "APP" requests that my friends have sent me.

Now, is a totally different story because I am slowly getting into the "Facebook Life". Instead of clicking ignore all, I spend at least 10 to 20 minutes wading through the enormous amounts of request to find something interesting or new. I will then spend another 10 mins or so setting up that specific app and start to use it, whatever it may be. To say the least, my average time spent on Facebook which used to be 2 hours max a week has changed to at least 2 hours a day.

As a conclusion, I truly think that Facebook is no doubt something new and refreshing and is actually quite fun to use. This is very true when compared to Frienster, as I have stopped using that service much like everyone else. Though I can say 1 thing for certain, Facebook kills a lot of time and may sometimes if not most of the time, take up TOO much time and leave little or no time for other activities. As an example, I have spent 3 hours playing an APP that resembles the RISK board game.

I sign off here with more to come about the other websites that I have been using.

Yee Chin Mun
41530836

Good examples of reflection assignment

I thought I'd post some links back to reflection assignments from last year for those of you who haven't searched them out yet (August 2007 is where they all happen, BTW).

For each of the top assignments, I've included a link, along with the comments given as feedback.

1. Being Lazy and Social at the Same time
Haha great read! Fantastic to see some support from established research to back up your statements! Would've been good to move beyond the sign-up experience (or did you not get beyond those) to reflect on the convenience of using the actual application once all that overhead was done with.And what is privacy these days? It begs the question - if you want privacy; why would you offer personal info to a very public forum? These applications are hardly asking for and broadcasting your medical history or credit card statement.

2. Reflection on Social and Mobile Computing Tools
Well written; although perhaps a little too formal for the medium (its great; however). Some images and layout adjustments may have helped in guiding the reader (images especially as layout is difficult on blogger). Great utilization of sources; really well done. Overall a good article; however more personal reflection; rather than a very systematic approach to analysing the tools may have helped in really connecting with the reader.

3. Social Awareness
Good reflection; with relation back to course and design issues. Would've been good to see some more discussion around what constitutes awareness and how it is supported in these applications (from a research perspective - pulling out what Dourish and Bly talk about) - rather than telling us what each application is as we do already know :) Looking at the differences between awareness in a physical setting (peripheral; audio cues etc) and how these may/may not have been adopted/supported online.

4. Skeletons in the Closet
Excellent incorporation of sources; succinct description of background - but could pull out key findings rather than generalise articles. Lacking in reflection of own experiences - more an overall discussion of privacy.

5. Collaboration Using Social Networking Tools
Nice layout fairly good overall. Good introduction - lays out the article well. Interesting way to tackle the structure; overall a good read. Some really nice resources cited; some interesting statistics. Some images to specific parts of the collaboration features may have helped; and shown more detail on each system. A section at the end which compared all of the tools briefly (as well as reflecting on them seperately would help). Also potentially talking about how they can be used together for collaboration might have helped.

David's Reflection On Socializing Network - Community Sharing

David's Reflections On Socializing Network

Overview:

This is a short reflection after using several socializing networks and analyse some certain elements which share the simliarity between them. I have found out that most of the sucessful networks tends to encourage their community to share some certain interest as their main theme, like sharing information, applications, music, artworks...etc. These applications have a broad context of communiation and socialization, however most of their main theme are built by the community who share the same interest. If the systems runs well with acceptable usability, these networks tend to grow constantly and become popular. Why? Because everybody within these community share the same interest and always have similar area of topics to talk about, which will makes the community grow.

Background:

Somehow I am not too much of a big fan of blogging and online socializing but I still tried some of a few systems. Bellow are a few reflections in various socialising applications I had played around recently.

- Blogger
- Facebook
- Last FM
- DeviantArt

Of course I had use more applications beside these, however, I am using these networks as an example to analysis the recent trend of socializing network, what do they share the common similarities.




Focus:

The area of online socializing is no longer just to communicate with other people, but to share their knowledge or their favorites. Unlike the older forums and chat system, the applications nowadays tend to group up people who likes to share certain things. Some system maybe sharing photos, some maybe sharing artworks, some may just share academic research which is more than communications, music, or even application plug-ins. Even though most of the application basically support sharing most of the elements, but they also have a main theme for sharing the people's favorite. Even though it is not too much big deal with it but it seems like this is a trend when the developers comes to producing a socializing network.




Reflection of Blogger:

Blogger is a blogging program developed by Google, which is one of the largest internet companies in the whole world. Blogger, the name is self-explanatory, it is a site for blogging. However, it also contains a kind of sense of socializing. The user will be able to create their own account and post some news and researches or even just some random stuffs. The other viewers will be able to browse your created blogs but of course, need to have the permission from the owner of the blog.

Blogger also allows people to create their own profile and input their images inside, just like other online social applications. Blogger allows the subscribers to have an online identity inside the application and will be able to meet other people’s online identity. This can be useful for people who try to find friends on the internet or even find friends with the same interests and hobbies, since the blog content can speak the author’s favorite interest of dislikes. By doing so, the sense of socializing is created inside Blogger.

Not only the viewers will be able to read the content from other people’s blog, they are allowed to input their comments on to certain topics and when the author of the blog actually replies, the sense of communication is created. However, the comments can be usually ignored by the author and this may create a communication breakdown. For example, if the commenter wants to pick up a point that the author had written wrongly, the commenter will post a comment onto the blog, but he cannot ensure that the author will get the message and the changes may not had been made due to the communication breakdown. And often some amatures reviewers may write something bad or untruth for a person’s content, which may result a serious problem of slander and speech-abuse.

When I use blogger this application, it became really useful when I want to do a group project or just put in some individual thoughts for my own work. I’ve also tried the customize interface function so I can pick my favorite colour scheme for my own personal blogs. The layout of the Blogger is pretty good, even though there is not really a wow factor, but at least it is neat and clean and the functions are there. The text input has a really simple interface and only contains a few genera functions but everything which is common used are all there.

After I had posted this piece, I had just realized I had typed something wrong, so the edit button does come in handy if I want to update or make some corrections in my content. Actually, the text-input is a bit buggy which is really annoying.

Blogger is a really useful and no-so complex blogging application which definitely meets the requirements of socializing and communication needs for people. Users are allowed to express their views freely and share their life experience to other people in a simple program.

Reflection on FaceBook:

Facebook, I still remember like last year, a bunch of my friends tells me to get a facebook account. Normally I am the kind of guy who will only constantly uses one social application and will ignore the rest. However, I still get myself an account since there are so many people request for my Facebook account. I’m like ‘Yeah, let see what can Facebook do”

When I just started, I thought “Meh….nothing special inside, just another kind of social program which allows sharing photos and writing random crap on the board.” However, when I start to give my friends my Facebook account, my friends just sent me a whole heap of applications and groups and speak frankly, I have not finished exploring everything in Facebook, yet.

I started to recognize the power of socializing and communicating in Facebook. The biggest difference in my opinion is that the system has lots of third party applications to make the whole “Facebook” this thing, rather appealing and interesting, IQ test, Circle of Trust, SuperPokes, SuperWall, Presents, Huggies, Tetris and even Counterstrike or Dota in Facebook…etc. I still remember that once I got addicted with a really simple application which is the slayers/vampires/werewolf, just biting each other and get points. Always when I think back, I felt rather silly that I wasted so much time on a no-so like a game application just to find random people and click “attack”.

However, I found myself stop using Facebook since it just cramped up with lots of random requests and I really got annoyed by it. Perhaps the problem for Facebook is just too many stuff inside, well, can’t really say that is a big problem, but it does take me too much time just to walk around the world of Facebook. Ok, even though this is not a flaw for Facebook but I do try to keep away from it just in case that I get stuck on Facebook for a whole day again. Nerrrrrrrd…

In addition, I do find a problem inside. I still do not get it why there are so many people who I had never met in my life will gave me an “add friends” request, which I find it really annoying for some reason. I really wonder to ask them who they are but there are too many of them. Perhaps I had met them before just because that I have a really really bad memory…perhaps…

Nevertheless, Facebook is still a great online socializing application with lots of fun stuffs. Just be warned that it is a complex program and it can get really really addictive.




Reflection on Last FM:

Last fm, speak frankly I rarely use it. However, I got a few good music from that site. According to my understanding, people will be able to share their favorite music with other people. People will be able to search for their favorite artist and play the music online. Not only people can listens to music but can also watch the music video online.

The interface is pretty straightforward since the functionality is not that complex. In my opinion most of the elements works well in that site. Beside listens to music and watch videos, the site also contains some good features like rating the tracks and discussion within the music community, which also contain a sense of socialization. Like any other online social application, people are allowed to have their own personal identity in the Last fm community. People will be able to talk about music throughout the whole world and sharing their likes.

One of the features in Last fm is allowing user to download the plug-ins so people will be able to use this online application without even going onto the browser. This is a really convenient feature however, it may have a drawback that some people is afraid of downloading plug-ins especially when it often loads automatically whenever the computer start up. As a result, this feature is not necessary fit for everybody.

There is also a little drawback for searching as well since the search function often plays the music which is not the what user’s in their mind. The music which has been played is often not the user wants to listen. It may capable to find the similar artist but often does not play the certain artist which the user had input in the search unless the artist is extremely popular. In addition, I assume the music from Last fm is from radio stations, so often if people wants to hear some music at certain time, it will not work and request the user to switch stations, or sometimes the music will just keep switching without finishing a track.

Nevertheless, I highly recommended this online socializing application since people will be able to listen to a range of great music conveniently and with a good strong support of the community who actually likes music. Even though it demands to download certain plug-ins in order to make good use of Last fm’s functionality, it still provides great convenience and people like me who dislike plug-ins still enjoys using that plug-in, well, in my point of view only.

Reflection on DeviantArt:

DeviantArt, a blog system developed for artistic people. Thousands of art works are stored in the server and people will be able to browse a wide range of artistic masterpieces, even though most of them are often neglected. Artists and designers from all over the world will be able to find some cool ideas from that website, from traditional sculptures to digital images. The whole community is built by thousands of people who develop their own online identity, setup a personal blog, upload artworks and develop their own gallery. These galleries will be able to view by the people within the community and outside the community.

Each individual artwork within a person’s gallery and blogs will be able to put in comments which do have a sense of communication within the site. The website also provide the opportunity for the artist to sell their personal master pieces as prints and commercial product or even download for free, which depends on creativity licenses. In order to sell quality merchandizes to the clients, each of the artwork will be inspected before they are sold, for the free ones it depends on how many views and download counts. Each of the artwork have the chance to be favorite and featured by other people within the community and as a result, people will also get their chance to advertise their hard developed artworks through internet.

Like other social website, this website also contains forums which allow people to discuss their ideas or to advertise their art pieces, and of course communication in everyday life is also included. Not only so, the forum also provides job offers and opportunities for artists and people who require artworks. These socializing functionality are also one of the major elements which sustain the community.

I had used this blog site for a period and it is considered one of my favorite. Not only can I gain creative ideas and inspirations from other people but my work can be seen by others which is a great opportunity for a new artist like me to showcase our work. I am always excited if someone favorite or feature my works even though it happens quite rarely. The communication system is quite decent and lots of funny smileys. There are nothing much to say about the dislikes of the system since I am happy at most of the functionalities. That is also the main reason why I am still using this system.

Deviantart is not just a website for artist talk and socializing but also get the artist to express and to share their artistic values. I highly recommended for people who works in creative areas to visit this site and open up their own profile.

Draws a Conclusion:

Of course I could provide more examples but these four socializing network not only just contains communications and socializing elements like personal journals, photo sharing, forum of it’s own community…but also a main theme of sharing things. For example, if people want to read something more academic related articles, perhaps going to Blogger will be more effective than going to Facebook. If people want to gain idea of their artworks, logging in to DeviantArt will be more effective than finding stuff from Last FM, which totally unrelated to artworks at all. If some people who is bored and want to fill out some random quizzes or playing random online application, they can go to Facebook to satisfy their needs. The point is, the trend of socializing network will develop a main theme of sharing. It is not just a piece of tool for communication but to group people together with the same interest. The community will be built up with people who contains certain interests and hobbies so the socializing and communicating will be easier since people will have the same topic to discuss.

Lastly, I will come up a conclusion; thinking about a main theme for the network will helps developing the network and building up the community since people will have a main reason to use the socializing network and they will often get what they want. These are just my personal opinion and thoughts and perhaps you may not agree with me after you read this article, however, I am still glad that you have the patience to read until this point and please do feel free to comment my article.

Data Portability

Thought I'd post this here.

With all the different identities that you require online, there's obviously the issue of identities and passwords. That's where data portability comes into it.

Here's an article from the SMH about it all. Its pretty interesting what is trying to be achieved, but as you can imagine there's so much work to do to get a standard achieved.

my link to Pipes

Hi,

This is my link to Pipes
http://pipes.yahoo.com/rct tm suicide prevention/dbdb5ecc35ee1835053b23aac2262e95

I found this is very interesting. I have put Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia and nlm.nih.gov databases/directories/search engines to search the term “Randomised Controlled Trials (RCT) in Telemedicine and Suicide prevention”.
It’s fantastic; I have received 21 items which are related to the search term. However I have received a message saying that “Can't fetch pages that robots.txt disallow” and I don’t know what it is?

I am still not sure it how it can be best use in literature search. But I think if this works, it will be a good relief for me to make a pipe and waiting for results rather than searching each and every search engines separately.

Any idea!

Thanks!
Rohana

Social Sites

Facebook- Already a member, Very addictive, use it alot.

Flicker- Uploaded some photos, but I prefer Photobucket, purley because you can bulk upload.

Twitter- Twitter is a cool concept, but I still dont really understand the point.

Blogger- I like that its a part of Gmail. I also think that its a really nice user friendly blogging site.

Last FM- Loving this site. I love that there is such a large music database and you can listen to all these cool songs from all the artists you like!

Yahoo Pipes- Im haven't really explored this yet. Ive added all my feeds from the sites above, but haven't really used them.

Embodied computing

I was wondering if anyone could give a definition of Embodied computing please. or a link to what it is. So I can work out a meaning for it.

Thanks Alexis

Pipes

In the tutorial this afternoon, I introduced you to pipes, which provides a visual programming environment for producing simple mashups from rss feeds and other internet sources. For those of you who weren't there, we asked everyone to produce a pipe of their own, using the rss feeds you have already collected for this class, and to then send an email to comp3505@itee.uq.edu.au with the rss feed for the output from the pipe.

There are a number of benefits from doing this:

• it will provide an easier way for us to create a single aggregate feed for the whole class
  
• you will get to see in more detail how rss works, and start to understand the concepts behind web mashups
  
• watching this feed will allow you to see, for example, if someone bookmarks something of interest using del.icio.us, then the bookmark will appear in the class feed and everyone can know about it.
  

If you think back to what we talked about in class today, building this aggregate feed will augment your awareness of what others in the class are up to. Twitter and facebook status will give you an ongoing sense of what people are doing or feeling (and it can be interesting when you view an aggregate facebook status feed from your contacts and see conversations happening in this medium). Flickr photos might show you something about where people have been, or what activities they have been involved in, and Last.FM will of course let you know what music others are listening to (based on conversations I heard in the tute, a comp3505 radio station on Last.FM would be eclectic in the extreme).

As a reminder for those of you in the tutorial, and a pointer for those who didn't show, here is a run-through of the process to create a pipe for your rss feeds.

Go to the Yahoo! pipes site and click on the link to "Create a pipe" (blue button at top of page).

This should take you to a blank pipes page with "drag modules here" in the background.

What you are going to do is to create a pipe to aggregate your rss feeds into a single feed. To start, you need to fetch each feed into the pipe. For each feed:

• Drag a "fetch feed" module onto the page
  
• Copy and paste the feed url into the text box in the module
  
• Click elsewhere on the module so that it checks the feed
  
• Look at the debugger at the bottom of the window to check the contents of the feed
  
• adjust the feed if you need to and check the debugger again (some of the people doing this already have found that the feed address they have already emailed to us is incorrect and have sent updates as a result)

Once you have all your feed inputs, you need to combine them together. To do this, click on the "operators" menu on the left of the window and drag in a "union" module. The union combines up to 5 inputs into a single output. If you are combining more than 5 feeds, you will need to use more than one union to bring them together, and then one further union to combine the outputs from the first level unions.

Now, what you should have as output from the union is a single feed which combines all your separate feeds together. At the moment, however, it is like you have taken several decks of cards and put one on top of the other. What we want is a 'shuffled' combined deck, where the final order of the items is determined by the date on which they were posted, rather than where they were posted to. There is a "sort" module in the operators menu which allows you to do this. Drag a sort module onto the edit pipe window and connect the output from the last union to its input. In the sort module, click on the pop-up menu and see all the different attributes that you can sort on. You can experiment a bit here, but based on what we looked at in the tutorial, I think the "utime" attribute works best (to get around some potential time zone issues in the way that publish times are reported).

Look at the debugger and see what you have as output from the sort module to check that it is behaving as you expect (are the items, which come from your own feeds, appearing in the order they were posted?). What we want is for the most recent to be at the top of the list, so you will need to switch the sort module to sort in descending order (it defaults to ascending).

Finally, link the output from the sort module, to the Pipe Output module.

Now you can save your pipe ("Save" button at the top of the window). Once you have saved, you will see a notification at the top centre of the window telling you that the pipe is saved. Next to this you will see a "Run pipe..." link. Follow this and you will see your pipe generate an aggregated feed from your original rss feeds.

Now all you need to do send us the rss feed for your pipe. To get this, click on the "More options" menu (has an orange rss icon) and click on the "Get an rss" option

Copy the link that this generates, and then please email to comp3505@itee.uq.edu.au

In return, we will take all of the feeds from your pipes, and create a class-level pipe which aggregates everybody's feeds together. Later in the semester, we may also do this for each project.

Sorry this was such a long post, but I hope it has made everything clear.

Thanks,

--Stephen.

Out with the old... and in with the new.

Hello all. I've just started off the changeover of authorship for this blog. This means that if you are currently enrolled in COMP3505 or COMP7705, you should have received by now an email (to your UQ student email account) inviting you to become an author on this blog. You have to do this so that you can submit your reflection on experiencing social software.

If you were enrolled in the last offering of the course, I've removed you as an author. Anything you posted is still here, but you can't make any new postings (but I think you can still add comments). This wasn't originally part of the plan, but there is a limit of 100 authors per blogger blog and it wasn't possible to keep you all in there. The course group in Facebook will allow you continued contact with the course (should you want it). 

--Stephen

Welcome to COMP3505 2008

Hi all,

A quick post to say hello via the blog, and to link to a bit of help for anyone struggling to find out how to find the rss feed for their facebook status:

It's hidden away a bit, and facebook's own rss help doesn't tell you what to do, but the helpful folks at Internet Duct Tape do.

--Stephen

Android Challenge

Anyone still checking this blog might be serious enough to consider this.

I'm interested, but won't have the motivation to tackle it by myself.

Google's Android Challenge.

It's basically about developing apps for their new mobile OS, Inital prototypes due early Jan, good prize money.

-SRE

I care

In the spirit of procrastination and the fact some people here would get the most from this. I found Flock.

Its a web browser based on FireFox with a social theme. Been using it for the last week and finding it real useful. It's basically Firefox with a couple of side bars. Except the side bars get your friends from f8, links from magnolia, delicious, RSS feeds and online media from your friends on FlickR, Phtotobucket and a internal blogger linked to most blog site. And my favorite a web clip board. Drag a picture from a site to it, it copys, the image link and site which you can then view or blog directly from, brilliant for that I'll blog about that later.

Even through it's a beta, I haven't noticed any problems with it's operation. You can add firefox extensions, though some are hit and miss. Few little problems with its usability, i.e. accidentally open a window to the current page instead of a new tab.

Personally I hate using sidebars, that are to structured, and hard to remove, bt this is just a click to show and hid it...very userful.


-SRE

Im sure no one cares...

I'm sure no one cares since all assessment has been completed,
but

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

Total number of marks

I have been trying to figure out what each assignment was worth so far after seeing my digg mark appear this morning. I thought that I knew, but I may be wrong... so a clarification would be great. Thank you :)
Sandra

"digg"?

Hey,


I'd just like to clear up what this "digg" mark is that has appeared in our results?

Thankyou,


Julia