Assigment 1: William Ho 4027586

Introduction
Communication technology has evolved from using telegraph, mail and telephone to the wide variety of social/communication tools that are available on the Internet today (Bargh & McKenna, 2004). The Internet allow users to perform tasks more than any previous communication tool can offer, including the ability to collaborate on tasks, social networking, sharing opinions to a public audience et cetera. For the purpose of supporting this reflective post, I will reflect mainly upon my usage on Facebook, with references to other websites such as Google, Friendster, Wikipedia and Xanga.

Background
Since Web 2.0 started to become popular, more users contributed content to the Internet, with content hosting services such as Flickr, Youtube, Picasa and .Mac allowing users to appropriate the Internet to a much higher level (March, Jacobs & Salvador, 2005). A newly emerging service, Facebook, is challenging a well-established player in the social-networking web industry, Friendster, offering an interactive experience to users with more games and features available than its competitor.

The following paragraph will provide a brief introduction to Facebook’s history. Facebook is a social-networking website founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. It originated as being an intra-university student social networking website at the Harvard Univeristy and quickly expanded to cover most universities in the US and UK by 2005. Facebook further expanded to accept any users of the Internet by September 2006, which was criticised by some of the existing users in the academic community.

Unique features that brought Facebook to fame includes The Wall, Groups, Gifts, Marketplace, Pokes, Status, and the ability for external entities to create Applications using its API named “Facebook Platform”, these will be further reflected upon later in the report.

Focus
The focus of this article will be to reflect on the composition of social websites and issues surrounding the privacy of virtual spaces. A brief reflection will look at the future direction of these user-centric website merging with mobile computing, allowing the virtual portal to merge with social networks in the real world.



Reflection
In this section, I will first reflect on my perceived architecture of the current social web. This architecture applies to social spaces such as Facebook, MSN Spaces, MySpace or Friendster alike. Secondly, I will reflect on the privacy issues of virtual spaces, as current means of measuring publicity of these spaces are not adequate in knowing how public a space is and users’ awareness in the privacy concerns over their postings. Lastly, I will reflect on some interesting experiences in using mobile computing with these web applications.

Topic 1: Composition of the Social Web
To my experiences in using social spaces such as Facebook and Friendster, there seems to exist a generic structure which forms the ‘socialness’ of the website. This structure is modelled around a real world social environment and includes having entities, relationships, spaces, social tools, social channels, social actions and time.

Entities: Within Facebook, each virtual identity, group or organisation is an entity having its own demographic and status information. This can be seen where each user having their own customisable user homepage, with their own profile page listing their demographic information, a “Groups” and “Status” function to allow grouping of users and displaying their current status to other users.

Relationships: Virtual identities can relate with other identities by creating virtual relationships. Facebook allows the relationship to be further detailed into categories, such as siblings, intimate relationships, attending similar educational institutions, working at the same organisations. This level of detail is not present in MSN Space or Friendster.

Spaces: Virtual Spaces are any webpages that a user visit or interact with other users within a social website. Examples from Facebook include: The Wall, User Profiles, Photo Gallery and Marketplace. These spaces can be set as private, thus allowing only invited guests to visit. However, the awareness of privacy for virtual spaces is not always made evident to users, as more will be reflected below.

Social Tools: These tools allow users to communicate in a more entertaining manner, allowing for more interactions by providing multiplayer games (eg. Texas Hold’em Poker), information sharing platforms (eg. Cities I’ve Visited) and the ability to send gifts to other users (eg. Gifts). The Facebook API allows the development of these social tools by external developers and listing them as “Applications” for uses to add, which increases the amount of these interactive tools significantly.

Social Channels: These channels perform as active information feeds to notify other users of the activities and status of a user. Facebook provides Mini Feeds, which reports on the actions that a user has performed, and Status, which displays other users’ self-reported status.

Social Actions: Facebook offers functions such as Poke and Hug to users, which essentially is just a standard text message transmitted to the targeted user. It aims to simulate such social actions that are performed in a real-world social setting between people, and provide a sense of physical proximity and casualness to the virtual space.

Social Timeline: By having a time element in tracking relationships between people and demographic information, it allows a categorisation and timeline plotting of events that happens between people and within a social network. As users provide more information and be more active in a social space, rich information can be collected and plotted against a timeline to provide insightful information as to relationship formation and strength, interests, participation in different groups and organisation et cetera.



As with all web applications, this generic structure brings the rules that govern how interactions should happen. However, the purpose of the web application is provided by the ability for users to appropriate them for their own use. It is the intention rather than structure that gives an application the meaning, and the structure would change according to the intention of a user, allowing the required task to be performed.

Topic 2: Privacy Awareness in Virtual Spaces
As content-hosting communities are becoming more common, the issues surrounding copyright and information privacy becomes vital. Current content hosting communities such as Flickr and Blogger offer users the ability to elect certain spaces as private. On the other hand, social networking sites such as Friendster and Facebook can allow up to a certain degree of their social network to view their profiles. However, as Facebook opens up for third party development, there are certain spaces that do not preserve the privacy of its users. Below are two examples of Facebook’s own applications that may not preserve privacy up to the level that users want.

News Feed
News Feed can be classified as a form of ambient intelligence, as it allow ‘interesting’ information to be actively distributed to all interested parties (Raisinghani et al., 2004). All actions of adding applications, performing certain actions within applications or change in profile will result in an automated post in the news feed section to inform other users of your status. This is no doubt a user awareness application, but would everybody want other people to know every single thing that they are doing?



Wall-to-Wall
By contributing information to this space, users not only want to communicate with the wall owner, but at the same time, opposing their message to the general public to view. When posting from wall-to-wall does users actually get a sense that they are exposing their message to the general public?



With the two examples above considered, I personally think there should be guidelines developed to let users know of the publicity that their content will be exposed to. Also, users currently do not know the popularity level of their content (i.e. Amount of independent visits) and what kinds of users are viewing them (eg. Close friends, Acquaintances or Strangers). These privacy and security issues should be considered thoroughly by Facebook and other community sites, allowing these virtual community to be a ‘safe’ place for users to interact and socialise.

Topic 3: Mobile Accessibility of Virtual Social Networks
Current mobile phones are becoming more Internet-enabled, allowing many web applications to be used on the go (Lewis, 2006). After using the initial set of web application listed in course, I tried to utilise these tools on my Nokia mobile phone and found interesting uses as listed in the following paragraphs.

Google Calendar
Bringing Google calendar with you on your mobile is a rather handy experience. It allows you to view the tasks and events that are on your schedule, as well as allowing you to put your friends’ schedule in your phone so you can find them when they are free or not disturb them when they are busy.

This can be done via two methods:
1. Google calendar has a SMS reminder function that sends you a SMS whenever an event is scheduled.
2. A service called GooSync allows a series of Nokia devices to be synchronised with Google calendar using SyncML via Nokia’s own synchronisation utility.

Flickr
By having Flickr on a mobile devices opens up a whole new dimension of usage. This is particularly evident when you gather with friends to share photos with them, or want to know more information about places surrounding you. With some newer phones such as the Nokia N95, direct upload and sharing of photos are enabled on the handset. While other phones can access Flickr mobile via Yahoo Go! 2.0.

Gmail
The online interface of Gmail allows a conversation style of email, providing an interactive interface for users to hold conversations or simply refer to an issue that they were talking about. Having Gmail on mobile has substituted SMS as a way of text-based communication, as it offers a turn taking conversation style messaging rather than the often cluttered SMS inbox that does not group messages together. The Gmail mobile application can be accessed at http://gmail.com/app and requires JVM to run.





YouTube
YouTube provides a platform for video hosting, which has enabled users of all kinds to express their opinion on issues, it also allow users to post a reply on a video clip using their own recorded video. By having YouTube on mobile allow users to use it as a video player for entertainment, catalysing topics for discussion, as well as directly record footages of their surrounding event or environment and upload these video clips online to communicate to the public.



eBay
The online auction site, eBay, inhabits a community of buyers and sellers. Through the use of feedback scores, it allows users to know how reliable an entity is. Mobile eBay allow users to use eBay as a benchmark on pricing and product variety, such that when you are shopping in retail stores, you will know if a product is comparatively more expensive than the market price or if there are also similar products that are not available in the retail stores. It is also useful as a tool for virtual ‘window-shopping’ when going on a road trip or at remote locations.



CityWare for Facebook
Lastly, the application that I came across is a plug-in for Facebook named CityWare, developed as a project at the University of Bath. It enhances the power of Facebook to interconnect people via collecting data in the real world. This application uses Bluetooth on your mobile phone to explore how your real and virtual social networks intertwine, especially with those ‘familiar’ strangers that we see everyday but not know. It then logs these records in Facebook, thus allowing individual users to explore these real world encounters within the virtual community, merging the digital and physical divide.

Conclusion
To sum up, I have reflected on my use of these social computing tools in regards to its structure and composition, as well as its intention of uses. I have also discussed the security and privacy concerns as being a vital safety issue in the future development of virtual communities. Lastly, I reflected on my use of these social web applications on mobile computing and listed some insights into uses that are not intended by the design but very useful and interesting when used on the go. Similarly with any development of technology, online social applications require multiple iterations of design, appropriation and redesign to enable the capturing of user requirements, which includes adapting to cultural and ethical changes.

References

Bargh, J. A. & McKenna, K. Y. A. 2004, 'The Internet and Social LIfe', Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 573-590.

Lewis, R. 2006, 'The meaning of 'life': capturing intent from web authors', Proceedings of the 2006 international cross-disciplinary workshop on Web accessibility (W4A): Building the mobile web: rediscovering accessibility?, ACM Press, Edinburgh, U.K.

March, W., Jacobs, M. & Salvador, T. 2005, 'Designing Technology for Community Appropriation', CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems ACM Press, Portland, OR, USA.

Raisinghani, M. S., Benoit, A., Ding, J., Gomez, M., Gupta, K., Gusila, V., Power, D. & Schmedding, O. 2004, 'Ambient Intelligence: Changing Forms of Human-Computer Interaction and their Social Implications', Journal of Digital Information, vol. 5, no. 4,

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