Social and mobile web applications are growing more and more in popularity and worldwide use. Their common services range from sharing; photos, comments, bookmarks and schedules online to recommending music and networking with friends and acquaintances. With the obvious popularity of the applications taking off, this unexperienced social and mobile applications user decided to jump on the bandwagon and find out why these tools are so successful. The following is an insight to the use of social and mobile computing from a common user and describes what applications are being commonly used, their effectiveness and what positive and negative experiences they produce.
Seven web based, social and mobile services were tested and analysed for this study, being: Delicious - a social bookmarking tool,
Flickr – a photo-sharing tool,
Last.FM – a music community website,
Twitter – a social networking tool,
Google Calendar – a schedule and calendar-sharing tool,
Blogger – a blogging application and
Facebook – a social networking tool.
They were all extensively employed in day-to-day use as a way of networking with fellow Uni peers in their own individual ways.
During my whole experience with learning and interacting with multiple social and mobile applications, I found the most useful and effective tool, by far to be Blogger. The reason behind this is simple, as it was only because of the context and environment it was used in that made it useful for myself, and this point remains valid for all seven tools and any other social and mobile application. It can only be as useful and successful as the context and environment they are in. For example if there is a reason for someone to share their favourite URLs with an individual or a group of individuals, then del.icio.us is perfect, but take that purpose away and the product is someone like myself who, might venture over some interesting websites but is really using it for no reason, hence its not useful nor is it a successful tool. Unlike this, is blogger, which has been very useful during the early stages of this course, creating a social area, where everyone that’s apart of the course can discuss and debate topics relating to course issues and matters.
As previously discussed, personal use of any of these seven tools can only be successful and time worthy if there’s a specific goal or achievement these tools can help provide but without this I see the application to be useless, such as one of the tool tested, in Twitter. This social and mobile application I found to be very unhelpful and unnecessary for my personal use. With this in mind, I am in no way suggesting it can’t be useful for others. If I need to communicate with someone by a short message I can simply send a message to his or her phone, without the need of going through the Internet. Twitter also caused problems such as, constant unimportant updates at odd times and a connection too close to people that weren’t really wanted. I found this application very hard to use without sharing information that I thought was personal and not of interested to others. This brings me to my next point about the use of Google Calendar. Once again I feel this application is unnecessary for someone in my position. It is clear to see the tool could come in handy for certain situations such as, group projects – to determine deadlines for milestones that can be added in by each member of the group etc but in my case, my schedule and my deadlines are for myself only and don’t need to be shared amongst the public or other groups. Therefore making it unhelpful and unnecessary for my use.
Flickr is an interesting application and was useful for finding particular images and photos all ready out there on the web and would also find itself handy for those wanting a free personal place on the web to display work they’d created such as photography or graphic art. I personally found the application unhelpful as any specific photos or images taken on a holiday or at a party that you wanted to share with friends or family can be just as easily done using the application Facebook. With this in mind Facebook is not limited to this function but is also an effective way of communicating with friends and family, meeting new people and sharing information with others in many forms. I found this tool especially good for meeting new people, getting back in touch with friends I had lost time for and even communicating with people I knew that lived both locally and in areas far away.
The last applications tested, which I also found very useful was Last.FM. This tool was successful in providing me with music I had not already heard that was specifically related to my interests in music. Having such a large interest in music particular genre of music (in my case being quite rare) my initial thoughts were that this application would not be useful to me as it would not be able to find music that I liked. Yet after just seconds of use I was listening to some great songs that were my taste.
Overall I would say that the revolutionary, somewhat knew era in social and mobile computing applications is a big success if you personally can find the right tool for your specific interests, lifestyles, goals and environment. Not every application is going to be useful for your needs. With this in mind, the growth of this ever popular method of interaction and communication is so great that if there’s not something out there useful for you today, it won’t be long until there is.
Seven web based, social and mobile services were tested and analysed for this study, being: Delicious - a social bookmarking tool,
Flickr – a photo-sharing tool,
Last.FM – a music community website,
Twitter – a social networking tool,
Google Calendar – a schedule and calendar-sharing tool,
Blogger – a blogging application and
Facebook – a social networking tool.
They were all extensively employed in day-to-day use as a way of networking with fellow Uni peers in their own individual ways.
During my whole experience with learning and interacting with multiple social and mobile applications, I found the most useful and effective tool, by far to be Blogger. The reason behind this is simple, as it was only because of the context and environment it was used in that made it useful for myself, and this point remains valid for all seven tools and any other social and mobile application. It can only be as useful and successful as the context and environment they are in. For example if there is a reason for someone to share their favourite URLs with an individual or a group of individuals, then del.icio.us is perfect, but take that purpose away and the product is someone like myself who, might venture over some interesting websites but is really using it for no reason, hence its not useful nor is it a successful tool. Unlike this, is blogger, which has been very useful during the early stages of this course, creating a social area, where everyone that’s apart of the course can discuss and debate topics relating to course issues and matters.
As previously discussed, personal use of any of these seven tools can only be successful and time worthy if there’s a specific goal or achievement these tools can help provide but without this I see the application to be useless, such as one of the tool tested, in Twitter. This social and mobile application I found to be very unhelpful and unnecessary for my personal use. With this in mind, I am in no way suggesting it can’t be useful for others. If I need to communicate with someone by a short message I can simply send a message to his or her phone, without the need of going through the Internet. Twitter also caused problems such as, constant unimportant updates at odd times and a connection too close to people that weren’t really wanted. I found this application very hard to use without sharing information that I thought was personal and not of interested to others. This brings me to my next point about the use of Google Calendar. Once again I feel this application is unnecessary for someone in my position. It is clear to see the tool could come in handy for certain situations such as, group projects – to determine deadlines for milestones that can be added in by each member of the group etc but in my case, my schedule and my deadlines are for myself only and don’t need to be shared amongst the public or other groups. Therefore making it unhelpful and unnecessary for my use.
Flickr is an interesting application and was useful for finding particular images and photos all ready out there on the web and would also find itself handy for those wanting a free personal place on the web to display work they’d created such as photography or graphic art. I personally found the application unhelpful as any specific photos or images taken on a holiday or at a party that you wanted to share with friends or family can be just as easily done using the application Facebook. With this in mind Facebook is not limited to this function but is also an effective way of communicating with friends and family, meeting new people and sharing information with others in many forms. I found this tool especially good for meeting new people, getting back in touch with friends I had lost time for and even communicating with people I knew that lived both locally and in areas far away.
The last applications tested, which I also found very useful was Last.FM. This tool was successful in providing me with music I had not already heard that was specifically related to my interests in music. Having such a large interest in music particular genre of music (in my case being quite rare) my initial thoughts were that this application would not be useful to me as it would not be able to find music that I liked. Yet after just seconds of use I was listening to some great songs that were my taste.
Overall I would say that the revolutionary, somewhat knew era in social and mobile computing applications is a big success if you personally can find the right tool for your specific interests, lifestyles, goals and environment. Not every application is going to be useful for your needs. With this in mind, the growth of this ever popular method of interaction and communication is so great that if there’s not something out there useful for you today, it won’t be long until there is.
6 comments:
Great Stuff. I totally agree with you regarding the individual worth of each application to each specific user(I was annoyed by twitter too).
I also found that while some are specific and thats good, most try to cater to too many users. Thus when new, inexperienced user starts they are bombarded with heaps of features and they have to spend a lot of time customising their experience. Or they put up with something that is not working well for them. Then they get bored and stop using it.
Hey luke.
Just noticed with your reflection on twitter, although it can be annoing, its sole purpose is not to send messages to friends, its something much more useless than that. Its just for updating your status or things you are doing.
Overall a good reflection. But maybe needs a to be a bit more structured. Focus on one application at a time rather than joining it together.
Hey I completely agree with your opinion of the various social tools. I felt that blogger and face book were the two best examples of social tools that allowed users to communicate with each other. I also agree that twitter and flickr are useless for most everyday needs and to the average uni student are not helpful in any manner. The only thing I disagree with was your choice as blogger to be the best tools for everyday needs, this is my opinion only but I felt face book to be more useful and enjoyable to use.
But overall totally agree with your assessment of the social tools good job.
Hi Luke,
Good reflection I thought, but maybe a bit more explenation of why you found Blogger to be the most useful, perhaps explaining for what purpose you use Blogger the most. Oh and twitter, I see quiet a lot of reflections on how useless it is...
Hey Luke,
I like your discussion on how the web applications are only useful with in regard to the context they are used and how particularly some make themselves more useful because of that. In the end after all it is how social and interactive the person wants to be that makes the application useful to them and to that I totally agree.
Twitter is rather an interesting application and I didn’t very much care for its purpose either.
Good introduction, using headings to identify sections would possibly help readability and presentation. Spelling and grammar manual check would help. The background, focus and reflection is kind of intertwinned, which makes it a little harder to read. Good reflection and background, and really good reflection on how it translates into the reason that the tools are there for. Some sources would have helped, with a clearer structure. While a focus is there, it is not necessarily as clear as it could have been.
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