Assignment 1: Reflection on social & mobile computing.

This article will focus on how the different applications in Facebook facilitated people in getting to know one another in a shorter amount of time which may not have been possible without them. There is a vast array of social computing tools available on the web and my experiences in using them the past few weeks gave me an idea that such tools can also be used in support of education as they are able to draw people together in many different ways in subtlety. Facebook has succeeded in putting various tools together into one customisable package and is able to integrate the usefulness of other social networking sites as well. Experiences with some tools are described as a background to understanding what it does and how it could be useful when it is used together with Facebook.

Flickr is an online photo management and sharing application created for photo enthusiasts, families and friends who want to share photos with loved ones across the world. It makes it easy for people to keep in touch and update on one another’s lives by sharing photos that they have recently shot.

Food enthusiasts are also using Flickr to upload pictures of the new food creations they have come up with and travellers are also using Flickr to show to the world where they have been to in the hope that it will help others who are interested in those places to have an idea of what that place would be like. (Although there is a website called WAYN – Where Are You Now that mainly caters for travellers and locates the whereabouts of people.)

An interesting observation is a trend in artists who love to have their own online gallery to show the world their works of art. Several Flickr accounts I have come across has works of art digitised and having an explanation of how it was being developed and what it was all about. It is like walking through an art gallery and a rather interesting and radical way for new and up coming artists to share their works of art without having to pay heaps or find a space to have an art gallery show of their works.

For educators like art teachers , it would be very useful to have their pupils display works of art that they have done on Flickr and allow the whole class or world to view it, and the processes that go behind it, not only the final piece. It gives an insight to the viewer in greater detail of what went through the child’s mind and allows them to practise verbalising their thoughts onto each piece.

Last.FM is basically a ‘scrobbler’ that allows users to collectively build a large social music platform as tracks are added to their servers and users with similar music tastes can be connected together and get to know one another. It works by having a widget that keeps track of all the songs that a user plays on his/her media player on the computer and later recommending songs to the user with regards to his listening patterns. However, I find it rather intrusive that a widget is actually keeping track of the songs that I played with my media players and keeping that data somewhere else. There is another similar application to this, by Yahoo called ‘Launchcast’ that does a similar thing but instead of keeping track of the songs that is being played on the computer, it has its own interface that plays songs like a radio and the user can choose to rate those songs or junk them, and the database keeps track of what was junked or rated and not just by the songs that are being played.

Before Facebook came into existence, Friendster first came out in 2002 as a social networking site, which allowed people regardless of geographical location to get to know one another. It accumulated about three million users within months of its launch. Accessing its content slowed down quite dramatically as too many users were logged on. In 2003, MySpace was founded and quickly overtook Friendster as the most popular social networking site. However, MySpace had problems with its layout and spamming with heaps of notorious profiles being posted that made it quite revulsive to some people. When Facebook was founded in 2004, it came out with a crispy clean interface and differentiated itself from its predecessors with its ability to have 3rd party applications added on to it and supporting several other more specific social networking sites like Flickr (for photos), YOUTube (for videos) and Last.FM. It has at least 3000 applications from 22 different categories at the moment and still more are being developed. The fact that it is quite a flexible social networking site and allowed integration to other more specific social sites made it more attractive and usable in many different ways. It allowed users to customise their profile page by allowing them to add in applications that reflect their personality and tastes.

Twitter did not really appeal to me as all it basically did was to keep track of what I was doing at any given time, and to tell others about it, so it didn’t really serve much purpose to me to update the world on my conquests. However, it might be useful for those who love to tell the whole world what’s going on in their lives.

Del.icio.us was created for book marking websites that I have been to and sharimg them with friends and contacts, and the main advantage it had over book marking directly on a browser is that the user is able to access their own bookmarks anywhere without having to go back to their own computer to access them.

Among the few different tools that I had to experiment with in the last few weeks, I find Facebook to be the most interesting and addictive. It worked really well for its purpose of getting people together and learning about one another. It is customisable and allows integration of the other tools that were chosen for this social computing experience with the appropriate applications installed. With its wide variety of applications to choose from, there will always be something that would be of interest to anyone, and if not, the application will probably be built sometime in the future which can be used as an add on and be monitored in Facebook. The applications are also built by other developers, not only by Facebook, and comments on errors and reviews on how it could be improve are kept together with it so users who are about to download it have an idea of how effective the application is , or if its worth installing.

Some examples of applications that can be installed onto Facebook that would allow blogging. Each has its own flavour of usage and users can choose to add on whichever one that suits them best or they can have a few different types of bloggers on their Facebook account if they choose to.

For music enthusiasts, Facebook also has numerous applications that enables the user to integrate music sites that they are already registered in so it is able to display their tastes and also play their favourite tunes depending on the application that they chose to install. There are also video sites like YOUTube that can be integrated into Facebook that would enable music videos to be put into the users’ profiles so visitors to their profile can have a taste of their favourite music video collection. This really enhances the feel, user experience and enjoyment that users get when using or browsing Facebook sites.

The same goes for calendar organizers, there are heaps of calendar applications that is available for integration that probably suits better than just Google calendar. For users of Flickr with a large database of their photos already uploaded on that site, there is a number of Flickr related applications that enable them to bring in their Flickr photos onto Facebook in a manner that suits them best so they need not upload their already compiled photos on Facebook manually again.

There are also other applications that allow users to interact with one another in a subtle way, like sending flowers to someone’s garden, giving them gifts or writing on their walls. In doing so, users indirectly feel a certain positive emotion for the sender (provided its something good). With the music and video applications, it allowed users to convey their own feelings about the type of music they like and characterises their moods as well.

In conclusion, I find that Facebook is the most useful and worked really well as it is able to integrate the specifics of most of the other sites with the add-on applications that made it very universal . Facebook has suceeeded very well in terms of being able to cater to the different needs of a wide variety of users that none of the other social sites can handle individually. It actually allows users already registered on multiple specific focus sites to put together a collage of their differing needs into one platform so they need only to log on into one and be able to access all areas of their social life on the internet. Its like a ‘one-stop’ networking site and I find that most of the time I just log on to it and is able to leave it on all day and monitor the updates to the various applications that I have added on that integrates with the other websites so I need not have multiple tabs or windows open for the different sites.