Integration
Nathan Hoad
40760104
40760104
There are countless social networking sites spread throughout the many tubes that we call the Internet. Some of these sites succeed, but most of them are never even known to the general public (until they try to sue one of the popular ones). There are many factors that might contribute to a popular social networking site but in this article, I will focus mainly on the one that I think is most important; the openness of a sites data. The ability for a site to cooperate with other software, be it another site or desktop software, is what makes a site more appetising to users. Google, for example, has opened up many of its collection of sites by allowing developers to use public APIs. This has paved the way for countless other uses for their original data and only made said data more popular. In this article, I will be talking about social networking tools such as Google Calendar, Twitter, Last.fm, and Facebook.
Firstly, I thought I'd mention that anything that comes out of the Google factory is bound to be awesome and Google Calendar is no exception. Google Calendar is, as it's name suggests, a calendaring application and is available to any Google account holder. Adding new calendars is as easy as clicking a button. Adding events to a calendar is similarly as easy; click the time of an event and give the event a name. There is a page full of extra options for events if a user needs them. For students entering their university timetable *cough* they can set the events to repeat by week and expire after the semester has finished. Once a user has a calendar they can share it to allow others to see the events it contains. Using the other side of the same process, users can find and view other people's calendars. Google Calendar integrates well with Gmail, another Google service by allowing users to send event information via email. When a user receives an email containing event data, they can simply click it to add it to their own set of calendars. Google Calendar also cooperates well with various desktop calendaring solutions, though some need extra plugins to work properly. The Mozilla Calendar project, in the form of Sunbird and Lightning, gives users a desktop interface to view and edit their Google Calendars through the use of the Provider plugin. Google Calendar users with blogs can easily incorporate any of their calendars into a little calendar application that Google provides. Google Calendar also kind of integrates with Sinet, and before you say “No it doesn't” read my story: I always put my proposed uni timetable into Google Calendar (I used to put it into Google Spreadsheets) once class times are available ready for signon. My fiancé used to just keep her proposed timetable in an excel file on her computer ready for signon. Then, last semester, we weren't at home during the first round of signons. I had my times worked out and available from Google Calendar whereas my fiance had to go back through Sinet and re-work-out her timetable before she could complete her signon. 
Twitter is for people who like to make sure that their friends know exactly what they are doing at any given time. When using Twitter, people are asked a simple question: What are you doing? Users can answer this in any way they see fit, as long as they keep their response under the 140 character limit. Users can update their Twitter status in a number of different ways. Twitter can accept status changes from Instant Messaging (with Google Talk, etc), from mobile phones (with SMSs), or from the user logged into the Twitter site. Twitter also has an open API and various other methods of updating your Twitter status have been created. Twitteroo and Twitteriffic are desktop applications that have been developed for Twitter that give users another way to update their status and perform other Twitter related tasks. I don’t use Twitter that often for one main reason: unless you keep updating your status, they become out of date. If there was some kind of calendar based software that integrated with Twitter to update your status based on your timetable I might see Twitter being more useful.
Last.fm is a music based social networking site. Once registered, users can download a plugin for most desktop audio players (some players, such as Amarok, have the plugin built-in) that ubiquitously reports what music they listen to and when. After the plugin has reported, or scrobbled, a few songs, users can begin to see their listening habits mapped out over time. After a while the user can begin to view extensive charts listing things like their weekly top artists, weekly top songs, monthly top artists, monthly top songs, etc. For example, my top artist for this week (5 August – 12 August) is Alain Boublil & Claude-Michel Schönberg after scrobbling the Miss Saigon album on infinite loop for a while. My top artist overall is John Williams after countless scrobbles of his countless soundtracks. Last.fm can take data like this and start to hypothesise about a users taste in music and give recommendations about other music that the user might like. If you like a lot of a certain kind of music and someone else likes a lot of that kind of music then, chances are, you would like most of the other music in their collection. Last.fm offers these recommendations in the form of a neighbourhood radio. This integrates well into some desktop audio players. I use Amarok, a desktop audio player for Linux, to listen to music. Amarok makes use of Last.fm to deliver the same neighbourhood radio. From within Amarok you can either start listening to your own neighbourhood or simply listen to any Last.fm within a given genre. Last.fm also contains an embedded streaming radio that users can listen to within the page itself. Although it has very little to do with integration, I think this also helps Last.fm to be a very useful tool. For example, while I am at work I just load up my Last.fm page and listen to my music collection using the embedded player. 
Facebook was built as a general tool to help users keep track of their college friends. The original Facebook wasn’t much more that a bunch of linked profiles. Over time it grew and more features were added and more people joined and so on and so on. In May of this year Facebook released The Facebook Platform, an API for developers to start making applications to interact with the various features of Facebook. In the few months since then, a plethora of applications have been created to integrate the data from other social sites into Facebook. At the last count, there were around 2200 applications. There are applications that provide interfaces to most of the other popular social networking sites. On my Facebook I have the Last.fm application installed which lets viewers see what songs I listened to recently and displays my favourite artists. I also sometimes use the embedded Last.fm radio stream to listen to music when I’m not at home. Delicious, a social bookmarking site, also has a Facebook application that displays users Delicious bookmarks as part of their profile page. Facebook recently announced its new iPhone integration feature that lets iPhone owners fill their hunger for Facebook even when they aren’t near a computer. Facebook has done a very good job of letting itself be connected to almost any other useful site that users can think of.Integration is an important factor in why some sites seem to be more popular than others. Sites that play well with others often attract a bigger user base and, when talking about social networking sites, a big user base can only make the site more useful. Some connections between tools come from places that you wouldn’t normally expect (eg. Google Calendar and Sinet) and begin to add more utility to the software than the developer could have imagined. Some pieces of social software present countless means of integration through the use of an extensive API which means more opportunities to integrate with other tools. Facebook is great because it acts as a central meeting point for all the other social networking sites. Facebook doesn’t really try to beat everyone at their own game; it just lets people bring their game to Facebook to play. My conclusion: Rather than trying to change people’s habits, sites should just make software that integrates into what people are already using.
Links used in article
Google Calendar – http://www.google.com/calendarTwitter – http://www.twitter.com
Last.fm – http://www.last.fm
Facebook – http://www.facebook.com
Facebook gets sued – http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2004/8/5/harvardGradsFaceOffAgainstThefacebookcom
Facebook for iPhones – http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=5353402130
API Information – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API
5 comments:
I found this article to be an interesting overview of the different types of social applications available. I agree with your conclusion that trying to change people’s habits doesn’t work when trying to get people to use the program. I believe that this is why Facebook has become so popular, quite quickly. Instead of creating their own versions of applications there is the ability to add that link to your Facebook. Making it more like a large organiser then just one simple application. In saying that it does have its own versions of applications but the links are there.
Pierre Medeiros
S No:40987385
A well written and thorough post. I thought the brief history of how facebook came to be a nice touch. The sites histories is something not many other posts covered. Good Job.
This was an interesting report and the depth that it covered was fantastic, but it was a bit lacking as a reflection. More of your experiences with the tools and how you came about discovering new functionality, what annoyed you or what disapointed you would have been nice.
Robert
A good insight into social web applications making for a informative and interesting post. I see the attraction to personalised information that you talk about in Last.fm and Google calendar. It would be great to simply login to any computer with internet and have everything you need wherever you go.
Tyson 40969662
I agree with Robert's post that your article is lacking somewhat a reflection of your own experiences. The idea of integration links nicely with Whipps comments of users adapting their lifestyle to the tool. Going into depth a bit more about the possibilities surrounding integration of these tools would've helped. Reads a bit more like a review/what is article.
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