In modern society, internet has become one of our regular activities like watching Television. Many people are exploring friendships online. To attract those who love to share and connect with others online, there are many applications that have been created to stimulate the interest of people in all kinds of aspects. The social and mobile computing applications that I have been exploring includes; blogger, facebook, and flicker. These applications have been popular amongst many members that have interest in different field of sources. These applications have reached a new identity in us to connect with others on the internet. Throughout the following discussion I will reflect upon these applications to focus on the aspect of “online identities”.
Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us is an useful application to bookmark your favorites. It does not show an obvious element for identity in this site. When I first used this application, I was inspired by the function that I was able to “tag” my favorites to share with others. I began from the main page to explore the application. In the main page you can see the “hotlist” on del.icio.us. These links are followed with a snap shot of the site and shows the tags they have been given. Furthermore, the most noticeable part was how many people had added this to their favorites. Del.icio.us had created the simplest application with no extra loadings; they were not many images or flashes. Moreover, there is a search bar at the top of the site. For this search bar, the key word is skimpily keyed in and it would bring up a page of links that can saved and see who had post this initial tag.
By using this application I was able to find the most popular site that has been tagged and often leading to find the most useful links in my interest. There is also a helpful tool in this application; you can download a browser button. This button allows you to post your current page to del.icio.us. Furthermore, you could view your favorites by clicking it. I found it useful with this tool button; when I found a good site I could easily tag it with the button. It’s vital to make the most convince for the user to handle with the application. Delicious is an application mainly to share links of own interest or make note of great sites to be viewed. The users do not need to provide any personal information to interest others. Others would be interested with this identity, because by presuming the user has knowledge with the range of the targets and is able to find a various of good links to be shared with others.
Flicker,
My initial experience with this application reflects back to my first class for this course. When I first entered the site, I have been enthused with the clear web design. It recalled my memory of seeing some of my friends using flicker before. This application is mainly sharing photos online with people all over the world. Flicker also use the tag system to custom the photos. It brought back my excitement of using an album. I believe the flicker team has made the most out of it; the users are able to drag an outline to frame anything in the photo. This could be an object or a view, others could add comment with it and it would show up while the viewers move their mouse over to the pictures. This is not the only amazing function, the user can also open a map and tag the photo inside the map and tell others where they have shoot this photo. It can show details of street names, just like a Google map. Most people that use this application shows a high level of interest to connect with most people on the internet. Flicker has developed many innovative tools to achieve such outstanding result of connecting users.
The uploading systems in flicker are simple to use and has various way of doing it. It can be easily accessible via different platform or in alternatives can be used on mobile phone to upload photos through e-mail. Flicker allows the user to organize their photos with two different grouping styles; one is sets, and another is collections. Sets are to organize around a certain theme. Collections are sets in grander themes. This allows others to view the photos more exactness. An online identity in Flicker might be more direct on what your appearances are, and your communities become visible. Most users post photos that reflect to their life. It is most likely to judge users that users the maximum of the application can be seen most clearly about the user’s life style and people that evolve around through them. Some people might only use part of the application and still create a dissemble identity by using fake photos or images of their hobbies. This is also why the flickers had generated a community of million themes.
Blogger
Blogger is the biggest blog website host in the world; millions of users have blog on blogger. The blogger creates a virtual for its users that they are a host of the site themselves. In blogger, you are able to post your diary, thoughts, ideas, or anything you would like to keep in track with. It can take years to design your own blogger, by adding features from other applications and the improvement of blogger itself or even a continual of writing. The blogger mainly categorize by entries, months or you can create a category of your own. Blogger allows visitors to search users’ blogs online and are able to input comments to users’ blogs.
The blogger have the functions of editing user’s own profile, attachment of photos. As a result, the viewers would be able to know the owner by reading their profile. The way that user may create their online identity with Blogger are likely to be depth. Viewers can read through the blogs to get to know the writer as well as commenting the blog to get responses. Comments are the most popular method of knowing the owner from their blog. However, there are moments the owner of the blog ignores the comments. In the society today, blogs could also be used as trade amateur or professional writers would post articles for trading purposes. This would also become a fatuous identity of the users. Common users’ uses blogger to record their life experiences and talk about their hobbies, or make documentation of their professions. Blogger is an application that has included one of the most detailed information about a person’s representations.
These three applications are selected with purposes. They focus on difference aspects to the social mobile computing system. They are all application that has already developed sophisticate functions. To define online identity with these three applications there are three aspects that need to be considered. For Delicious the identity was not the focus of this application. It was to share information amongst the viewers or/and users. There it is not necessary to sign up for this site to locate find the sources that you are looking for. On other hand Flicker and Blogger are more focused on the original posting. Flicker is mainly paying attention on the sharing photos or images that were either about their personal life or professions. However, Blogger has taken the writing from the users. The user of blogger could post articles either they had interest in or original created, everyone can be a writer or journalist. Therefore, the viewers were able to foreseen deeper information over than merely viewing photos. These three applications included the ranges of personal representations, interest and communications between users in this world.
s40989802 Jo Huang
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Reflection Assignment 1 post by s40989802
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7 comments:
I think Facebook would have been the best application for you to discuss in this essay in terms of identity. Like you said in the conclusion, delicious doesn't even require a user to sign up in order to use the service. To me, delicious seems like the least focused on identity. Also the article was a little short. I think you could of delved a bit deeper, discussing privacy issues, multiple identities and so on.
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Pierre Medeiros (40987385)
A very easy to read posting. I liked the way the sites you used all had a bearing on social interactions between users. In other words they were all social programs. It linked well with your comments on identity.
I think your conclusion summed up your post quite well. While you did cover some of the main points sometimes I think you could go into less details about the actual layout of the social mobile tools such as general interface etc. I enjoyed your focus as well, this was the first post about online identities that i have looked at.
I think your reflection could use a little more research in terms of privacy issues and applications which would be best suited to be reflected upon in terms of privacy. Reading previous posts in relation to privacy issues I would have also suggested to focus on facebook and perhaps blogger just to give an example. I liked how your conclusion turned out and overall it was good to see your point of view in general on your tools selection.
Cheers:)
I find delicious to be effective mostly through the firefox add-on you can get for it - which makes bookmarking so much easier. Nice, straight forward article but points taken off because Wordpress spits all over Blogger :-)
One other aspect of identity that may bear merit is the manner in which the various applications authenticate it, and the vulnerabilities present - be it by an email address that only one person (hopefully) can access, an account already established with another service (such as gmail or yahoo) or an sms "from" header. Twitter, for example, has a vulnerability to sms spoofing, so people who don't register a pin to use with their sms's can find their identity subverted all too easily.
Really nice read, you tackled the focus in a unique way, and it worked well. It was a little disconcerting that you didn't consider Facebook in your analysis, however I think looking at del.icio.us identities was fantastic. You provided a good level of detail on the background, however more personal reflection may have helped (mainly with the Blogger review). Some references / sources would have helped the article (there are a lot of articles discussing identity). Images of the features you describe would help also.
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