Name: Pierre Medeiros
Number: 40987385
Reflection on social and mobile
computing tools
One important aspect for a system supporting human to human interactions is that of awareness. Awareness deals with a systems ability to let the user know who else is around, what is happening and who is communicating with whom. This idea also touches on peripheral awareness, which is concerned with the monitoring of signals at the edge of the users awareness. This reflective essay will look at the applications required for COMP3505 participation and evaluate the extent to which they support the users’ awareness.
Out of the COMP3505 applications required for participation, this essay will be focused on the use of the delicious site. The main questions that will be asked about this site are, do its features support good user awareness? And in what ways does it fail at supporting user awareness?
Delicious has many features that help with user awareness, the first and foremost being it’s layout. The home screen has a hot list, which is a long list of sites with accompanying user names. This list can give a user a better idea of what is popular on the delicious website, as well as what the other users are talking about. Also, with the posters username visible it makes it easier for like minded users to become aware of one another and consequently make contact.
Another useful tool to help with awareness is the networking feature. This feature allows the user to place other users on a list, where they then can receive notification when the user subscribes to any new sites. The networking tool ensures that users will be able to be made aware of what their contacts are looking up.
The delicious site allows users to take RSS feeds from them so that they can be notified about changes without needing to go to the site to check. The helps raise the efficiency of the users’ awareness and means they are only getting the information they are interested in.
Supporting the main tools is a collection of less obvious, peripherally based shows of information. When a user makes a new post there is a small tag showing how many people that tag was saved by and how long ago. In a similar fashion there are population tags for the number of people that have subscriptions to any given site.
Even with these tools in mind, the delicious site still has some drawbacks as to it’s’ ability to enhance the users awareness. The main problem is there is no real way for the user to know who is interacting with who and what they’re interactions are about in real time. This kind of information is rather abstract and deals mainly with the general numbers of people and their usernames. Not having features that support a faster paced system of user awareness, is a drawback as it makes the rate of the users’ awareness slow.
In conclusion delicious has many features that help enhance and support the users’ awareness via obvious or peripheral means. The only downside for delicious is the slow rate at which the user is made aware of things. What this means is that delicious is not a viable site for a fast paced level of information exchange. Overall, delicious fulfils its role as a web sharing site and has many features that help enhance the users awareness.
6 comments:
Maybe i had the wrong idea but i thought you were meant to touch on all the soc and mob applications. It seems you focused on one... not sure. quite a decent reflection tho...
Thank you Pierre, Finally a nice quick read. Good outline on what the application is. maybe a few more would have been good.
I thought your reflection was quiet informative and a good read. I would have liked to see what you thought about the rest of the social networking sites & applications.
Cheers.
This was a nice, quick read. While it only focuses on the one application, I think its quite effective (if not more so) to break down a single application entirely like you have rather than trying to do a quick glance-over of several different ones. I say kudos to you.
Good job on the analysis of delicious, I found delicious to be difficult to use, however the option of being able to add favourite websites and then seeing how popular they are with other users was a great option. Overall I can’t really agree with your overview as I have no idea how to use the site to be able to work the options that you discussed. But a thorough investigation.
Interesting take to focus on a single application with only a few questions, it has allowed you to go into lots of detail with the inner workings of the del.icio.us site. While you have gone into a lot of detail, it feels as if you have missed a level of reflection in the "when I used this, it worked well / not well". Personal reflection into the details would have added to the article. You could have utilized sources which talk about the social setting of delicious, as well as reflected back in the conclusion on how delicious fits within the larger social space.
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