Reflection on
Social and Mobile Computing
COMP3505 || SOCIAL & MOBILE COMPUTING
By: 40818229 || David Andrew Whipps

The World Wide Web has been a continuously growing medium of data sharing since its public formation in 1991. It’s power as a source of mass-information over extended geographical circumstances has been long foreseen. Even artists like Nam Jun Paik coined the term ‘Information Superhighway’ back in the early 1970’s as he foresaw a future ability in the world of electronic collaboration. Now in the wake of the 21st Century the true use of the Internet as a dynamic, public shaped medium of information and data is truly taking form. Some refer to it as the second Internet Bubble; others are coining the style of social websites as the Web 2.0 revolution, either way the Internet is growing into a true social medium. As this mould however, is only just starting to take its shape, the websites and online applications that are being developed and hyped about by common users of the internet – are yet to be seen as flawless tools of the Internet’s future.

The sites that will be discussed in this reflection all share a commonality in that they are all recently successful social networking sites. Each differentiates from each other in that they each specialise in different aspects of user functionality. Some sites serve to share and organise information or data with friends, others act on a more stricter social function that purely serve to represent a person on the internet as an ‘online identity’. Either way the use of the Internet is evolving into a more user-driven experience, a big step since the days of it being a mere collection of online documents. And as new technological gadgets like Mobile Phones, PDA’s and ubiquitous developments take form; the Internet is better integrating itself into our everyday life. However, how successful certain social projects can be in becoming a user’s everyday routine and thus a successful social and/or mobile adaptation – involves a lot more than the programming of the application.

My experiences with the social and mobile computing projects involved for this course I deemed as an overall successful one, especially considering I was using most of them prior to the course. However the biggest challenge I faced in using them all were not technical usability issues but social. No matter how technically advanced the site/program was, it didn’t count for anything when it wasn’t designed to be seamlessly adopted by the user. Usability was what I found to be one of the most important factors contributing to a successful tool of social/mobile interaction. If users, in general, did not adapt their lifestyle (even ever so slightly) to the tool, then it would not become a truly effective/data-accurate application.

An example of this theory of ineffectiveness I found was the social and mobile tool, Twitter. Twitter is an attempt to be a truly effective asynchronous distributed interaction between users. It is a simplified version of blogging in that it is more a short phrase of reflection on your current status of activity in the real world, or the virtual. The biggest twist with Twitter is that you are able to update your status anywhere geographically, by texting an entry with your mobile phone. Whilst you also are posting your own status on the site, your friends can also be given live updates of your new entries by phone, wherever they are (in an area with network coverage). The problem I found with its use since I signed up 4 weeks ago is that no one seemed to effectively use it. Though I can’t really prove why it wasn’t a real success with most of my peers, I stand by the theory that blogging everything that you are doing just seamed too much of a task for most. The friends who, including myself, seemed to use it to an almost full extent were ones with laptops and had the Twitter dashboard widget. The thought of texting my updates all day was something I knew I just wouldn’t adapt too, not to mention not knowing the cost involved in the process. However with the widget on my laptop I was able to at least keep a rather constant diary of my actions, and with another peer doing the same I learnt quite a bit from reading into his life.

For a deeper representation of a user as a real person however, I found Facebook to be the most successful. As their website states so clearly.

“Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.” – Facebook website

Facebook is quickly become the world’s leading social networking site, with its members list almost doubling by the month. Its success is merited towards its ability to reflect the true identity of the user from the real world. Facebook serves to fulfil the networking of known people from the real world, and thus a more grounded experience is fulfilled.

“That’s why I think the website has been such a success. We don’t view the site as an online community—we bill it as a directory that is reinforcing a physical community. What exists on the site is a mirror image of what exists in real life.”
- Mark Zuckerberg

As stated by the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s success lies in its integration with the real world, with the user’s real social lifestyle. The ethical design of the system has thus been its unique edge over other social networking sites like MySpace and Hi5. My personal experience with Facebook was though it was a bit more restricting than other social sites; the strict functionality has kept it as the clean, professional social networking tool that it prides itself on. Also with the new ability to add third-party applications, the users are given greater choices in what they can do with their profile. A favourite of mine is one that actually promotes the aspect of social computing in that it visualises your friends network by creating a social wheel graph, that links everyone that knows each other on your list. This is just one example of the possibilities of the Facebook platform.

Another good example of a well built tool is last.fm, an online hub for musical enthusiasts, that, as the websites states:

“Last.fm taps the wisdom of the crowds, leveraging each user's musical profile to make personalised recommendations, connect users who share similar tastes, provide custom radio streams, and much more.” – last.fm website

To achieve this, the users’ music that they play must be ‘scrobbled’, this simply means recorded by last.fm onto the user’s account on their database. What makes last.fm so effective and usable is that you build up your data of musical taste with the ability to forget about it! The system uses a hybrid architecture that requires you to download a small program that runs in the background of your computer to record whatever music you play. Thus the tool becomes something that seamlessly integrates into your own lifestyle with next to no hassle of maintaining anything. Personally this has become my favourite tool for this very reason, it’s great to forget about it for a good week and then check the website to see who my favourite artists of the week were.

For a piece of technology to truly integrate itself into your social lifestyle it must answer to a lot of ethical and practical problems as well as the technical. One of my most favoured suggestions would be better integration between all these tools. Though Twitter could be a very useful feature, it by itself is a very acute tool in terms of so much sufficient time and thought into it. If the same features and functionality could be incorporated to Facebook’s status feature then you would see a lot more use of it. Thankfully now with Facebook’s third party applications system there are add-ons for Facebook to integrate both twitter and last.fm, but there’s definitely room for improvement yet.

Understandably the world of social and mobile computing has a long way to go, and these tools are mere pioneers of more advanced, ubiquitous and integrated tools that will shape the way we live life in the future. As good as programming and technology is developing, we must also consider the human aspect of tools like these, to which require so much more psychological depth than we first perceived. We have a long way in studying ourselves alone, before we can flawless utilise the power of technology we have birthed into our world.

References:
Facebook: www.facebook.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com
Last.fm: www.last.fm
Exclusive Interview with Mark Zuckerberg (MSNBC)- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6596533/site/newsweek
SAAM Interact – Nam Jun Paik’s Information Superhighway - http://americanart.si.edu/collections/interact/zoom/paik.cfm