Sandra 40959083

• Collaboration Using Social Networking Tools

Deciding to choose COMP3505 as my elective for my final semester at Uni, it has given me the opportunity to subscribe to a number of social and mobile networking sites/applications and reflect on my experiences while using those. Although I have already been using flickr, blogger and last.FM I was ready to explore the remaining applications, tools and social networking sites which were delicious, twitter, facebook and google calendar. I have been using these social and networking sites, tools and applications for almost 5 weeks now, and I have realized that some of these tools such as delicious, blogger and facebook have become part of my every day life.

Drawing from my experiences in using these various tools, applications and social sites, the focus of this article is how certain tools have had an impact on the collaboration with my peers, how the tools have increased the connection between me and my peers and what tools failed to do so.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. (2) What makes delicious such a popular social bookmarking tool is the access it provides to the other items that have been bookmarked by the millions of other users on the site. It’s also a great tool for finding information that you may need, but it does not necessarily provide an opportunity for collaboration with my peers or users who may have similar interest which are reflected by their bookmarks. On delicious a user is only identified by a user name, for example me s4095908 (http://del.icio.us/s4095908) clicking on this link will only provide the audience with all the items I have bookmarked, but there is no form of information which would lead to some sort of collaboration based on the items I have bookmarked. Delicious is all about finding good resources, popular links and the reputation of this tool is reflected by delicious passing the mark of 1 million registered users on September 25, 2006. (3)

FLICKR is a photographic community where users all over the world have the ability to post and share their photos within this community. I am a photographer my self, and the popularity of this site has attracted me to share my photographs too, by getting exposure to my work and feedback from those who view my photographs. Many individuals use flickr as their portfolio to show their work in photographs and perhaps attract new jobs and careers. Flickr gives opportunities to collaboration between users on the site, by letting them create groups, “it’s away for people to come together around a common interest, be it a love of small dogs, a passion for food, a recent wedding, or an interest in exploring photographic techniques. And if you can’t find a group which interests you, it’s super-easy to start your own.”(4) Although flickr is a photographic community, collaborative work is possible by a team or a group creating it’s own group where they can post and share photographs on the process of their project or anything of a similar nature. An example of a flickr group is our own http://www.flickr.com/groups/comp3505 where there are already a few examples of work posted.

Last.FM is a internet radio and a music community “that tracks your music listening habits and compares your musical taste to the taste of others. Based on the taste of people with very similar listening habits (your musical neighborhood), you get music recommendations.”(5) You can also get information on top weekly tracks, artists, top videos and so on. In contrast to previously mentioned application, last.FM let’s you see what other individuals are listening to in real time making you aware that there are users are active. Last.FM allows individuals to create groups, much like in flickr but those groups will certainly have a common theme which is music and everything related to it. Last.FM is a community about music and it provides resources related to music, so there is no doubt that last.fm would not be a chosen tool to aid in collaborations with my peers in terms of research on social and mobile computing.

TWITTER is a tool that let’s you stay in touch with family or friends via sms text messages, im or by posting on the web. (6) Users are able to create a profile with a thumbnail to place their photograph. Once the user is logged in they are faced with a box in which they can only type up to 140 characters to let their family and friends what they are doing. This clearly indicates that Twitter is only there for one purpose, for you to let the global community, friends and family know what you are doing, and that twitter would definitely not be the ultimate tool which would help me to collaborate better with my peers on which ever projects we might be doing. Twitter is a simple tool for letting your friends or family know what you are up to, but for me it has no real purpose and I find it hard to constantly have to update my status.

Facebook is a social networking site that enables people with common affiliations to network with one another. (7) Facebook is quiet a large social networking site with 31 million active users and over the past year (May ‘06 - May ‘07), Facebook saw an 89% increase in unique visitors to the site at 26,649,000 uniques, with a 143% increase in page views at 15.8 billion. The site’s stickiness has increased and then tapered off at about 190 minutes per average user.(8) From the start, facebook for me provided a fun and enjoyable environment to collaborate in with my peers. Joining specific networks such as Australia and Queensland made it easier for me to find other individuals who are attending UQ and individuals who were studying in the same degree I did. I was able to join specific groups such as the comp3505 group where I could see what my peers and teaching staff had to say, making me feel part of a group in an environment that is a social networking site. Facebook increased the connection to my peers by allowing me to add them as my friends and make me aware of what they were doing based on their status. Facebook provided a positive experience in terms of collaboration by having various tools that easily connected me to my peers and provided an interesting and different way of communication and interaction.

Google Calender is a tool which lets you organize your events, birthdays, doctor’s appointments and so on. You can create invitations, send reminders and keep track of RSVPs right inside Google Calendar. Organizations can promote events, too. (9) Users can also choose which information should remain private and which information should be displayed to the public. My experience with Google Calendar did not have an influence on the connection to my peers. I wasn’t able to notice the google calendar application used a great deal within my peer group and I had problems setting up and publishing my own calendar, which I have since stopped using.

Blogger is a free blog service for which users can sign up for to create their own personal blog. I have been using blogger for previous projects and courses such as studio, and have found it very useful in terms of team collaboration because it allowed us to create a joined blog where we could all share opinions, ideas, post sketches and reflect on our process. It is a team-oriented blog. That means that all the information you publish to the team blog can be revised, modified and appended to by any member of your team. All your team members can also add comments to any blog entry. You and your team can enjoy the advantages of this collaborative tool, publishing, sharing and managing all the knowledge generated in your daily activity. (10) I will continue to use my blogger blog in order to keep track of the process of my projects, and being part of the http://comp3505.blogspot.com/ group blog has definitely exposed me to various resources such as links to other interesting sites, and has given me the opportunity to voice my opinion and give feedback by adding comment to particular entries. I feel part of a group.

Social and networking sites are becoming more popular each day and many of the established social and networking sites are experiencing substantial traffic increase. The background research shows that 20% of regular internet users have visited a social and networking site in the past 30 days, and South Korea being the leader social and networking market with 49% of its adults in the country have visited at least one social and networking site. (1) In terms of collaborating using social and networking tools my experience shows that one social networking site or tool is not adequate. There is always a need to work with a number of social networking sites or tools to achieve the desired outcome.

Bibliography

1. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. del.icio.us. [Online] August 13, 2007. [Cited: August 16, 2007.] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del.icio.us.

2. Schacter, Joshua. del.icio.us. del.icio.us/BLOG. [Online] September 25, 2006. [Cited: August 14, 2007.] http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2006/09/million.html.

3. flickr. flickr. flickr: Tour. [Online] 2007. [Cited: August 14, 2007.] http://www.flickr.com/tour/share/.

4. Trieloff, Lars. Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog. [Online] July 19, 2006. [Cited: August 14, 2007.] http://weblogs.goshaky.com/weblogs/lars/entry/new_last_fm.

5. Twitter. Twitter. [Online] 2007. [Cited: August 15, 2007.] http://twitter.com/faq.

6. CrunchBase. Facebook / CrunchBase. [Online] 2007. [Cited: August 15, 2007.] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook.

7. Gonzalez, Nick. Facebook Users Up 89% Over Last Year; Demographic Shift. TechCrunch. [Online] July 6, 2007. [Cited: August 13, 2007.] http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/06/facebook-users-up-89-over-last-year-demographic-shift/.

8. Google. Welcome to Google Calendar. [Online] 2007. [Cited: August 14, 2007.] www.google.com/calendar.

9. University, Lancaster. Lancaster University. Centre for e-Science. e-Collaboration tools. Blogger. e-Collaboration tools » Blogger. [Online] [Cited: August 14, 2007.] http://e-science.lancs.ac.uk/eCollaborationTools/blogger/blogger.html.

10. Creative UAE. Statistics about video and social networking sites usage. [Online] July 9, 2007. [Cited: August 14, 2007.] http://creativeuae.wordpress.com/2007/07/09/statistics-about-video-and-social-networking-sites-usage/.