By Darren Ehrlich (40797753)
The internet has become a tool that more than 1 billion people use [5]. It is a way of connecting people in almost any way thought possible. One such way the internet is being used to connect people is by creating social portals through html based applications.
For the purpose of this article, experiences have been drawn from a number of online social applications over a 3 week period. The applications that I will talk about specifically are Facebook [2], Twitter [7], Flikr[3], Del.icio.us [1], and Last.fm [6].
Having had no previous experience with any of these applications, I found all of these applications have some interesting services to offer. Last.fm is a great way of showing music information not only to your friends but to the wider community telling them what people are listening to. Del.icio.us is great for sharing bookmarks with a group of people you know or even for looking at a group of bookmarks that have been made on a certain subject. Flikr provides a means of sharing photos with friends easily, and Twitter, while being slightly confusing to begin with, is a great tool for telling your friends what you are up to. However, there was one application that stood out to me from the others, Facebook.
Facebook had a significant difference to all the others. All of the other applications had a way of sharing a certain form of information with people, but none of these would integrate with other applications and meant an individual had to use multiple applications to share all of the different types of social information. Facebook, while also having its unique style of social interactions, also provides a way of adding other applications to its own profile.
This got me thinking. Multiple identities are necessary to benefit from a range of unique social programs. How does having multiple identities affect an individual’s ability to track and/or post social activities of another on the web?
In terms of being able to post social information with multiple identities, it is apparent that current web browsers are making a valid attempt to track an individual’s information for them. We see all the time the question that pops up “do you want your username to be remembered on this computer”. This is one way that the browser is helping to keep track of such information. However, the social web applications also have some unique ways of remembering who a person is in order to make the posting of social information easier.
The Del.icio.us application has created a way of easily updating your bookmarks with a plug-in to the browser. In this way, a person can simply visit a web site and click a tag button which automatically tags the website into their bookmarks with the user information that was given when the application was set up. In a similar way, Last.fm uses its own program which connects to music application on a user’s computer, such as iTunes and Windows Media Player. Once installed, the user need do nothing as the program runs automatically whenever the user plays music, sending information back to the users account about what they are listening to.
Figure 1: Del.icio.us tags put into Firefox web browser
Figure 2: Software Last.fm uses to record music usage.
However, Facebook, Flikr and Twitter all rely on usernames and passwords from the user in order to post information. There is also another consideration to be made here. That is that all of these applications need to be set up to start with, thus the user needs to create a number of accounts for all these applications. This can be fine to begin with, but if the user is to change computers then they will need to remember all of their information in order to set up the applications again.
While Facebook does still need information in order to post social activities, because it is able to combine a number of applications into one it provides a better solution. The user need only use one of their accounts to add all of their social information rather than signing in to a number of different places to change information.
Figure 3: Options for adding different Last.fm information to Facebook
Figure 4: Updating Twitter through Facebook
Being able to track an individual’s social activities is also hampered by the number of identities require to keep such information. With the Twitter, Flikr and Last.fm applications I found it rather difficult to search for other people’s information. In order to be able to track the social activities of a person in one of these applications, it always required that I know something about their account, usually a username. I was not able to just to a plain search on names of the person for the most part. I attribute this to searches looking for usernames rather than real life names of the person. This makes it very difficult to be able to track a person without them giving you some kind of initialization.
Facebook, on the other hand, did a much better job at finding people who I wanted to know about. From the time I first signed up, it automatically retrieved information from my email contacts to tell me about other friends of mine that are on Facebook. On top of that, searching for people was also much easier. Once friends were added, Facebook also provided neat updates on what was happening with my other friends, so I only had to log in once under my username and all the information about my friends was there. There was no further searching required and this makes the tracking of my friend’s social activities much easier.
Figure 5: Tracking an individual through a single location, Facebook
Clearly there are a number of issues associated with the requirement of multiple identities with these different social applications. While Facebook does provide a facility I believe to be better than others, there are still some things that need to change. An article by Scott Gilbertson [4] talks about how only certain are accessing social applications because of “walled gardens” rather than being utilized by everyone on the internet. This has a negative effect on the user and as a result there needs to be an open standard created that would help with the multiple identity problem.
All in all, I found Facebook to be the best application to use out of all the applications that I experienced. The reason that this was the case is simple. Facebook is easy to use, but more importantly, you can add applications from your other social accounts to all be viewable in one place. There is however a number of things that still need to be considered in the online social realms.
References
[1]. Del.icio.us. Retrieved August 16, 2007. Web site: http://del.icio.us/[2]. Facebook. Retrieved August 16, 2007. Web site: http://www.facebook.com
[3]. Flikr. Retrieved August 16, 2007. Web site: http://www.flickr.com/
[4]. Gilbertson, S. (2007). Slap in the Facebook: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up. Retrieved August 6, 2007. Web site: http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2007/08/open_social_net
[5]. Internet. Retrieved August 16, 2007. Web site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
[6]. Last.fm. Retrieved August 16, 2007. Web site: http://www.last.fm
[7]. Twitter. Retrieved August 16, 2007. Web site: http://twitter.com/
6 comments:
Great article, interesting topic.
I have also noticed the fact that it's hard to track or even find people. I know facebook allows you to unify everything but I find that it gets cluttered really quickly and can be very confusing.
I personally would like to see a program that unifies information from multiple services into a nice easy to read "portfolio" style format. So you get brief samples of information on the top-most level then you may delve deeper and deeper into the various services as you see fit.
Interesting article.
I agree with most things in this article. Facebook did make it relatively easy to find your friends, especially like you stated adding friends from your hotmail account. The only problem I could see with this was if you had a friend on your e-mail account that you don’t talk to, or want to talk to but is still on your account it will automatically add them as well. Perhaps a solution could be a do you want to add this person instead of the automatic response.
So I think when I did the automatic add thing it actually gives you a list of all the people it finds in your address book and you can tick/untick everyone you want... That way you dont have to talk to someone on facebook who may appear in your contacts. :P
I've also gotta say that for an online app that certainly has a fair amount of *cough* "crap", facebook does a nice job of organising and displaying it all in a friendly way. It certainly could have been done much much worse since its a html page!
Your thoughts on having to log on to many of the social sites was an aspect that I just accepted. I agree with you that the delicious site is great way of accessing information linked by others.
A problem with multiple 'user accounts' on different websites is the threat of a security problem, where users use the same username and password for all their logins on different websites.
Microsoft tried to solve this using their 'passport' login, centralising all their MSN services with one authentication. This would probably be the future of online identity control by linking real world information to a virtual user (such as a credit card), and allowing one login for all your online authentication.
Would've liked to see a bit more detail in terms of the multiple identity and searching for people.
Interesting issues there, and I'm sure there's been some research done into the ways people manage these that you could have used to support/discuss.
Perhaps reflection on the methods you used to try to 'guess' a person when trying to find them. Or the ways in which you managed your multiple accounts. As a way of teasing out how you might get around these problems or design solutions to these.
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