Social Interactive Capabilities By Kevin Pamenter 40990237

This reflective article will be aimed at critiquing the web tools known as “Facebook”, “Last fm” and “Flickr” for the purpose of coming to an evaluated conclusion on how effective they are for what they have been designed. I will be drawing upon user experience to bring forth arguments that elucidate how and where they are most effective in particular areas and also how they may be ineffective for particular means of use.

As previously stated “Facebook”, “Last fm” and “Flickr” will be used as primary references in which the experience will be drawn from. Other web tools may be referred to for comparison or contrast purposes throughout the article to help provide a notable difference between their effective or ineffectiveness.

The primary experience being drawn upon for this article will be social interactive capabilities; by the way users can interact with one another through the use of programs and added applications to enhance their meaningful experience.

A question that can be asked is “What makes Facebook an effective form of communication?” This can be narrowed down to a few factors such as ease of use, positive enforcements and how entertaining it can be. Through experience, Facebook can be relatively easy to use once the initial navigation mindset is understood. With its repetitive style of navigation, once the user has learnt the basic skills of it they will be able to effectively move through the application without hassle. Also by having links accompanied by small icons for representation the user can learn much faster visually and can learn to associate icons with actions that will be performed once clicked on.

One of facebooks positive enforcements is its ability to search through your contact lists and find friends that already have an account with them so it makes getting in contact with friends that much easier. Another positive enforcement is the ability to post pictures and comments on other friend’s walls, helping people to stay in communication no matter where you are in the world.

Entertainment can be a large factor in what makes a web application an effective form of communication. Someone that is communicating with one another and is enjoying themselves while doing this makes them far more likely to want to return and use it again. Facebook has added entertainment to this by creating programs such as “food fight”, “poker”, “super walls” and many more. These applications can be added to the users main page and can interact through it with anyone else that has the program also. These applications provide a means of entertainment to keep the user interested and enjoying themselves while encouraging communication among friends.

Another Question that can be asked is “what makes “Last FM” an effective of social computing?” Last FM is an online based web application that records the users play list and then displays it on their paging ranging from most popular to least popular. What makes Last FM so popular is that it has added applications that allow the user to compare their tastes and styles with others friends, letting them see how they match up against one another. This provides a positive social interaction for the user and encourages them to play more songs to see what other matches they come up with.

Another capability on Last FM is that you can play samples of music your friends have so as to get an idea of what the song sounds like. This style of social computing forms a connections amongst their peers as they can establish who has similar tastes so that they may look through their records again for more songs and therefore encouraging them to use Last Fm again.

The only problems found in Last Fm is that it seemed to be inefficient at recording every artist played through the media player limiting its effectiveness slightly, as users then would not see the full list of tracks played by other users. This could possibly lead to incorrect match ups between the user’s tastes and would not give them the full experience of the web tool.

“Flickr” is an online web tool that allows the users to post their photos for others to view. It allows for the user to post comments and receive comments on their photos, therefore encouraging a good social communication amongst people. With so many other ways to post photos to the internet these days one can ask the question “What makes Flickr competitive against the rest?”

Apart from other web tools Flickr is dedicated to the sole purpose of providing pictures from user to user, when other applications have pictures in only as part of the package. By having pictures as the sole focus of the application, Flickr can attract particular groups of people such as photographers and graphic designers who just wish to receive feedback on their works from their peers with biographies or journals not needed.

The concept of Flickr works extremely well, as it goes for the simplistic approach and has effectively done this setting it apart from the rest. Unfortunately its navigation does not match the users mental mode and can lead to problems causing negative experiences such as the user not being able to work out how to add friends to their contact list.

Overall I personally found Facebook to be a rather enjoyable application to use, although I did continually struggle with navigation issues. Being able to pick and choose which applications the user adds to their profile made it more enjoyable as they were able to personalize them. Personalization is what played a key factor in the users enjoyment to make the application effective as the user felt they owned a private area to themselves and were able to show others what they take pleasure in.

Last FM is also enjoyable to use and can make socializing with music all that more exciting apart from its few down sides, It would appear to be an effective web tool by its use of making interactivity an enjoyable experience. Flickr appeared to have a specific social computing interactivity in mind when it was made and for this reason has made itself into an effective piece of software for everyone to use, This is what makes it so competitive.

All of these programs have provided effective social interactivity for their specific field. They all encourage their users to create social networks and interact with other users, therefore demonstrating a good understanding of their social capabilities.