Tyson Dudley
This Post is here to reflect my experiences in using the social and mobile computing applications. The applications that will be looked at in this post are facebook, delicious and Google calendar. The main aspect of this post will be on awareness and how this affects the user, in this case me and how it affected my online social experience. How aware a user is, is only as good as the applications ability to show information that is relevant to you and your interests.
Facebook’s main focus is based on making you socially aware of other people around you. They do this through a profile that you create when you sign up then based of your country, state, university matches you to other people with the same details. Allowing you to ask to become their friend and extend your social network. The awareness aspect of this comes from the clever design of the facebook system, making it easier for users to find people with similar interests to your own. Another way facebook makes for a more aware social experience is through the use of statuses. Facebook allows you to edit your status allowing everyone on your list to see it. This status bar lets you type whatever you like so you can express anything from what mood you’re in to what you’re doing right now. This makes everyone on your list more aware of your current situation and lets them make an informed decision weather to talk to you or not. Poke is another good feature of how facebook makes you more aware by allowing you to poke people on your friends list. This allows for a more instantaneous response, letting you know if your friends are really there and able to talk. The news feeds are also a place of social awareness allowing you to view what people on your list are interested in and making you more aware of current news and social events that are taking place. The thing I liked most about facebook was how easy it made keeping in contact with everyone I know from high school through to work in the one place. Facebook is definitely an application I enjoy using and will continue to use in the future.
Google calendar makes for an easy way to plan your weeks. It allows you to add events within seconds by simply click and dragging over the time and adding a name. Once you have an event planned and it needs changing it is even easier to change. You can expand and retract the size of the event or move it to a different day. It also comes with all the typical functions of a calendar allowing you to repeat a task on a scheduled bases e.g. daily, weekly, monthly. What’s great about this application is that you can share your calendar with other people so you can see who is available when. This awareness makes for scheduling times to meet group members and friends a lot easier. The other strong point about Google calendars is that everything is stored online so you can access the information from anywhere making the information readily available. I use Google calendar to keep track of my uni timetable and that of my friends but not much besides that. This is because my work roster doesn’t have set days or times and I rarely plan more then a day or two ahead. Although Google calendar makes it extremely easy to add and edit your calendar I do not see myself using it for anything more than my class timetable.
Delicious makes interesting use of social awareness in the way they use tags. Instead of restricting a user to a preset list of categories to tag your bookmarks you get to type your own. Not only does it allow you to type your own tags but it makes you aware of what other people have tagged the same bookmark or similar bookmarks as. By allowing people to choose their own tags and making them aware of what is already out there is makes for a more enjoyable experience and are more likely to reuse the site. Again the other way it adds awareness is through the bookmarks themselves keeping up to date with current news and events.
The underlining trend in all of the applications so far is awareness. The basic idea in everything so far is that the more information you have about yourself and your life on any given application, the easier it is to create a social network. The more aware other people are that they have something in common with you the more likely they are to want to add/talk to you. The hard part about awareness is keeping all the information in sync with what is actually happening. The above applications all have their own methods in keeping as up to date as possible but so far I think that facebook has done the best job. The combination of social groups, pokes and the status bar have created a pleasant and playful environment in which to keep in contact with my friend. This makes Facebook the most fun socially aware application on the web.
6 comments:
I see that you've explore these applications and have some thoughtful opinion on it.
However, I think you should focus more on the results and affects on users rather than describe the applications in detail because of most us have known about this already.
Hey I especially liked your section on Facebook as you mentioned aspects of awareness that I didn't know about (the status part). You did do some reflection and had an understanding of awareness in the tools but I think the inclusion of some quotes would have really strengthened your post.
Pierre Medeiros
S No:40987385
I liked the way you touched upon the strengths of each site, as well as referring back to your own experience to support what you were saying. Overall the post was well written and covered everything it needed to. Good Job.
I like how you talked about the awareness aspect of Delicious bookmarks. I think it's handy how they suggest tags when you bookmark something. There have been a few times that I have bookmarked something but wasn't sure what tags to apply to it. Delicous had a few suggestions so I used some of them... handy! :-P
I agree with your argument that different social applications have different levels of awareness related to them. Your article raises the question for me of the relatedness of awareness and the actual user usage.
You describe your usages effectively and the underlying awareness concerns, but I would like to see a consideration of the applications you looked at from the view of other users as a contrasting example to demonstrate differences in awareness.
You touch on some interesting issues regarding awareness, but don't really get into the meat of them. I think you could've strengthened your reflection and examples with support from external sources.
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