40771548 - Dean's Reflection

Introduction

The advent and popularisation of the internet has seen it’s use change from an academic research and collaboration tool to a way of connecting with the world for business, socialising and pleasure. Of great interest is the social impact the internet is having on today’s society and the way it is changing how we interact and share information with other people. It is the goal of many of today’s online social software tools to help people in their everyday lives stay connected to friends and help people find new friends with similar interests. But just how well do these social software tools achieve goal if at all? Do these web sites and applications adhere to traditional HCI (human computer interaction) guidelines and are they only here to help us or do they have a less obvious agenda? This blog article will reflect on my personal experiences with a number of social software sites and applications and show how some of the above issues arise in their everyday use. Certain aspects of these tools will be focused on and how they affected my use of the software.


Background

For this subject we were required to sign up for and use a number of social software sites and applications. A brief background for each of these is given below.

Delicious

Delicious is a bookmarking tool that enables people to bookmark and tag web pages. These bookmarks can then be shared among users and are stored in the users account so they can be accessed anywhere. Users can explore others bookmarks to get a perspective on what sites they visit and can see how popular their own bookmarks are as the site keeps track of how many times a site has been bookmarked.

Image 1: Screenshot of Delicious.

Flickr

Flickr is a site that allows users to tag and share their personal photos and images. Users can create and organize their own galleries (called sets) and add descriptions and map locations to pictures. Users have the option to set the privacy of each picture so that only fiends and family can see it otherwise it is viewable to the public and can be searched for from the site. The use of tags makes the images searchable and is an example of folksonomy [1].

Image 2: Screenshot of Flickr

Last.FM

Last.FM is an internet radio and audiosctobbler application that enables users to listen to online radio stations and scrobble the tracks they listenen to on there own computers. Users can see statistics on what tracks they and others listen to, most popular artists and search for songs and stations with specific tags. The downloadable application uploads track information, otherwise known as scrobbling, from a number of different media players through ID3 tags. When a song is playing information about the artist is displayed in the application and tags can be associated with the song.

Image 3: Screenshot of Last.FM.

Twitter

Twitter is a micro-blogging social networking site that asks the question: “What are you doing”. Users periodically update their current activities to this site either through the web site or by using SMS. A user can have a number of other users they are following as well as having followers who receive updates when the user posts to the site.

Image 4: Scrrenshot of Twitter.

Facebook

Facebook is another social networking site that was originally created as a way of being able to find former classmates but has expanded to support many more applications like uploading photos, quizzes and custom applications made by users. Facebook has networks and groups which users can join to meet people with similar interests. Users can browse other user’s profiles and see if they have mutual friends or friends they know but have not yet connected with on Facebook. Facebook is growing in popularity and is often compared to MySpace, another popular social networking site.

Image 5: Screenshot of Facebook.

Google Calender

Google calendar is an Ajax based web application that allows users to add notes, schedules and reminders to dynamic calendars. Users can create events on the calendar at any time on any day and can have these events repeat every day/week/month. Users can also synchronise their Outlook calendar with Google calendar. By using Ajax users can drag and drop events on the calendar making the application dynamic

Image 6: Screenshot of Google Calendar.

Focus

Since enrolling in COMP3505 I have had a number of experiences with different social software web sites and applications, none of which I had used before. These experiences have opened my eye to the social aspects of the web and the applications that use it. This blog will give in insight into my personal experience using a few of these sites and applications, last.FM, Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feeds .For each I will reflect on 2 things: functionality and features that appeal to me and the social implications of each. The functionality and features of social software tools is important as they are needed to retain the member’s interests and often determine the lifespan of the tool [2]. My reflection will call upon certain examples of my experiences as well as theories and works from others.


Reflection

Last.FM

Last.FM is the application I probably used the most. It conveniently has a plug-in that will automatically start scrobbling when ever I start playing music and with each new song it updates the artist information in the last.FM application. I found this feature particularly appealing as I am more into genres of music rather than particular artists so this gives me an opportunity to learn a bit about the artists based on what other users have submitted about them. If I am listening to a track I think a friend might like I can easily share that song with that friend. When I go online I can see what artists my fiends and I listen to most and get an idea of who has similar tastes to mine. This is further reflected on the Taste-o-meter shown below.

Image 7: Taste-o-meter from Last.FM.

One thing I think could have been better was they way I could search for friends. Apart from the usual search criteria it would be good if the application supported searches based on the tracks we listened to and found people with similar listened to artists. From a social networking perspective I found this application was less about sharing and socialising with others and more about cataloguing my music habits and viewing that of others.

Facebook

I traditionally saw sites like Facebook a big waste of time. Who wants to spend hours everyday reading messages from friends, taking pointless quizzes, searching for new friends and seeing if you know friends of your friend’s friends? Apparently over 98 million people do [3] and I’m starting to see why. It can be a very lonely world for some and these social networking sites allow people to connect with others, sometimes for emotional support [4]. With our busy schedules we can’t always be in the same place at the same time as our friends but Facebook always us to communicate with our friends through asynchronous distributed interaction (different place, different time) [5]

As for my experience I found Facebook quite fun, seeing which of my friends were on there and who they had as friends. I did find at times that navigating around the site was difficult and unintuitive and so this discouraged me a bit. My favourite thing was the applications that you could add, especially the friend wheel. The friend wheel gives you a visual representation on how connected you and others are.

Image 8: My Friend Wheel from Facebook.

Personally I think the reason I never use social networking sites like Facebook is because I am in a relationship and have many friends which I see face to face everyday so I get my social fix. If I were single I think I would use them much more as I noticed all my male friends that use this site are also single. The graphs below show some interesting statistics. Facebook is a cheap, assessable way to meet people and we can portray ourselves in anyway we want. I think this is why these sites are so popular and why most of their users are teens and young adults, the people most likely to be single.

Image 9: Australian Facebook User Statistics [6].

Twitter

I’m still trying to figure out the actual purpose of this social networking tool as the uses of it have been quite varied. When I first signed up I was greeted with a simple yet ambiguous question, “What are you doing”. There are many different answers that one could give based on different levels of involvement, ranging from: “I’m typing on twitter” to “I’m living”. This ambiguity makes the purpose of the site unclear and leads to frustration and lack of awareness. This site lacks contextual affordance; people don’t know how to use it [7].

People started using the site as an instant messaging service on their mobiles and when you are following lots of people this can quite easily get out of hand. I think what the creators of the site made it for was to track the activities of family, friends and colleagues, like such software as AnyBiff which announces people’s engagement in activities to other colleagues [8].

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are becoming quite popular nowadays with many sites having their own feeds. As well as being a technology to provide web site updates they can be used as a social networking tool to provide people with updates on what people are doing on the web, as used in this course. Although a lot of social networking sites track changes and updates and display these to the user RSS feeds allows users to choose what information they want to receive updates on and using such tools as Yahoo! Pipes people can aggregate all their feeds to be displayed in one place and not have to check in multiple places. Pipes also allow customised filters to organise the information in different ways so users are able to customise how the feeds get put together. Although this technology is only one way it is still a powerful tracking and logging tool.

Comparison

Whilst using the tools above and those motioned in the background there were a number of similarities and issues that arose. One thing common in a few of these tools was having groups that users could join. Most of the time these groups are centred around a particular theme or subject and users can join groups that have similar interests to theirs, I myself joined the “The Birds at the UQ Lake Freak Me Out” group on Facebook and the “Above And Beyond” group on last.FM because I had similar interests and experiences. Being able to join groups lets people socialise with others that have similar interest and gives people a sense of belonging. Another common issue was that of privacy and security of personal information [9]. The registration process of these tools all required entering varying levels of personal information. Some sites ask for your email username and password to find friends. That rang alarm bells for me and I was initially reluctant to give them this information, as with my mobile number on Twitter, but I eventually gave in because without giving them this information my experience was going to be very limited. I suppose for these social networking sites to work they need people’s information and it seams the more information you commit the more you get out of it.

Conclusion

My introduction to and experiences with social software has been interesting. I found Last.FM to be the most useful and feature filled application but Facebook made me feel more socially connected than any other tool. I found Facebook supported “social browsing” [4] the best and had a wide variety of diverse and amusing groups [10]. I was disappointed with the lack of features on Twitter and it wasn’t clear what the main purpose of the tool was. RSS feeds are a useful technology with many applications that will only grow in popularity as more and more uses for them are found. The security concerns of these social networking tools is a growing issue but then again I’ve given out my information so many times now it doesn’t seam as big of a deal. As for who actually use these social networking tools I find that their audience is quite varied but in my opinion it’s generally people who have spare time on their hands and those who are looking to meet people with similar interest. At least with online tools you are not obliged to commit to the friendships you make, although some people get quite cut if you ignore them (have to hear about it from my girlfriend). The use of and range of social networking tools is only going to increase as the demand for new ways to socialise online grows. The capacity in which people use these tools is also changing all the time with some people using them just for fun while others use them to feel connected.

Dean Knight

40771548

References

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy Online Accessed 25/03/08

[2] http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1463 Online Accessed 25/03/08

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_ websites Online Accessed 25/03/08

[4] L. Cliff, E. Nicole, and S. Charles, "A face(book) in the crowd: social Searching vs. social browsing," in Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work, Banff, Alberta, Canada, 2006.

[5] http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~comp3505/Lectures/Week02-CSCW-slides.pdf “Introduction to CSCW Online Accessed 25/03/08

[6] Source calculated from http://www.facebook.com/ads/create/# Using http://saunderslog.com/2007/11/25/facebook-market-research-secrets/ Online Accessed 25/03/08

[7] H. Sharp, Y. Rogers, and J. Preece, Interaction design: beyond human-computer interaction, 2 ed. Chinchester: Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007.

[8] http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~markusr/anybiff/ Online Accessed 25/03/08


[9] Gross, R. Acquisti, A., Information Revelation and Privacy in Online Social Networks. In Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, (Alexandria, VA, 2005), ACM Press.


[10] http://www.benfolds.org/forum/32974 Online Accessed 25/03/08