Impacts of Social Network Participation Style

Matthew Salmon
s4116665@student.uq.edu.au


Introduction:

Services such as Twitter, Del.icio.us, Last.fm, Flickr, Google Calendar, and Facebook are all based around social computing. They all require user input, whether active or passive, to do what they set out to do. My experiences with these services vary but from a social perspective I feel that active participation is a necessary ingredient for a good experience. It creates better awareness of other users, and makes the participant feel more involved, and therefor important.

Background:

Twitter is a relatively new service designed to let you update your family, friends, and the whole world if you choose, on what your doing right now. Socially it works by using a system of followers; you can follow someone, or they can follow you, or you can both follow each other. It takes a text input of at most 140 characters and publishes it on your Twitter page at the same time as pushing it out to all your followers. An interesting aspect of Twitter is it’s ability to work with mobile phones by pushing out updates as SMS text messages, it also allows you to post messages by sending text messages to the Twitter service.


Facebook is a social network platform in the traditional sense. It allows you to create a profile and then add all your friends who also have profiles, creating a giant address book of people you know (known as your “Network”). It allows you to communicate with these people publicly or privately and has a host of other features such as event planning and photo storage built in that all become social on the back of your network. Facebook also allows developers to build other applications that take advantage of your network information to do exciting new things. Facebook is easily the most popular service of those discussed here.


Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site, you use it by posting links to pages that you find of interest and tagging them. You can create a network by adding people’s user names to your network list. It’ll also show you who’s added you to their network. Once you’ve created this network Del.icio.us will aggregate everyone's links onto one page so that you can see what all your friends have been bookmarking. It also incorporates tagging into the mix, allowing you to tag links with keywords to enable searching by tag and letting you tag bookmarks for people in your network.


Last.fm is a social music site. It aggregates a users listening habits and uses that information to recommend them new music based on what other people with similar habits have liked. It also allows you to friend people so that you can keep tabs on what they have been listening too. Last.fm performs other functions such as event tracking, but music recommendations are it’s core service.


Flickr is the popular photo sharing site. You upload your photos to flickr where they are advertised in a main feed, and kept in your profile page. Depending on your privacy settings, anyone can see and comment on your photos. You can also add all your friends to create a community for easier photo sharing and collaboration.


Google Calendar is Google's web based calendar application. It explores interesting new avenues in calendar integration by allowing you to share your calendars with other uses, though at it's heart it is a calendar application that is built for the web browser.


Focus:

I’ve chosen to look more closely at the differences between active participation and inactive participation across a variety of services based on social computing. On the active side we have Twitter, Flickr and Del.icio.us, and on the passive side Last.fm and Google Calendar. Facebook sits in the middle taking aspects from both sides.

Twitter requires the user to actively input data in order for it to be effective. It creates a social experience by passing that data on to other users in your network, known as followers. Twitter was built around communicating actively, it’s intention is for you to be able to fill friends and family in on what you’re doing right now [1]. This isn’t the only active use for twitter though, it can be also used as a tool for micro-blogging [2] or chat like communicating. It’s a tool for actively publishing you.

Del.icio.us was built as a site that could grow [4]. It’s goal is to organise information a lot like google does, only using the power of people rather than algorithms. This social organising of data has led to an experience in which you can tag things for your friends, or even follow what your friends have been bookmarking, and visa-versa. Social bookmarking requires users participate actively by bookmarking sites and tagging them so they can be organised.

Flickr is another service that requires active input in order for the user to take full advantage of it’s social platform. The service, designed for photographers of all levels, is used for picture hosting, sharing, and critiquing. It is a portfolio of your work, instead of storing all your photos locally you put them on Flickr so your friends can see what your up to with your photography, and give you their input. Flickr lets you actively take the solo experience of photography and turn it into a social activity.

Facebook attempts to take parts from both passive and active involvement. Actively you can communicate with your friends both publicly and privately, and you can add photos and events and a host of other things. Passively facebook can collect data on your activities from services that it partners with. This can then be added into main feeds of your activities. It also inserts data other people have added about you into these feeds. Facebook’s decision to collect data about you from sources other than facebook cause large outcry’s from users concerned about their privacy, forcing facebook to turn this feature of by default [3]. It seems that the thought of facebook publishing information about you gathered totally passively was a little to risqué; users want some more active control over the service.

Last.fm in particular is different because it’s primary input is completely passive. It happens in the background. You download and install the Scrobbler which captures data on what your listening too and pushes that up to the Last.fm service. It the creates feeds of that information that your friends can see. Apart from being able to see what your friends have been listening too, or recommended, there is very little in the way of social interaction. Capturing all this data does however, make the service very good at showing you music that you’ll like. You don’t ever need to actively participate with this service.

Google Calendar takes user input of calendar data, but everything after this step is passive, and communicating with other people about their calendars is limited. Just because you can see someone else’s calendar doesn’t make you aware of their active presence, in fact their presence doesn’t impact your use of the service. Google Calendar is an aggregation of calendar information, not an active social service.

Reflection:

I really enjoy using twitter, it’s a constant stream of information from people you know. I find that it lets you get to know them better as well as keeps you in touch. I like that when I push something out there I can get responses from anyone I know rather than the specific people I would usually address. It’s also fun to think up interesting ways of saying what your doing right now. I think twitter would be far less amusing if you were just sitting back watching everyone’s tweets come in instead of getting involved and pushing out your own life. Sure it can be a little creepy at first, broadcasting pretty much everything your doing to pretty much everyone, but once I got over the initial privacy concerns that all went away and I just love using twitter.

In the case of Del.icio.us, it’s cool to see what my friends have found interesting and provides great conversation stimulus in the real world. Unfortunately only a few of my friends actively used the site, which limited it’s potential. I feel that a better way to find and manage connections with your friends would make this service more popular I feel. In the mean time I’ll keep using del.icio.us because I like sharing cool things that I come across.

My experience with the flickr service started off slowly. It took me a little while to figure out just what I was supposed to be trying to achieve, which I’m putting down to poor design of the sign-up system because it didn’t really give me any good tips. Then I really started to get what Flickr was about, and found a couple of interesting groups to participate in. I also started to browse around and check out other peoples works, there really are some amazing photos on there. Feedback through commenting seems to work really well on this site, it promotes good discussions with friends and random people alike. I like to call this creative collaboration, because it generates new ideas and lets you constantly improve your skill set, learning from other users. Using this service encourages me to take more photos because I feel that I should continue to update my photo portfolio for my friends to see.

Facebook is a monster of a social site, it can be really useful when you figure out how it works and what you can do, but the learning curve is quite steep. I find interacting with facebook to be overwhelming due to the sheer scope of it. There are so many ways of both actively and passively participating that you can lose hours getting continuously side-tracked. I feel that the application experience, while good in principle, has created a mess of confusion that swamps people, requiring forced and unwanted types of active participation. I like to think of facebook as a giant address book and message system, with an event planner tacked on. If facebook concentrated on these three things and made the experience with each really good, it would be a much nicer place.

In the end I found Last.fm to be a completely passive service. I tried getting involved in the social experience actively, by adding friends and trying to communicate, but the process of interacting socially sucks. It’s difficult to find friends, the communication methods are bad, and simple things like navigating the website are painfully difficult. At the end of the day, going through that horrible task of adding friends was pointless because, surprise, I don’t share the same taste in music as any of my friends. Having said that the music recommendations service that uses collected user data to recommend music is really good.


Google Calendar was really useful as an individual calendar, and could be great at creating and sharing group schedules, but the social experience is non existent, and being able to see my friends calendars is entirely useless. For starters, their calendars aren’t updated often enough to be usefully accurate, so when they are listed as free they may have something the want to do during that time that they didn’t feel was worth listing. I think that the service could be improved with a better event planning and co-ordination system, this would allow users to participate more actively.

Conclusion:

The type of user participation a service uses has a huge impact on it’s effectiveness as a social application. While passive participation is certainly useful when it comes to adding value to services, such as in the case of Last.fm, where aggregated data on peoples listening patters makes the service excellent at recommending songs, it doesn’t provide a fantastic sense of social awareness. So while some users may not like having to actively participate with a service, it seems that in order for true social awareness to occur, where one is actually engaged with other users, active participation is a requirement.


Refrences:

[1] Linda L Briggs, “Micro Blogging with Twitter”, March 5 2008, http://campustechnology.com/articles/59315/

[2] Anita Hamilton, “Why Everyone’s Talking about Twitter”, March 27 2007, http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1603637,00.html

[3] Om Malek, “Is facebook beacon a privacy nightmare?”, November 6 2007, http://gigaom.com/2007/11/06/facebook-beacon-privacy-issues/

[4] Rands, “A Del.icio.us Interview”, December 3 2004, http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2004/12/03/a_delicious_interview.html