A Reflection by Corrine Donaldson

Reflection on social networking applications
By Corrine Donaldson 41165210

Online Social Networking is all about creating your own social networks with others with similar likes and dislikes. It's about connecting with others who share the same interests in numerous topics like music, activities, sports etc. When using Social Networking sites you can become "friends" with friends and family, as well as complete strangers who may also have the same interests. Social Networking users also "build online profiles and share media such as photos, music and videos" [1].

At the beginning of this course the only social application I actually used was Facebook. While I knew about the other applications, I was never motivated to sign up for them. Though now that I have signed up for applications like Twitter, Blogger, Google Calendar, Flickr and Last FM, I’m definitely enjoying the exploration stage of using the tools. Presently I’m constantly on Last FM and checking my Twitter page to see if anyone has updated their status. Therefore due to my attachment to those particular tools, I will share my experiences with my interaction. While lightly comparing them to the interaction I had with the other applications.

I honestly think the best way to understand how a new tool works and how to use it to its full capability, isn’t to ask some one who already knows but to actually sit there and explore it yourself. Test things out, make mistakes, click on random buttons etc. It took me awhile to properly understand how to use both Last FM and Twitter, but once I understood they have consistently been used.

Last FM

I must admit before starting this course, I was told about Last FM from a friend and urged to join. But of course I never got around to it and eventually forgot about it, until now. I now regret that I never took my friend more seriously.

At first it took me awhile to figure out how to use Last FM. I initially downloaded the Last FM application to my mac and tried to figure out how to listen to music. It asked me whether I wanted to connect with my I-tunes. Since I use I-tunes predominately to listen to music, I readily agreed. Unfortunately what I didn’t account for, was the fact that connecting to my I-tunes meant that it would display every song I listen to publicly on my profile. While normally I would be ok with that, however whether you like it or not it also displays the songs you listen to, that you’d prefer no one to know of. I’m talking about that one song that you can’t help but love, but due to your other musical interests it stands out like a sore thumb and defiantly not in a good way.

That small issue aside, after removing the scrobbling, I began to explore the Last FM website, it took me awhile to figure out how to listen to entire songs, as most artists only have 30 second clips of their music. Even if you do listen to the 30-second tracks they don’t appear on your list of recently listened music. After more exploring of the site, I figured out how it basically works. You enter a name of an artist you like into the search function of the listen tab, Last FM then plays a random song by said artist and from there each song it plays after that is by another artist with similar styles.

At first after entering one artist that I like and listening to the random song Last FM chose to play, it would go onto play another track by a similar artist, usually a song I already knew and liked. It then went onto play songs by bands I’ve never heard of, most of which I instantly enjoyed, others not so much. I’m always interested in finding and listening to music, so I application that does it all for me based on my current musical interests is perfect!

One thing I have to get over is the fact that when I listen to a song, I sometimes skip the song half way through without finishing it, to get to the next song. Last FM only acknowledges you listening to a song if you actually listen to a song. So if I want my recently listened list to actually show the music I listen to, then I actually have to listen to the whole song. I’ve learnt to listen to the “whole” song now and as a result it now appears on my recently listened music list on my profile.

In the social side of the application, it allows you to be add friends, and from there you can generate the ‘taste – o – meter’, which displays your music compatibility with your friends. At the moment I am mostly aware of the music tastes of my friends on Last FM, but its interesting to see it displayed on screen, especially if you already know whether your musical interests are similar or not. I also like the aspect that you can see what songs your friends have recently listen to, if you do have a high music compatibility with that particular friend then you can get an idea of what unfamiliar artists to listen to.

In all I think Last FM will be new favourite obsession. In fact I have it playing right now…

Twitter

When I first started using Twitter during the first week of uni, I really didn’t see the point in it. Though at that point I was probably only following 2 or 3 people, and unless they updated frequently, there really wouldn’t be much change day to day. However as more people from this course started signing up for accounts and began to update their status, it got a little more interesting. Personal for me to see the benefits in using Twitter, there needed to be a large number of others I know to become aware of the application and to sign up for an account, before it became interesting and useful.

It wasn’t till a week or so after I signed up for Twitter that I decided to connect it with my phone, so that I could get notifications sent to my phone as the people I followed posted them. I was a little skeptic at first, as an over thinker, I was worried that I would be charged ridiculous amounts of money to receive messages. It’s hard not to be skeptic with the ways people get fooled when it involves mobile phones and receiving something from a third party, like a ringtone or something as equally pointless.

That aside the results of connecting my phone to Twitter to receive notifications didn’t really become apparent till a comp3505 tute. During the second tutorial more people began to sign up to Twitter and as a result I was being followed and following more people. I didn’t seem the harm to click ‘on’ to everyone I followed to receive their status updates. Big mistake as I later discovered half way through the tute, where my phone would constantly go off every 5 seconds. The problem with social networking sites like Twitter is that it’s easy to get carried away and you can abuse the fact that people may be following you through their phone by updating your status so much that it actually acts like spam. So learning from that mistake, I changed my settings to only receive messages from a select group of people and only between reasonable hours.

On a positive note, I do like the idea that Twitter is considered micro-blogging. "Micro-blogging allows you to write brief text updates about your life on the go" [3]. Within Twitter it requires the user to update their status in 140 characters or less, which means as readers we don’t have to read through pages and pages of babbling text to understand the message the person, is trying to send. In 140 characters we can literally say where we are and what we are doing and either update it via text or web. "Everyone really loves it’s simplicity" [2], I completely agree, it's simple to use, just type a few words, post it and everyone who follows you will get an immediate update about your current status.

I must admit social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook allow for a certain degree of stalking. In those 140 characters of text we learn a little more about each person based on what they have shared to everyone. Unlike applications like Facebook, Twitter allows any users (even those you don’t follow or follow you) to read your updates. That aspect is definitely a bit intrusive, but with all social applications we as the users have to personally decide how much personal information we are willing to share with strangers. However Twitter is a great method to communicate with others it "makes existing professional relationships stronger and more intimate" [5]. By updating statuses we know where people are and what they are doing as the post it. It's a way of getting to know others that you normally don't socialise with outside of work or university. You can tell a lot about a person with the way they update their status, in terms of contents and frequency of updating.

In terms of updating my status it’s something that I’ve done in the past through either Facebook or MSN. As one source says Twitter "It’s really just a glorified Facebook status" [4], but with both of those applications, I tend to forget to change it, and basically leave it with the same message for several weeks. With Twitter however, because everyone is constantly updating his or her status, I too want to update my status. However now I literally hit two birds with one stone when it comes to updating my status on Twitter, now that I’ve connected my Twitter status to Facebook. The updates I write on Twitter now appear on Facebook, therefore making it easier to update my status on more than one application at the same time.

Final Words

Currently I find Last FM and Twitter slightly addictive, I don't know if it will continue to feel that way later on. At the moment I see Twitter as a novelty item. Something I like to use at the moment, but may lose interest in it. It's something that needs to be used constantly by everyone. Its one thing updating your own status, if no one else updates their own status then it loses usefulness. Last FM however may be also be a Social Networking site in terms of sharing music tastes, it is also a source of music. Personally I don't see it that important to make sure my friends are also listening to music, because listening to music is something I like to do alone (most likely due to the fact that I like to sing along with it) and it's not absolutely necessary that everyone else listens to their music using Last FM. Sure it's interesting to see what others listen to, but it's not vital for me personally to continue using it. Unlike Twitter, Last FM doesn't need to have a lot of people using it to see the usefulness and benefits of using it.



Resources

[1] http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/08/digging_deeperyour_guide_to_so_1.html
[2] http://www.dred242.com/?p=255
[3] http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/05/for_the_uberconnectedyour_guid.html
[4] http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/19/sxsw-showdown-dodgeball-vs-twitter/
[5] http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/03/15/eight-ways-twitter-is-useful-professionally/