A Quirky Reflection

A Quirky Reflection

One of the best things about social networking sites is that you can totally lose yourself in them - they are the ultimate time-wasters!

Perhaps time-waster is not the best word, since they can be very useful... oh, who am I kidding. I have lost many hours a week fiddling with these sites in one way or another.

After looking at the provided list of social websites to sign up for, I quickly realised that I regularly use many of them, and have at the very least heard of the rest. This presented me with an interesting situation - what is the best way to immerse myself in applications I am already familiar with?

I decided the best way is to reflect on my recent experiences with each of the social sites I am familiar with, and describe my first impressions of the ones I am not.

Facebook

Been using for: 3 years

Facebook is an entrepreneurial goldmine. Within one month of launch in 2004, three-quarters of Harvard students were signed up to the social website ¹. Four years later, it is ranked as the 6^th most visited English website in the world, up there with the likes of Google, YouTube, and Yahoo ².

Unfortunately, one can get lost for hours in Facebook. There just seems to be an endless supply of pages to click to - one minute you can be looking at photos of last night’s pub crawl, and the next, you are deciding whether to add an application that will tell you who you should date!

While on the topic of applications, I should point out that they are a major annoyance to me. If I tell Facebook once, I should not have to tell it ten more times: I do not want to add the Vampires application! I have the notification settings down as low as they go, so at least my Inbox does not get flooded with emails - but it is still not enough.

The sign up process still sticks in my head - even though it was about three years ago! I am not sure if it is still the case, but it would not let me sign up using a non-University email address! This was very annoying, and took a long time to change once signed up. The idea of separating people by their educational institution still puzzles me - it does not seem to reflect the evolved concept of the mature Facebook.

Personally, it is a site that has sucked up an undeserved portion of my time for the last three years, and one that will not stop doing so for quite a while!

Last.fm

Been using for: 1 year

One word to describe it - awesome.

Many people (myself included) just think that Last.fm is a way of logging your music listening habits. After clicking around a bit, I found that there is a lot more to the application than initially meets the eye. The feature that makes it a very relevant social application is its ability to show you people with similar music tastes.

When I first signed up, this feature did not work properly. I have since realised that it requires a great deal of history on your profile (and other people’s profiles) to determine your compatibility. Now that I have around two years worth of history, this social networking feature works quite well.

I recently finished writing a Python logging program for Last.fm. Why you may ask? Well, I like reinventing the wheel. It can pick up songs from my music player of choice, log it to a local database, and then update my Last.fm profile from there. Writing this made me realise how well designed the internals of Last.fm are. Everything you see on my profile in the last month has been scrobbled by my own program.

Twitter

Been using for: Never

Up until this course, I had never used Twitter. I always thought it to be a pointless application, since most of the other social networking sites (Facebook and the like) allow you to do list your current status.

Being the go-with-the-masses person I am, I set up a Twitter account, and started... twittering? (I still have not found a verb that I like). What I found was exactly what I had thought in the past - I just honestly do not see a point in it. Why have a totally separate system that only shows your status to others, and nothing else?

If anyone disagrees, please let me know - I am more than willing to accept that I am wrong!

Google Calendar

Been using for: 6 months

The idea of keeping a computerized calendar is far from new. Google has taken a simple idea, and provided a way for people to access their calendars from any Internet-enabled computer or device in the world. Yes - even mobile phones.

I have tried many different calendar solutions over the years, and Google Calendar seems to be the best I have come across. Sure, it has its annoyances (such as having a web browser open all the time), however all in all is a very solid application.

The biggest difference Google Calendar has with conventional calendar applications is its idea of categories - there are none! Took me a while to figure out that the way to do it in Google Calendar is to create one calendar per category! This is very useful, since you can set notifications, colour tagging and sharing all based on each calendar.

Flickr

Been using for: 2 years; recreated this year

A photo sharing application. How original. I suppose you do not actually have to be original on the Internet, just do it well. Flickr is a perfect example of this.

I have had a Flickr account for quite a while now, but have never used it. I recreated it from scratch for this course, just to compare how the sign up process was two years ago to now. First impression? Same as it used to be. Still takes less than two minutes before you can start uploading. The ease of use is probably a contributing factor in why Flickr is such a popular website.

Yahoo Pipes

Been using for: Never

This site fascinates me. Apart from its slow Flash-based pipe designer, it produces an interesting result. I have always used a dedicated RSS feed reader (Liferea) to fetch all of my regular (and not-so-regular) feeds. I can definitely see the usefulness of ‘mashing’ together feeds based on categories, people, or any number of things.

I have set up the pipe for this course (see http://www.sjkingston.com/mash), but have also started experimenting with the other, more obscure features that Pipes has to offer.

Blog

Been using for: Various blogs over six years

For many years, I have had a personal blog - LiveJournal (back in 1999 when it was actually cool to have one), Blogger, WordPress, and most recently, a blog written and hosted by myself. I have settled on my own blog for various reasons, mainly due to my fascination with reinventing the wheel! I have (re)created by Blogger account for use with this course, however all of my old blog posts are long gone, so it is very blank at the moment!

In closing...

Social and mobile computing has certainly taken off in the last few years - and for good reason! With the continued evolution of the Internet, social sites will only grow in numbers. Some will use them, some will not. The most fascinating thing about social websites is that they allow people with similar tastes and hobbies to stay in contact 24 hours a day, 7 days a week - regardless of timezones.

And to ‘digg’ a self-hosted social system - come join myself and others on my IRC network: irc.sjkwi.com.au (channel #jicks) - we have a ball - err, sometimes!

A final quote you for to ponder:

‘Google is the modern-day Pacman - gobble, gobble, gobble!’

References

¹ Ross, E. & Holland, A., 2007. 50 Great e-Businesses and the Minds Behind Them. Sydney, Australia: Random House Publishing, p. 44.

² Alexa Internet, Inc. 2008. English - Alexa Top 100 Sites. [Online]. Available at http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=lang&lang=en [accessed 20 March 2008]

Sam ‘Kingo’ Kingston
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