s40994860 - another boring reflection.

Introduction
Everyone who has been using Internet has come across websites that promoted social asynchronous distributed interaction of some form [1].
Naturally, people remembered the websites they liked, and came back to them later; those who liked them a lot advertised the sites among their friends.
The success of a site typically depends on the quality of the interface and the amount of useful features [2].
In this reflection I will tell you about my experiences using some of the more popular social software tools.


Reflection
Facebook (www.facebook.com)
This website is famous for its ability to waste peoples' time and lives [3]. How?
Simply by providing hundreds of ways for people to interact with each other - via messaging, group discussions, playing games and others I fail to classify.

Currently, there's over 50 million people using Facebook [4].
However, despite all the developers' efforts, people will never be completely satisfied with the site [5].

I've made an account few months ago - just wanted to see what's so addicting about it.
Registration and basic features like editing my profile were easy enough, but when it came to finding friends and joining comp3505 group,
I got stuck... for all those people that have been using Facebook for a while it's probably a given that you need to be in certain network before joining the group which is part of it,
but I had no idea. So after clicking all over the place I got on MSN and told a friend that Facebook sucks, they called me a noob and explained how to join the group... but the bad impression is still there.

After using Facebook for a couple of days (and by using I mean logging in and looking at what my friends have done, but doing nothing myself), I realised it's not for me.
The lack of interest can be explained by the fact that most of the people I've had added I don't really talk to anymore (High School friends, random internet people),
in other words the number of people I've had added didn't reach the "critical mass" [6].

People express a lot of concerns over privacy issues on Facebook [3][7][8]; but i find them rather superficial - in my opinion if someone wants to find out something,
they will no matter how well the information is protected. On the other hand, limiting what other casual users of the system can see by more sophisticated means than "limited profile",
would be favoured by many.

Even though I didn't get addicted to it, I think Facebook creators did a decent job, although interface could use improvements.


Delicious (del.icio.us)
Delicious is a social bookmarking tool implemented using a browser plugin; it provides lists of sites based on popularity/time added.
Despite the potential usefulness I never really ended up using this tool.
Evidently the target audience are bored people looking for random stuff on the net (I'm bored 99% of the time, but the headlines just weren't delicious enough).

I'm sure there are people who find plugins amazing, since they provide an unobtrusive access to most used features [6].
But I like keeping the interface to minimum so the plugin got quickly uninstalled...

I've pretty much forgotten about the website until I got to writing the reflection, since it was too much effort to use with little benefit [6].


Twitter (twitter.com)
A social networking service that allows people to post micro-blogs. Seemingly useless at start, it becomes fairly entertaining once you have 10+ active friends.

It's widely known that Twitter has been used by people for more than just "chatting", e.g. arranging business meetings, weddings, protests.
But for me it merely improved my awareness of what other people are up to [10].

I found Twitter really usable, as there are several ways I could update my status, including but not limited to SMS, MSN and Web interface.
The only negative thing about it is probably draining my phone credit... :(


Last.fm (www.last.fm)
A music recommendations website... Requires the user to download plugin for their music-playing software, that logs all music that has been played and generates statisitcs.
Based on the statistics it makes recommendations - what else you might like. It also does a ton of other stuff like listing people with similar interests (which is the social ascape of th software),
listing when the band you're listening to has concerts, what people think about the band, etc.

It's an amazing tool for lazy people... For quite a few months I couldn't find anything new to listen to until I've started using this.
The "similar artists" and "my recommendations" features were great. Sadly, some of the recommendations were, for the lack of better word, BAD.

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, I didn't have to add friends before the site became useful; the social part of the website is there, but it's up for users to choose whether they use it or not.

Overall, I think Last.fm is one of most useful sites on the net.


Google.Calendar (www.google.com/calendar/)
An online calendar tool. Allows people to share calendars for whatever reasons...

As you can tell by description I didn't find it particularly useful... Maybe if I had 10 things a day to do that I couldn't remember I would use it,
but then if I was that busy I would be more likely to use organiser in my mobile phone.

The only feature I've liked so far was Australian Public Holidays calendar - I keep forgetting dates.
www.google.com/trends - more useful than Calendar tbh, and quite a good laugh at times.


Conclusion
In my opinion, people are running out of ideas for new websites, so we can only hope for improvement of old ones.
Most privacy issues are likely to soon be resolved, as the new generation is more wiling to share personal information. [9]
Slowly, but surely HCI experts design more and more usable software; I can almost see "Facebook" being one of the options in the menus of future mobile phones.


References
1. http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~comp3505/Lectures/Week02-CSCW-slides.pdf "Forms of Interaction"
2. http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/webapps/why-i-dont-use-social-software
3. http://www.thetechbrief.com/2008/01/16/top-10-lives-businesses-and-reputations-ruined-due-to-facebook/
4. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_people_have_a_facebook
5. http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/166041
6. http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~comp3505/Lectures/Week04-SocialSW-slides.pdf "Groupware Challenges"
7. http://itnews.com.au/News/71298,hackers-attack-myspace-and-facebook.aspx
8. http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/02/07/1646250.shtml
9. http://blog.cdt.org/2007/11/18/dismissing-the-value-of-anonymous-speech-is-dangerous/
10. http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~comp3505/Lectures/Week03-CSCWDesign-slides.pdf "Awareness"