Hoomie Hung
41198496
Introduction
With the prosper of technology in today’s world, “the World Wide Web (WWW) is undergoing a subtle but profound shift to Web 2.0, becoming more of a social web” (1). It is very hard to separate Social Software from Web 2.0 by using social collaborative technologies, such as Blogging, Flickr, BitTorrent, Wikis, web services, Wikipedia, and some other social networking sites(SNS) where people online can communicate with each other rapidly and conveniently.
Background
In the following section, reflections are made on the basis of four Social Network Sites. Background information on each of these SNS are as below.
Facebook is a Social Networking Site (SNS), which allows people to freely access and join in more than one network. The network is passable for them to connect with other people in the same network easily based on their real-life information, such as school, university and/or location. Facebook also offers users capabilities to share photos, leaving messages, give comments, and others for them to create their own social applications.
Figure1: Facebook screen shot
Flickr is a platform for people to share photos, join online community and web services suite, which was one of the earliest Web 2.0 applications. It allows the user to tag the photo and group them.
Figure2: Flickr screen shotBlogger is a blog publishing system, which offers multiple authors to establish group blogs. It also support tagging, FTP publishing, RSS, CSS, commenting, html/javascript, multi-media blogging, and so forth.
Figure3: Blogger screen shot (Edit by CSS)Google Calendar is a contact/time-management web application offered by Google. It allows collaborating and sharing of schedules and/or birthdays between groups or families using various levels of permissions.
Figure4:Google Calendar screen shotFocus: Social Network Site Tools
As part of the requirements for this course, COMP3505, I signed up to several popular SNS to gain experience of using them. Some SNS are based on age, like Facebook which is more popular with high school or university students, or different contents, like Flickr which is for photo sharing, or planning, like Google Calendar for scheduling the time-managing (4). There are too many forms of SNS around the world, but whatever SNS are used in the course, I find it hard to put my interests into those popular SNS. However, using social computing was part of this course, hence, I tried to indulge myself in the course-assigned websites, not only having fun with them but it was a special experience. Therefore, for each of the SNS I have chosen, I have reflected on my experiences using them. In this article, I will talk about the process of how I made use of the features of SNS tools to collaborate with peers, and increase the connection among the peers, and what sort of problems caused them to fail to do so.
Reflection
Facebook is the largest SNS on the internet. I have been using Facebook myself for a couple of years, which is quite nice to participate with. I believe this SNS’s feature enables people to connect with friends and someone who work, study and live around them easily (2). It contains various networks for the users to make their own selections of making a connection with other users through messages, comments, quizzes, interests, games, and so on. These connections are useful when I was asked to join the COMP3505 group, which allowed me to see what the peers and teaching staffs had said through the facility in Facebook and makes me feel I am part of the group and also can recognised who are taking COMP3505 course as well. I have a lot of fun and enjoyable collaboration with my peers and get to know each other further in this network. It is, moreover, interesting to see who has left you a message, or check who has sent you a gift when you log in to Facebook. Occasionally, whenever I have received an invitation from others to join their network, but my impatience made me delete the invitation straight away. This did not seem friendly, which could be because I was not used to using the SNS tools.
Besides, Facebook when compared to the other similar SNS such as hi5, Friendster, MySpace, or Window Live Spaces, are further remarkable. It reflects on the real-life communities to relationship with relatives and friends. It offers a good space to interact, such as ‘locking out’ unfamiliar visitors, where the majority of users cannot see the contents, unless the user themselves open his/her own area to the public or make the particular visitors as friends.
Flickr, is professed as “an online photo management and sharing application in the world” (3). It allows the users to store photos for people to view and give comments. Users are able to give each photo a name, a description, tags, and a selection of permissions for designate people who are allowed to see the photos, such as the people on friend list, or open to public. Although, as known, most of well-known peers do not really to communicate with people via Flickr, therefore it is hard to collaborate with them using Flickr. Nevertheless, I continued to upload the only photos I had onto the Flickr, group them, naming them, and make all the photos open to the public, where the purpose was to share photos to the world who wish to look at.
The use of a Blogger is quite wide: it can be a posting journal of activities or communication surface for group work. Each user is allowed to invite of a maximum of 100 users to post onto a Blogger, but does not have any authority to edit the layout of the Blogger or some other oversteps to the posting. It is very useful as a group work and/or class communication area. Whenever you publish a post onto the team blog, everyone in the team will be notified of a new post, with some comments or other relevant information appended to the post. For instance, in COMP3505 course we had a group blog (http://comp3505.blogspot.com/) for all of the students in this course, which allows the students to explore their own posts and/or gives an opportunity to voice my opinion to other students by giving them feedback on their particular entries.
Besides, I found out that Blogger allows the user to change the template of the blog by editing CSS, and also can add some other HTML/JAVASCRIPT on the side of the link column, which made me feel that Blogger is fun and enjoyable. Blogger also offered multi-media blogging, including videos and images. However, I am not a person who is interested in taking photos and recording videos, therefore I did not get a chance to use this feature, which seemed like I had squandered the given tools.
Google Calendar was the most boring SNS that I had used for this article when compared to Facebook, Flickr, and Blogger. This SNS was hard to use to communicate with families and friends. The only thing that Google Calendar does is to organize events such as birthdays, appointments, exams, etc. It is also able to create an invitation and to send a reminder when the special event is coming, and allows the user to choose which events remain private and which are to be displayed to the public. Furthermore, Google Calendar allows a user to add another calendar into our calendar, such as Australian holidays, which means, the calendar will show up all the Australia holidays on the calendar. In my experience, I found the only thing that Google Calendar failed was to organise my peer groups and adding friends to my friends list like what Facebook does. Therefore, I stopped using Google Calendar after setting up one month’s event schedule.
Conclusion
Besides, Facebook when compared to the other similar SNS such as hi5, Friendster, MySpace, or Window Live Spaces, are further remarkable. It reflects on the real-life communities to relationship with relatives and friends. It offers a good space to interact, such as ‘locking out’ unfamiliar visitors, where the majority of users cannot see the contents, unless the user themselves open his/her own area to the public or make the particular visitors as friends.
Flickr, is professed as “an online photo management and sharing application in the world” (3). It allows the users to store photos for people to view and give comments. Users are able to give each photo a name, a description, tags, and a selection of permissions for designate people who are allowed to see the photos, such as the people on friend list, or open to public. Although, as known, most of well-known peers do not really to communicate with people via Flickr, therefore it is hard to collaborate with them using Flickr. Nevertheless, I continued to upload the only photos I had onto the Flickr, group them, naming them, and make all the photos open to the public, where the purpose was to share photos to the world who wish to look at.
The use of a Blogger is quite wide: it can be a posting journal of activities or communication surface for group work. Each user is allowed to invite of a maximum of 100 users to post onto a Blogger, but does not have any authority to edit the layout of the Blogger or some other oversteps to the posting. It is very useful as a group work and/or class communication area. Whenever you publish a post onto the team blog, everyone in the team will be notified of a new post, with some comments or other relevant information appended to the post. For instance, in COMP3505 course we had a group blog (http://comp3505.blogspot.com/) for all of the students in this course, which allows the students to explore their own posts and/or gives an opportunity to voice my opinion to other students by giving them feedback on their particular entries.
Besides, I found out that Blogger allows the user to change the template of the blog by editing CSS, and also can add some other HTML/JAVASCRIPT on the side of the link column, which made me feel that Blogger is fun and enjoyable. Blogger also offered multi-media blogging, including videos and images. However, I am not a person who is interested in taking photos and recording videos, therefore I did not get a chance to use this feature, which seemed like I had squandered the given tools.
Google Calendar was the most boring SNS that I had used for this article when compared to Facebook, Flickr, and Blogger. This SNS was hard to use to communicate with families and friends. The only thing that Google Calendar does is to organize events such as birthdays, appointments, exams, etc. It is also able to create an invitation and to send a reminder when the special event is coming, and allows the user to choose which events remain private and which are to be displayed to the public. Furthermore, Google Calendar allows a user to add another calendar into our calendar, such as Australian holidays, which means, the calendar will show up all the Australia holidays on the calendar. In my experience, I found the only thing that Google Calendar failed was to organise my peer groups and adding friends to my friends list like what Facebook does. Therefore, I stopped using Google Calendar after setting up one month’s event schedule.
Conclusion
Social Network Site (SNS) is one method for modern people to connect with families and/or friends that they have not seen for a long time, as well as a place for them to express sympathy and solicitude for each other. In the world there are billions and billions people that are using SNS to communicate with families, friends, or others who live in distant places. SNS allow these people to have a change to connect with relative and friends, and to know what they are doing recently through journal, guestbook, e-mail, photos, and so forth.
Reference
Reference
1. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Volume 387, Issues 2-3, 15 January 2008, Pages 675-684Feng Fu, Lianghuan Liu and Long Wang
2 comments:
I agree with you! I only use these websites, mostly, facebook, to keep in touch with people far away from me. Sometimes its the only way I have to communicate with them so I can't really do without them.
Really well structured report :D
I agree with the Google Calendar thing. I said in my review that it was better as a personal rather than social networking tool.
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