‘Social networking Site’ and how I use them

Introduction

When I knew that I will be required to sign up for several social networking sites for Social and Mobile Computing Course, I was really excited. Mainly because I used to like social networking sites, or I should say, addicted to them. It was friendster that introduces me to the social networking hype. I even joined others social networking sites shortly after that. Then as my university assignments, work and other real life activities started to increased, my activities on them decreased. In addition, those sites being a lot less interesting to me, to the point that I see them only as a waste of time and actually feel guilty if I spent my free time for them because it does not serve the my initial purpose of using them anymore.

Therefore I though, this is a good opportunity to start using them again, at least I have enough reason and less guilt to start wasting my time on social networking sites again. I also would like to know what improvements and changes offered by current sites have to offer. This article will outline my experience with the several social networking sites and as the title said how I use them.

Background

This section contains brief descriptions for social networking websites that I have joined in the beginning of the Social and Mobile Computing course.
Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site, is generally a place to share the links to the websites that you interested in with other people. Those links can be described using tags. You can also view other people bookmarked sites and browse it using the tags.
Flickr, a photo sharing site. It is a site for people to upload and share their photo collections. Users can categorised their photo as well as give them tag to describe them, in addition they can also marked the location where the photo was taken [1]. Other users can browse their photos using the mentioned descriptor.
Google Calendar is a solid online calendar application. Users can add events into their calendar by using the site as well as importing the events from other calendar application, on the social aspect users can create public events, invite people and get comments from them. In addition it offers personalisation to the users, enabling them to change the look and feel of the calendar [2].
Facebook, is a social networking website with a lot of promising features. You can send messages to your friend using wall or messages them, share your picture albums and also videos with them, status and news feed to keep your friends updated with your activities and other functions such as pokes and gifts [3]. It also has the application framework, which allows developers to create custom application for facebook to be used by the users.
Last.FM is a music-based social networking website. Last.fm profile allows the users to share the song that they have been listening to with other users. Last.fm then gives the users recommendations based to logged song list, other users can also give recommendations. Other functions such as forming a group based on their interest as well as events which allows users to get notified if events matched their music taste are coming, they can also marked themselves as attendance of the event [4].

Focus

This article will focus on my opinion of the function of the social networking sites mentioned above and how I interact with them. That includes what functionalities that I use and whether I use the social context from the websites and also whether it serves the purpose that I seek from them or my initial thought towards them. Some of the good functions and the drawbacks will be included in order to delivers the main focus of this article.

Reflection

After using the social networking sites for quite some time, I divided them into two categories based on how I use them. First is the ‘good functionality’ websites, they are the ones that offer steady and useful function but I do not really use the social aspect out of it. Del.icio.us, Flickr and Google Calendar fall into this category. Second is the ‘social networking’ websites, they are the ones that I use because of the social context that they offer, such as facebook and last.fm.

Del.icio.us offers quite an interesting and useful service, but I am not really keen to share my bookmark with many people, I do not really want people to know what sites that I am interested in. It is good that I can mark my bookmark to a private, so rather than sharing my bookmark I mainly use it to store my favourite websites then use it a portable bookmark. I have more than one computer and I spend large amount of my time either in the office or campus as well, so it is good to have my bookmarked sites in Del.icio.us. So despite It is a social bookmarking service, I am not using the social part of it to the fullest. Except browsing other people bookmark using the tags that they are given, which is really useful.

I use Flickr to upload pictures to be used on another sites, for example blog, facebook or posting pictures in forum. It is relatively easy to upload pictures into flickr, they have flickr uploader and I can also use it to upload my pictures from iphoto. Because there is nothing artistic with the pictures that I have taken, I do not feel the need to show them off into the world. I used to like drawing pictures and I would love to share my drawings with other people with the same hobby and hear their opinion about my works. So If only I am into photography, Flickr is a really nice social networking site.

Google Calendar despite having a good functionally the social aspect does not appeal to me. The reason being people that are interested in my schedule or the ones that I need to inform of my schedule does not use Google Calendar nor spend the time mostly in front of the computer. Just like Del.icio.us I ended up using it for personal use. I always use ICal as my calendar application, and google calendar offer most, or even more, of the functionality from ICal that I use. I see it as portable ICal. I can export my schedule from ICal to Google Calendar not the other way around. Therefore I do not see it as a replacement for ICal, because I need to synchronise ICal with other calendar in my other gadgets as well.

Facebook offers good and promising social functions for me to use. I signed up because some of my friends that study overseas like myself use it quite often. I was not really interested on it because I was already using friendster, that at that time already not as enjoyable to me as it did and became slowly neglected. I saw Facebook as friendster alternative with better layout and less unappealing users. When I started to really using it in oppose of having an idle account only, and I have to admit it was fun. I found my high school friends and even my elementary school friends there.

Getting touch with old friends, sending messages and know how they are doing and what they up to are the main purpose for me to use facebook. I used to send wall and messages quite often, that was when my friends still use it as the main interaction on Facebook. But my enjoyment in using the facebook start to went downhill after the start of the application era. At first I get hundreds of request for using the application, less that half of them interest me, but those request is not that annoying because I can just reject or ignore it. The fact that rather than using facebook as a communication tools, for most people at my friends list, facebook transforms into online games to fill up their free time to the point that If I do not add the application into my profile I have less interaction with them. Even the wall that was a place to exchange messages, transformed into publicly viewable forward emails, those email you got in your inbox which is a forward from someone then the receiver send it to other group of people and it continues, with all the useless messages and images posted. Therefore I find facebook slowly become less appealing to me as the users do not really use it as social networking websites anymore.

Last.fm is other social networking sites that I truly use the social side of it. I was always interested to sign up on Last.fm but have not got the chance to explore it. The concept of music-based community is really interesting to me. I imagine I can finally find people with similar taste of music then get recommendation of other music that I probably interested in as well. It was not really enjoyable the first time I joined, that is before the songs on my play list scrobbled. As I leave my computer on for couple days just for letting last.fm to get my taste of music from the scrobbled songs, things start to get interesting. The recommendation function which makes me interested in the website truly delivers what I wanted to get. I do not listen to radio that often anymore because I do not like half of the song get played anyway, so it is a nice way to know what other music I might like and listen to them. I can also find the videos from the artist that I like on last.fm, I usually search for them through youtube which sometimes showing the fan made videos instead, although marked as official by the uploader. Besides that, there is also neighbours users, you can see their profile and find out what other artist that people who listed to the same music taste with you.

For me, last.fm have a ‘show off’ factor into it, which in this case is not a bad thing. If you want to show off your music taste, the concerts that you have been going into or if you want to be the one that most listened to the songs for particular artist, last.fm is a nice website to get it. You can also show your taste of music with application for other websites [5]. The good thing about Last.fm is that it offers fewer holes for the users to abused them and transform it into personalisation nightmare. Although, you cannot avoid raging fan defending their favourite artist or the ones that feel the need to say a bad things about certain artist just to make the fan upset. Last.fm offers different thing from the social networking sites that I have joined such as facebook, friendster or my space, mainly because there is a thing that keep me interested in using it, which is music.

Conclusion

The enjoyment of using Social Networking Sites will be different for all people. It is based on their personality, preferences as well as security concern. For myself, I want to use Social Networking Sites to communicate with old friends or find people with the same interest as myself. There are things that I would like to maintain for myself thus make the social context from some sites unappealing to me. In addition to that, how people interact with these sites are varies as well which for some add into negative sides. The disappointing acts from other users in the social networking sites is one of the main reason for me to dislike a social networking site.

Reference

[1] http://www.flickr.com/tour/
[2] http://www.google.com/intl/en-GB/googlecalendar/tour.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_features
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last.fm
[5] http://build.last.fm/

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Aristyaningtyas Kusumo