What were they again? Myface and Spacebook?

With the Internet becoming such a huge part of society, it is natural that humans, as social creatures, would attempt to implement some form of social aspect around it. Social computing has come along way since the humble ‘Web-Log’ and has fully immersed itself into online society. My understanding of ‘Social Computing’ has increased dramatically after undertaking this course as I was required to sign up to a number tools in order to learn more about it. In this reflection I will discuss my experience with a number of these tools covering both what I found to be positive and negative aspects of the ‘Web 2.0’ phenomenon.

I have had some experience with a few of these before but the list of tools I will review is as follows:

Twitter: ‘Twitter’ is a free social messaging utility in which you are encouraged to, in up to 140 characters; tell your contacts exactly what you are doing at that point in time. As the website explains; “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?“ (1). You are able to follow and be followed by your friends and you can also search your ‘MSN’ account to find contacts that are also using ‘Twitter’. The aim of it is to get information out to your contacts in quick, sharp hits, emphasising a need to say what you have to say in as concise a form as possible.

Facebook: ‘Facebook’ is a social networking website that allows users to share information with any users they have added as friends. Or as ‘they’ put it, Facebook “Is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet”(2). There are many features including the ability to upload photos, movies and the ability to converse with contacts through a messaging system. The site also allows you to join any number of networks all based around certain topics including students of a certain school, fans of a certain band or TV show, right down to ambiguous ones such as “People who don't sleep enough because they stay up late for no reason” (to which I sometimes apply).

Last FM: ‘Last FM” is an online music-community website that, through the use of downloadable plug-in, shares users’ musical tastes with anyone who views their personalised ‘Last FM’ profile. It claims that it “Tracks what you listen to, learns what you like, and gives you personal top charts and new music to discover”.(3) The website catalogues a library of the music you listen to, organising it in terms of the songs that receive the most plays. The website also provides recommendations to the user based on the artists they listen to by finding users who listen to similar artists and analysing their play lists for alternate artists. You can also make friends and share comments and recommendations between them.

All of these sites require you to sign up in order to use them.

I’m going to focus on my personal experiences with these sites, two of which (Facebook and Last FM) I have had an experience with before. The other site, ‘Twitter’, was completely new to me and I will explain the positive and negative aspects of all three of these sites while trying to work out why they are gaining such popularity.

I’ll start off by reflecting on my experience with ‘Facebook’ which I have used for almost a year now. I’m not one for the online trend scene; MSN was all I had used for five or so years and I was sceptical when a group member suggested that I sign up to it as a way of ‘sharing files’. The site stresses that it’s a way of keeping in touch with friends, which I’m sure everyone has so much trouble with these days what with mobile phones and the like. It also informed me that I could find anyone I could think of to see if they have an account and add them to my friend list. Sure, I did enjoy finding old friends from primary school and seeing what they were up to but I can count on one finger the number of people I’ve actually hung out with after finding them on ‘Facebook’. Then there are the few hundred things you receive emails for. Someone has turned into a werewolf and has feasted upon you or someone has taken a completely pointless quiz determining what Disney princess they would be, that’s all well and good for them but I really don’t want to know about any of these things. Due to the amounts of spam I was receiving I managed to turn all email alerts off except for the posts I would get on my wall and even that was pushing its limits until people realised I try to ignore ‘Facebook’ as much as possible. And it seems I’m not the only person who is getting bored with ‘Facebook’ “Facebook's number of uniques dropped 10% to 13.3 million at the end of September from an August high of 14.8 million”.(4)

For the record however, I was able to share files with my group member for an assignment although simply sending them via MSN or email would have been much easier. The only positive thing I have found is that ‘Facebook’ is an easy way to share photos simply because everyone has an account. I recently went overseas and found it extremely easy to say, when asked, that I had put photos from my trip on ‘Facebook’. But then this is no different to any other photo-sharing website.

‘Twitter’ was one of the sites I was urged to sign up for in order to get the most out of my social networking experience. It involved answering a simple question, ‘what are you doing?’ After originally making an account I found it hard to add friends even when I typed in their exact user names they had chosen so I initially missed out on all the excitement. Did I say excitement? Well that’s exactly what I didn’t mean. Maybe I just didn’t ‘get’ it but twitter seemed like another version of MSN, except it isn’t MSN at all, it’s a web page with MSN like capabilities. The only advantage being that you can send your message to all your added friends regardless of how vague it is. I used this a few times and didn’t see the point in it, the responses I received hardly made me want to reply back as I could have done the same thing on MSN only faster. Although I was aware of the trouble people were having concerning mobile phones accepting messages from ‘twitter’, I didn’t give my mobile number to the site and missed out on what was apparently both entertaining and annoying. I did see that someone had made use of ‘twitter’ to organise a pub-crawl which was a clever way of going about this and it made me see that it had a few positive qualities.

‘Last FM’ was an interesting site which I had used before. My friend set up an account for me when he was first getting into the site a few years ago and I thought it was cool at the time. Along the line somewhere I deleted the plug-in as it was somehow causing problems with windows media player and when I looked back on the account I could see how much my musical tastes had changed. The most played song I had listed is from a band I wouldn’t prefer to be at the top and since I haven’t downloaded the plug-in again it remains there which is one negative issue. I also found it a little hard to add friends who had requested it due to the poor design interface. And apart from those issues I have nothing negative to say about ‘Last FM’. The play count is an interesting idea and since i’m always looking for new music I found the recommendations to be a highly enjoyable aspect of the site. I plan on reinstalling the plug in sometime in the future to right a few wrongs taste-wise.

Overall, while Social Networking may play a large part in ‘Web 2.0’ I personally think that I won’t become obsessed with it unless it concerns things I enjoy, music for example. There are a few interesting ideas out there that do seem to be gaining in popularity (Myspace and Facebook in particular) which may well prove that the way of the future concerning the Internet is set in a social context, but I am yet to see one that is deserving of such attention.

References:

1. Twitter description:

http://twitter.com//

2. Facebook description:

http://www.facebook.com/about.php

3. Last FM description:

http://www.last.fm/

4. Facebook Statistics:

http://mrwavetheory.blogspot.com/2006/11/is-it-over-for-facebook-losing-10-of.html

Rob Whitelaw
S4121685