1) Tweet
2) ???
3) Profit

An online social networking reflection from Michael Shiel - 41213531

Introduction

The new waves of interactive websites, currently experiencing extraordinary popularity, are dubbed “Web 2.0”. These sites offer more than simple data to the user, they offer an online social environment. Most if not all of these sites are centred around collaborative efforts (Such as blogs, and wikis) or individual interactions known as online social networking.

Sites such as Facebook allow people to catch up with friends and classmates from yesteryear that they may not have spoken with for years, Last.FM allows you to find artists similar to your favourites and other listeners who share your tastes. A phenomenon known as ‘micro blogging’ has recently risen largely due to the website Twitter. Twitter allows you to quickly and easily express yourself (tweet) and inform others as to what you are currently doing with a small message posted to your page. Flickr lets you share photos with family and friends, but has recently stagnated in growth and its user base has even begun a slight decline.

Focus

My primary interest with social websites is the interaction provided by the website and experienced by the users while using it, and how and why this might be useful to people. During my use of the above websites (Facebook for several years, beginning when it was for higher education only) I have noticed one thing – it all seems to be abstract from reality. If people used traditional communications methods to announce the same information that they do on Twitter, they would soon find themselves being the only person listening. And as far as Facebook is concerned, a general rule is that you can safely divide the number of Facebook friends a person has by at least ten to get an idea of how many people they actually genuinely interact with. Friend requests are a dime a dozen, passed between people who wouldn’t even know each other’s names, let alone recognise one another on the street. It seems to be a competition, and whoever has the most friends wins.

Reflection

One article I found particularly interesting is named “How to make 80 million friends and influence people” from The Guardian newspaper. In this article the author investigates the unstable explosion of social networking websites. Joe Taylor, a dPhil student from Oxford university states:
“At any social occasion you're introduced to many people you will probably never see again. But if you can remember their name you can put them among your Facebook friends, and a huge, loose network develops. There appear to be many people whose sole aim in life at the moment is to acquire as many Facebook friends as possible.”
This rings true with my experiences of these sites, and reflects the seemingly dominant but unspoken truth: “the illusion of having many friends is socially more important than having a few legitimately strong relationships”

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of all about online social networking is that since so many people will accept random friend requests from strangers in a benefit to enhance their online persona, it seems the Web 2.0 revolution may have benefited identity thieves more than anyone else. Sophos, which is an IT security company, sent out 200 friend requests to strangers on Facebook under the alias of Freddi Staur (an anagram of ID Fraudster). Out of the 200, 87 responded, close to a 50% rate of return, very lucrative for potentially unscrupulous people. The amount of information people post to their profiles is enormous and most would consider a large amount of it to be personal and private. Why then do we make it so easier for people to access our seemingly private information?

The micro blogging master, Twitter, whom Facebook recently overhauled their entire site to imitate (Which resulted in an enormous user backlash), does not have most of these issues. However, personally I do not see the purpose in the services that Twitter offers. A world where a single website has the last 30 minutes of everyone’s lives posted on it available for all to see worries me, especially if it got to the point where it would be considered abnormal to not partake in the micro blogging madness (From the looks of it we’re not far off). This is just a personal opinion however, and it seems to be a fairly uncommon one judging by the massive uptake in Twitter usage.

Integration between social networking sites is another facet of the online world which I find fascinating. Facebook features possible Last.FM integration via apps, however the two sites overlap in social functionality. I feel that Last.FM has lacking social features, and the ones that are present are currently superfluous. This highlights another prevalent issue with modern online social networking, the endless barrage of sites on which your friends make themselves available and in order to stay in touch you must also. Each site requires a separate login, which is just a huge pain. In order to check up on the latest event your friends have planned, or where they plan on going tomorrow night you must memorise numerous accounts and passwords. There is growing movement towards the (very good) solution to this: OpenID login, which Yahoo (Flickr) currently support along with Google’s recent addition and Microsoft allowing all Live(TM) accounts to partake in.

Conclusion

Personally, I am pretty adverse to the whole putting your life online situation, mainly because of the lack of ways to properly secure your information. Several of the sites I signed up to for this course have already published my name (Shame on me for giving them my real one, or shame on them for lacking in privacy?) allowing anyone to use Google when it inevitably picks them up to find personal information about myself. Facebook does solve some of these issues with private profiles, and requiring friend verification before allowing access, which is perhaps why I have been using that site so long. However, and I know this is pretty controversial right now, but I absolutely cannot stand Twitter. In my opinion the micro-blogging service has no purpose other than to massage the posters ego. Are we moving towards a world where all social interaction occurs over the internet rather than in the real world? I hope not.

References

Benyon, D., Turner, P., & Turner, S., Designing Interactive Systems: People, Activities, Contexts, Technologies (2005).
Garfield, S. How to Make 80 million friends and influence people. (2006)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/jun/18/digitalmedia.observerreview

Sophos Plc. Sophos Facebook ID probe shows 41% of users happy to reveal all to potential identity thieves. (2008)
http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2007/08/facebook.html

Stone, Brad. Facebook at 5 - Is It Growing Up Too Fast? - NYTimes.com (2009)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/technology/internet/29face.html

Webb, Matt. On social software (2004)
http://interconnected.org/home/2004/04/28/on_social_software