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Introduction
It has been only a few years since the first time when the term “Web 2.0” was proposed. In the "Web 1.0" era, users mainly browsed for web content and retrieving information provided by web sites. As oppose to it, users can now build on the interactive facilities of "Web 1.0" to provide "Network as platform" computing, allowing users to run software-applications entirely through a browser [1]. Users can own the data on a Web 2.0 site and exercise control over that data [1]. Nowadays, there are many social networking websites over the internet, and some of them have millions of users. These sites have jumped to the main stream in a very short time, and many of us now use them everyday, some are even making money of them.
In this article, I will write a reflection about some of the popular social networking websites based on my experience and some other literature. First I will make a brief description about what these websites are and what are they capable of. Latter in the Reflection part, each of the social networking sites will be discussed separately focusing on some key aspects. Base on these key aspects, a conclusion will be made at the end.
Background
I have visited almost every site that is listed on the COMP3505 web site prior to this course. But for the most of sites, I merely know what kind of sites they are, and after I signed up, I have never used them again. So the reflection will be drawn form the sites/tools that I regularly use or visit, which are listed below.
Flickr: An online image management and sharing application, allowing users to upload and browse for photos.
YouTube: It is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips.
Facebook: A popular social networking website that people can interact with others.
Twitter: It uses a micro-blogging service so that users can read and update their posts referred to as “tweets”.
Focus
For each of the above tools, I will focus on discussing about the key features that make the site “social”, in both positive and negative ways, and how I feel about these features.
As one of the most popular image sharing websites, Flickr clams that it now stores more than 3 billion images [2]. At first, Flickr emphasized on collecting images found on the web, and the site was not well known at then. After the team focuses more on letting users upload and share their own images, Flickr has been growing rapidly, and it is now the biggest image hosting and sharing website.
At first, I used Flickr as an online repository to store my photos, in case someday my hard drive crashes and I lose all of my personal photos. And I believe many of other users first started using it for the same purpose. After using it for a while, I realized that I have more and more friends using Flickr, so I added them in my contacts, and found that it is more fun to share photos with others. Unlike the text, images always give people better understandings of your life experience. Latter on, I noticed that Flickr keeps adding new features to it, makes it more interactive.
As mentioned before, the site now focuses more on the “social” aspect. Like many other social sites, you can add contacts and share photos and activities with friends. But what if you don’t have a lot of contacts and you want to share your photo with others, or you want to see others’ photos? One way to do that is to create or join a group. I didn’t use this function before until recently. Just for research purpose, I typed in some key words like “fun”, “animals”, “cars”. It comes up with thousands of results. I randomly joined some. There are some really decent groups with good quality items. Some interesting comments are also posted. But I found most of the groups are really crappy. Tons of irrelevant photos are in the pool, and heaps of advertisement comments are posted. Unless you have friends already know the good groups or you accidently find some, it is very hard to search for good quality groups by just typing in the key words. I guess the initial purpose of the group function is for friends or families to share their life experience, but it also limited the public experience.
Another way to see other’s photos is to use “Explore” function. All the photos here are classified by tags. In the main page, some frequently searched tags are listed, and you can view each by clicking on the link. I looked some tags up and found that most of photos are more like “public” art photos instead of photos taken by real life people, and in each tag, photos can only be sorted by “Most recent” or “Most interesting”, it is again very hard to find quality photos by its searching facility. Maybe I am just not good at using it, but at the moment, this “Explore” function is just useless for me.
I do notice that the photo management tool kit is very handy and easy to get used to. By clicking on the “organize” link in the home page, you can edit your photos, adding them into sets, or groups. You can even them into the yahoo map to indicate where the picture was taken. The tool kit makes the sharing more efficient and effective, but it requires good internet connectivity which will be its down side.
While Flickr is the most popular image sharing website, the most well known video sharing website is definitely YouTube. YouTube was initially created by three former PayPal employees in Feb 2005 [3]. In November 2006, YouTube was bought by Google Inc. for US$1.65 billion. The site uses flash based video player to display video content generated by users.
YouTube is the first social tool I have used among all four, and also the most frequently used one. I am using it almost everyday. If it is the first time you are using YouTube, it is best to take a look at the “Videos” page, here by default, most viewed videos that day are listed here, mostly uploaded by users.
My favorite feature is the “Subscriptions”. After using YouTube for some time, either by viewing the videos in “Videos” page or by typing in key words searching for videos clips that I am interested in, I found there are users who will upload videos regularly. Most of them are just normal people. My feeling is that the videos posted by normal people are more attracted to me, because I feel they are closer to me. They can be students, office workers, and I can see these people everyday. One of the most popular users is hotforwords. By the time I write this article, there are 188370 subscribers who have subscribed this channel. The name of the user is called Marina Orlova, she is a Russian-born philologist (although primarily an etymologist) who has become an internet celebrity, hosting one of the most popular channels on YouTube, HotForWords, and a corresponding website [4]. Many other users have become famous because of YouTube.
Another feature will be adding notations and subtitles. This feature is added only a few months ago. The feedback shows that many people like this new feature. The video owner can add dynamic notations and comments to the video to better explain the content of the video, so there is no need to use third party applications to edit the videos if notations are needed. It provides better user experience for both creators and viewers. But now lots of users started adding advertisements in videos for their own good, which is annoying for users to watch. However, the feature can be turned off manually.
YouTube also has similar functions as Flickr like “Groups”, “Friends”, but as far as I know, these “social” functions are not very popular. Most of my friends visit YouTube just to watch video clips, rather than interacting with people, so it is more like “one-way” interaction. The social function is very limited.
I have used a lot of video sharing websites, and I found YouTube provides the easiest way to upload videos. It supports almost every video type. Once you upload a video clip, it will be converted to its own type in a very short period. You can even upload multiple videos at the same time. Because of its popularity, thousands of videos are uploaded in 1 minute, which makes the YouTube team extremely hard to organize and examine the video content. Some inappropriate or sensitive video content might be uploaded. Some of which may violate copyright laws, others may not suitable for children. This issue is and will be one of the hardest problems to solve.
Facebook is one of the most popular social networking websites. It claims that it has more than 175 million active users [5]. It was created by some students from
The focus of the site is to connect people together and establish what they called “networks”. One of the fantastic features would be finding friends via your email. When I initially registered, I didn’t know how many friends of mine are using it. I just registered for fun. But it instantly found from my email contacts that I had more than 50 friends using Facebook. So only 3 minutes after I registered, I already had more 50 fifty known friends to be added on Facebook. That was experience I never had before. I know that many other sites have the similar features now, but Facebook is one of the earliest started using it, which attracted a lot of people in a short time.
Further more, Facebook wants you to find more friends. So the other feature is its profile system. Facebook encourage people use their real names to identify themselves instead of nicknames. It’s much easier to find your friends by real names. Even more, you can type in your city, workplace, school, and region to join Facebook “networks” to increase the chances of finding friends. In less than 1 month, I already had 80 friends on my list, and most of them were real life friends. It is not a virtual society anymore. It is more like a real life network. Users are very well organized by real names, city, workplace, school, and region etc. Friends are better connected here. However, there are many concerns. Most of the users provide their private information here, although you can set it to private, but still many of them prefer making it public, which can be seen or used by everyone, prompting serious privacy concerns.
The most active function would be the feed. On your home page, you can see a list of recent activities of your friends, which makes it more interactive. But the current design makes it a bit messy. There are too many friends on my list, and too many activities of them, such as some one changed profile, who just added some app. It is supposed to keep you in sync with your friends, but there are too many feeds which make it tedious to read. I would suggest that a filtering system should be added here, so that you can choose what kind of feeds you want to see.
The application function is one of the most unique features that Facebook has. There are many third party Facebook applications, such as games, online calendars, and music sharing tools. These applications enrich the content of the system, users can add the ones they are interested, and they potentially increase the amount of active users. Meanwhile, developers can make a lot of money by providing these apps. The disadvantage will be these applications also make users hard to organize. I first found the application feature so cool, so I searched and added lots of applications that I was interested in, but latter I found I rarely used most of them. I also received lots of notifications. For me, they were just like spam information. I have a friend who added more than 50 applications. I wonder how many of them he really uses.
Twitter is famous for its micro-blogging service. I believe it is the first website brought up this term. Unlike Facebook or other social networking websites, it focuses on letting users post short texts referred to as “tweets”. The idea is creative. It differentiated its character with other social networking websites.
What I like about twitter is its simpleness. Type in short text within 140 characters and it is all done. The purpose of tweets is to let your friends know what you are doing at the moment. Instead of adding “friends”, Twitter introduced new terms call “followers” and “following”. If Facebook is a high class restaurant, using Twitter is more like going to a fast food restaurant. I can easily and efficiently get updates from friends and knowing what they are doing. There are also some third party applications that make it even easier to send and receive tweets. I am now using a firefox extension called “TwitterFox”. Just like a notifier, it notifies me when new tweets are updated, and I can directly reply to them or post new tweets.
Many people found that using Twitter tightened relationships between friends. But I found more and more people are using it as a RSS feed receiver, but instead of receiving feeds from websites, feeds are posted by a person. Some users regularly post useful or interesting tweets and these attracted a lot of other users. Now there are many users on Twitter that have thousands of followers, and I believe most of them are not their real life friends.
Because of its nature, people will only use it if they are really interested in micro-blogging. There are no other main features of this site, so the target users are very limited. Actually I was surprised to hear that Twitter now has 4-5 million users [7]. I think how Twitter adds new features but keeps its simpleness at the same time will be a tough task.
Conclusion
From the key features of these 4 social websites, we can conclude that they share some of the common features, but each of them also has unique features. The most common one will be the “friend” feature. That is what it is called in Facebook and Youtube, while it is called “contact” in Flickr, “follower” or “following” in Twitter. This is the most straight forward way to implement the “social” concept in the system – adding known friends and share experience with them. It is also very easy to see the nature of each site. Flickr is about photo sharing; Youtube is about video sharing; Facebook is about social networking; Twitter is about micro-blogging.
There are reasons why these social websites are popular. They all had some initial features that others couldn’t compete with. Flickr was one of the earliest website provided image hosting and sharing services, the tagging system makes it even more popular. Similar to Flickr, YouTube is started its video sharing services very early, it provides strong file compatibility that makes users easily share their videos. Facebook was actually created after some other popular social networking websites such as MySpace, Friendster, but its unique profile and networking system helped it establish a huge community. The feature that Twitter has I personally think is the most unique one. I still haven’t found any websites that has the same character as Twitter. The unique feature makes Twitter a successful social website.
New features are rapidly added by all of these social websites. How to integrate these features with the existing ones will be a hard task. Because all these websites are commercial websites, their ultimate purpose is to make money, and the best way to do that is to attract more users and increase popularity. So whatever features they add, I think they should still focus on the “social” aspect.
References
1. Tim O'Reilly (2005-09-30). "What Is Web 2.0". O'Reilly Network. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html.
2. "Flickr 3 billion photos". DoesWhat. 2008-11-06. http://www.doeswhat.com/2008/11/06/flickr-3-billion-photos/.
3. Hopkins, Jim. "Surprise! There's a third YouTube co-founder".
4. Marina Orlova has managed to get several million people interested in the origins of English words, Victor Sonkin, The Moscow Times, June 6, 2008.
5. “Statistics”, Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
6. "Executive Bios", Facebook. http://www.new.facebook.com/press/info.php?execbios=
7. Aneesh, Jeremiah (November 19, 2008). "Social Networks Site Usage: Visitors, Members, Page Views, and Engagement by the Numbers in 2008". http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/11/19/social-networks-site-usage-visitors-members-page-views-and-engagement-by-the-numbers-in-2008/.
6 comments:
i agree with your opinion about the facebook.i think the feed function in the facebook is not just a list activities of my friends, and also, it saves my time to get to know my friends immediately, instead of enter to each of my friends personal page, the more friends i had, the more time i saved. Isn't it? Yes, the applications on the facebook are more unique than others. After all, the facebook is like we communicate and interact with each other in a real world by using a virtual method.
The feed really annoys me most of the time. It messes up my page by sending the information that my friends do, most of which seems trivial to me. A filtering function will be great for me. Different strokes for different folks, however, there are a large portion of people who really appreciate the feed function. The feed function brings convenience to them, just as what Lyn said.
Anyway, I still strongly recommend Facebook to provide a filtering function cause it won't do any harm to both parties. A user can turn the filtering function off if he wants to receive all feeds. From my point of view, rare people want to receive all feeds without filtering.
One more comment on the feed function. It is said that users could not choose what self information to be shown to their friends when Facebook was firstly put into use. The privacy issue is not well handled. But while users are provided with function to determine their level of privacy, i.e which part of himself to be shown to public, the tide of public opinion completely reversed. The users tend to show all their activities to the public instead of hiding himself. It is the magic of the social networking, it successfully captures users' subtle psychological activity.
When I using the Facebook, it is really help me to save a lot of time when Facebook display a list of my friends’ activities.
For this reason, I can keep in touch with all my friends and know what’s going on with them recently.
However, when I leave a comment to my friend and do not want other friends to read this comment, the Facebook also have the privacy function to help me.
I have the same opinion in using Facebook. Its convenient tools allow users to meet more friends etc. You pointed out that the “feed” function is disorganised. In my experiment, I also encounter this problem where the contact list is crowded with dozens of friends.
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