My Reflective Report

Student Number: 4128289
Student Name: Zhu,Lin

Introduction:
With the fast development of the web 2.0 in modern society, more and more social interaction and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) are involved in the internet. As distinguished from the traditional web technology, human-beings are likely to play a more and more important role. During the period of Web 1.0, internet was working merely as a vast information store, where people could gain their desired information. Today, a lot of social interaction has been involved in the virtual internet society, which means you can meet friends, date and chat through the network.

In order to examine the relationship between social tools and social life, a couple of specific social computing tools have been tested by myself. The experience about those softwares which I used during the last few weeks will be demonstrated in the following paragraphs.

Background:
Facebook: It is a social networking site designed for supporting groups and communities. With the network, users can add each other as friends who are in different cities, workplaces, schools, countries, and interact with each other as well. It is a good platform to share peronal contents of your social life.

The reason that I focus on the Facebook is because that I have been using it for a long time, and I think it is good to show that how life is socially organized and how those tools can support it.

Focus:
I will focus on two aspects: One is the interactive functions of the Facebook, while the other is how the functionality impact on their specific users and users’ social interaction in particular context. All standpoints are based on my own experience.


Reflection:
Facebook:
Since 2006, Facebook has been innovated and developed significantly. One of the new functions introduced by Facebook is called news feed. Regarding the function, a great variety of newly updated information, which includes news about friends, new events, friend’s birthday, various online information and so on, will be displayed in chronological order and users are able to see them as soon as they enter their homepage. With this function, I do not need to spend all day to visit each friend’s homepage and find out what is happening these days, instead, I could read all the latest information easily in my own homepage.
However, one of the problems of the new function, which Mark Zuckerberg who is the designer of Facebook did not conceive, is privacy. I still remembered that when the function was introduced, my first reaction was "panic", because all my newly updated information was “exposed” in front of all my friends, which brought me inconvenience. Gradually, a number of users were against to the new function as well. Some people complain that some of their own information which they do not want other friends to read will still be published to others. Thus, personal privacy could not be guaranteed with the new function. In this case, Mark Zuckerberg has to come forward to apologize, and also quickly make the corresponding solution, which is to customize the privacy control for News Feed.
After the News Feed function was improved, I can now decide what to share with my friends and what not to, which considerably protects the users’ privacy.




“Facebook also redesigned the home page for you and your social graph. Now you can visually experience all that is shared by your friends and connections, as it happens. It also provides you with additional control by allowing you to filter what you see and from whom”- Facebook Swims Its Way into Your Lifestream: What the Facebook news means to you
As shown in the figure 1 above, this is the homepage we use now, which is in the latest version. In terms of the layout of the Facebook homepage, all the functions buttons are located in the left-hand side; the “Status” function and the latest news from friends are put in the middle of the page; the advertisements are located in the right-hand side. In addition, other information such as the friend requests and other requests is arranged in the top of the web page.
“One way to think about this is as a timeline–or a stream.” –Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the new look for profiles and home pages on the hot social-networking service, March 3, 2009


Shot at Mark Zuckerberg's 2008 F8 keynote
http://www.flickr.com/photos/briansolis/sets/72157606335164322

Facebook is trying to improve the quality of information transmission between groups and communities globally, which could eventually improve the quality of interpersonal communication. The ultimate goal is to provide a universal society relationship management tools and platform. Specifically speaking, if your information storage tool, such as your address book, cell phone, or notebook hard drive, are unfortunately destroyed or lost, all data would be gone, but you can still get in touch with your friends through Facebook. No matter how your life changes, no matter how long it pasted then, it will always help you to maintain and manage the social relationships, and the information management style is unique, interesting, and colorful.
Everyone can use Facebook to manage their friends into different categories according to social networking relationship, and maintain the relationship in a unique interactive form.
The functions of “Status” and “News Feed” are the core of the interactive concept. On the one hand, the “Status” function could clearly tell my friends what I am doing and what I am thinking through the “status” function. On the other hand, with the “News Feed” function, I could see what my friends are doing, what is happening to them, and what they are paying attention to these days, which is good fun actually.
Furthermore, Facebook has a number of additional applications - Widgets, which provides various forms of interactions, such as “Super wall”, “Poke”, “Hug”, “Gift”, “Ilike” and so on. The examples mentioned are the ones which are the most frequently used in Facebook. These tools not only realize good interactive communication among users, which help the users convey their own feelings, and maintain a close relationship with their friends, but also set up a multi-dimensional interactive dialogue system, which helps people communicate and interact with each other well, so as to achieve the maintenance of the social relation in the modern time.
There are about 700 different applications in the Facebook. Each of these has magical power and can make people’s lives colorful within the internet network. Nowadays, Facebook is becoming one of the fastest growing search engines. On the one hand, the social network provides information from outside networks. On the other hand, it provides something more within its own network - access to the personal lives of other people and experience their life and information they are willing to share in your circle. Regarding this issue, Chamath Palihapitiya who is the vice president of product marketing of Facebook explains: "I see Facebook as becoming more essential than search."
The following link is clearly shown that the Facebook is becoming one of the fastest growing search engines.
The Potential for Facebook Search Kicks Twitter’s Butt by Jesse Stay, published on March 22nd, 2009
http://staynalive.com/articles/2009/03/22/the-potential-for-facebook-search-kicks-twitters-butt/

Facebook is a typical “life Stream” application. The definition of the “Life Stream” is: “In its simplest form, it’s a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline.” (Brian Solis，March 06, 2009.) At the same time, similar to globalization, the “Life Stream” of the Facebook is also likely to “globalize” the large network and bring a smaller world to the people who use the application. Within the small village, where people get together from all over the world, everyone knows each other’s social life, and it is hard to lie to someone else, because there will always be someone who knows the truth in the small village, and they will never lose contact with their friends. It is probably more accurate to describe the scenario by using Marshall McLuhan's "global village" concept. Facebook congregates the “Life Streams” of the social networking together, so that the real world is almost compressed into an integrated village. Moreover, people, who are living in the “Global Village”, are free to share each other’s “secret”, and this gives people an unprecedented “cordial feeling”. This might be the reason why Facebook is becoming the most popular social software to the young generation.

Conclusion:
The real world has been compressed into a small virtual interactive computing world, as the social tools start to play an important role in the modern society. We can organize and maintain our social relationship well through the network.
The relationship between social life and social computing tools in details in the reflection part has been analyzed in this report. Taking Facebook as a good example, it shows that the new interactive social computing tools are absolutely necessary to exist in our social life. It helps support people’s interaction in a sense.
I can always keep in touch with all my friends, and see what they are doing, what happened to them, what they are paying attention to, which is a big deal to me to catch up with my friends always, and guarantees the relationship never be lost in the real world.


References:

The Potential for Facebook Search Kicks Twitter’s Butt by Jesse Stay, published on March 22nd, 2009
http://staynalive.com/articles/2009/03/22/the-potential-for-facebook-search-kicks-twitters-butt/

Mark Zuckerberg's 2008 F8 keynote
http://www.flickr.com/photos/briansolis/sets/72157606335164322

By ANITA HAMILTON, Nov. 21, 2007, Is Facebook Overrated?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1686825,00.html

Marshall McLuhan's 'Global Village'- Marshall McLuhan, 30 Dec 2008
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/bas9401.html

“Facebook Swims Its Way into Your Lifestream: What the Facebook news means to you”- Brian Solis，March 06, 2009.
http://www.briansolis.com/2009/03/facebook-swims-its-way-into-your.html