Student ID : S4131322
Reflection on Social and Mobile computing tools.
Introduction
The following is a reflection on how the various social tools available would satisfy my needs . It explores what works and what does not work for me as an individual.
Background
The idea of this report is to evaluate the social tools available and see how they fit my lifestyle as well as evaluate the usability and function of such tools.
Focus
The focus on this article is about will be on preferences. How my choice of music ,food and lifestyle is being communicated to others and the other way around . This article will also examine the extent of how such tools help me
Reflection
The key for this reflection is ‘like’ . Do you know what I like?, Do I like what my friends like ?. How do these tools use my preferences in ways that I want it to.
I would like to be able to have all my preferences in one location that is easily accessible and allows me to integrate it with other tools that I use as well as discover new music or websites that my friends like.
Last.FM
I got hooked onto this tool really easily. It starts by letting you enter your favourite artist and then recommends other artist based on your preferences. Isn’t this what ‘Genius’ in ITunes does already?. Well Last.FM is similar but it lets you explore its vast list of music which you can sample. It would be good to have a more social element to this tool. Perhaps to see what my friends like or disliked. Maybe If I knew who else liked The Presets we could all buy the tickets to go and see them in June (as it says in the Events list on Last.FM).
I feel that this tool has real potential, as people would inadvertently start to like it because of the great music you can find on it. Just like the way people who love their iPod. They love it because of the music they put on it.
Does it meet my needs ? : Yes, this tool is excellent. I will start to use it more and explore my taste in music as well as experiment with other genres of music.
Delicio.us
Delicio.us is a social bookmarking tool. It lets you add links to websites and share them amongst your friends. This is a great way for me to share links of websites that I like with my friends, if only they were on delicio.us too. The fact most people are not using it is a strong enough reason for me not to use it. After all tools like Facebook already have similar functions.
Does it meet my needs ? : No, Im not to sure if I want an application specifically for social bookmarking to express my likes and dislikes for websites.
Twitter
I knew that Twitter was big in the US but had no idea what was so great about it. I created an account and went twittering away. I felt that the application was great for communicating bits of information. It just adds another dimension to traditional sms systems where you can broadcast a message to a group of people.
I liked how you could connect your mobile phone and other applications to twitter, it would be a cool too to use if all my friends had it. Again universality ( how many people are using it) seems to be the factor that prevents me from using it further. I am already using Facebook and so are all my friends.
Twitter lets you communicate everything, it does not however focus on your profile or your preferences and your likes and dislikes.
Does it meet my needs ? : No, This is a great idea but im not sure if I want a dedicated tool.
Facebook
When people stop asking you ‘Do you use Facebook?’ and instead ask ‘ What’s your Facebook?’ you know that Facebook is used by almost everyone. This makes it a powerful platform for implementing new social tools. The initial concept of Facebook was to model our social interactions and relationships that we have in the real world to something that is based online and not create something superficial.
I am able to ‘shout’ (Broadcast) what I am doing to everyone around me as well as comment on what others are doing, this functionality overrides some of what twitter offers.
By joining groups and completing my profile, I can communicate what my tastes are as well as meet likeminded people. It does not however give me the ability to explore similar music like
Does it meet my needs? : Yes, its universal and I am able to express my tastes and preferences in a convenient way.
MySpace
My Space had the lead at one time but it isn’t any more. I feel that it took personalisation to a whole new level,a level which made it quite annoying at some point. I liked how you could add what music you liked onto your profile and let others sample it but giving users full control of their pages isn’t a good idea.
Does it meet my needs? : No, too much flexibility isn’t a good thing.
Conclusion
I realised that most of my choices were based on two main themes, Universality and Function.
Even though applications like Twitter were useful, I didn’t want something that only provided a small subset of functions when I had something else that provided a broader range of tools and functions.
I was also not prepared to become a user of a particular tool for the reason that most of my friends are not using it. I am not a fan of the ‘herd mentality’ but I’m not going to start a revolution either.
I would also love to see Facebook and Last.fm integrated together in some way as they would both complement each other.
17 comments:
I am in entrie agreement with your viewpoint of Last.FM. Last.FM is a very practicable，simple music sharing platform. Users only need to download the software from the homepage of Last.FM, then install into their own computer. The software will track the music you listen to, upload to the website. Listen to music ,that's the only thing you need to do. How simple it is!
I think it would be better if you have put up some refference to support your arguments.
Also, the punctuation marks seem odd in the paragraphs, some of the full stops are one space away from the last letter of the paragraph; some comma are followed by a question mark; and a colon after a question mark.
Other than that, the arguments seem reasonable. Well done!
In the reflection part, I agree with you on Twitter. It really depends on whether your friends are involved in it.
I had the same situation, so I don't really step deeper into twitter.
However, I can understand if people actually find it useful and helpful in socialising, because they might have a totally different friend groups to us.
The other part of the reflection are also understandable but would be nice if you could provide more examples and perhaps discuss further into the issues.
Totally agree with your point on Last.Fm. It brings you together with the community and genre of songs you are interested in. It adds that social element to the site and friends can be made thru Last.Fm.
As for twitter i guess it's just not that popular as facebook now since everyone is already on facebook and are reluctant to be maintaining so many social profile pages. Just like the friendster era.
Good and short write up but i gues you should have focused more on social netwoking then just reviewing each of the site. Good job though.
cheers.
well said. i agree with your point with delicious and twitter in that it has very limited functions and theres only so much you can do on it. Also the fact that noone else is using it also contributes to why i, myself don't use it very often. Summed it up well.
I am agree with you that Last.Fm is an excellent tools to explore music taste. It simple but very useful and also portable.
But delicious is also a very cool, perhaps you should try i more. So far i can see, it's a huge storage and a very powerful search engine ( sometime even better than google)
I am totally agree with your idea that this ‘shout' functionality of facebook overrides some of what twitter offers.
I personally believe the facebook is fantastic especially this‘shout’function...It is positive communication..
I agree that Facebook, at the moment, has most of the tools in one place and makes it easier than joining many other social sites. It makes it easier to complete a task like sharing music tastes or sharing website links. But what you've said about giving people too much flexibility can also apply with Facebook since there's always those annoying invitations to join applications. Overall I think you summed up the applications quite well. Especially the part where you said you wouldn't join a website unless you're friends are on it, which I can definitely relate with.
I feel that your comments on the different networks were a bit broad and not too in-depth. It seems to me that you spent time on many individual networks while I feel that you should have spent that time on just one or two. This way you could have had a more expansive experience to really flesh out the full capabilities of the networks you were using. Case in point: Last.FM does have a friends component where you can see what your friends have listened to and their top listened artists and tracks.
I am strong agree with the Del.icio.us is useful bookmark for sharing the website link to anyone. But the limitation of the Del.icio.us is that users can’t read the reason why people would like to share. However Del.icio.us as a traditional example which could applicant web 2.0 technology to communicate with users. And then more social software like Del.icio.us were developed which are able to allow the user to read the reason why they would like to share. So Del.icio.us regard as a lead which become the effective social mobile software, although it is not very perfect.
I think you should write more reflection about your opinion, to make you argument more structure. Good writing but if you use reference to support your argument will be great. Structure clearly~~~~ Good job~~~
I agree with you on Last.fm. the idea of using music in social network is great because alot of people listen to music and some time people used music to interact with each other. I think you need to try Last.fm Scrobbler applications. it is very useful application for all Last.fm users. it collect all information of all music that you listen and use that informations in Last.fm so they can easy show your top artists and top Tracks.
Good post. I agree with most of what you have written. Services like Delicious and Twitter seem to provide very little functionality seem to work best when combined in some way with other services. They focus on a small subset of social interaction and this may seem lacking.
From the sounds of things, facebook would be your all-round tool that allows you to do everything you want in one place. It's more like a collection of social networking applications all in one place.
Just out of interest, did you scrobble any songs on Last.FM? I've had a few people contact me via Last.FM asking about some of the songs I listen to.
You mentioned it lacks social interactivity but I believe this is only limited to how much you look into the users in accordance to your's and their musical taste. This interactivity isn't obvious, but it is there.
@Sam: You don't need to be friends with someone to stalk them :p
I totall agree with your point of view. I have not that much experience with this tool. I perfer to use facebook more than Last.FM because most of my friend are using facebook. Maybe most of my friends are not really keen with music. However, last.fm is a good tool if you want to download some good music because you can know what music is popular nowdays via last.fm.
good post!
I agree with your point about Last.fm. The key feature about it is that you can share your music with others. You can also know what your friends taste of music by browsing your friend's page. Potentially, good music can be known much faster by people.
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