Reflection (Yuan Yang 41107630)

Introduction:
Since now, we have already entry the period of information. People are not necessary face to face to do a project; space, time are not a problem for us, network can help us to do that. With the Internet technology developing, web2.0 becomes more and more important. Not only exploring, users could also use it to communicate to other users, share information, and present opinions on the Internet. I will write some experience of I using these social softwares such as Flickr, Twitter, and Blogger…., and also I will discuss some problems/questions I found when I use these software.

Background:
Through couple of week’s practice of social software, I have already known a little bit functions about each tool such as researching, uploading and so on. The purpose of me to use these social softwares is to know about whether these products are useful when user interact with other users.

Flickr which users can upload photographs easily and also can share their photos each other if they want, such as friends, groups, it save many space for their computer.

Twitter is a website that users can receive any post messages by other users who you are following, or you can post your news to your followers no more than 140 characters each time.

Blogger is the most successful social software and it started popularised in 2000. Users can choose the background model they like and write journal what they are thinking about.

Focus: I will focus on my experience of how these social softwares interact between users, are they work well and are there any issues for them? We will discuss them in more detail.

Reflection:
Flickr:
Flickr is the best online photo management website; it gives us an opportunity to appreciate what kind of photo user usually takes in their everyday life.
The advantage of Flickr is users store their photos and share with other users on the website. (Nancy A.2007) When I wanted to upload my images, system provided a series of clearly direction to let me know what I should do next, and also I can download tool to upload photos from my computer. After I chose photos, it pointed out whether I agree with publish my images on or just sharing with my friends or myself. Some photos I chose private because I don’t want to show other users. Everyone could add more than one tag on each photo and write description to write about what I want to talk about; it’s very convenient for other users to type the keywords and find the relevant topic of photographs they want. However, the tag was only limited by one word, for example, When I wanted to search a particular image called “my classmates”, I typed the tag of “my classmates”, it presented separately with word “my” and “classmates”, it’s hard to me to find the photo I want. And also there are too many photos with the same tag, it would spend users long time to view all photos. What I support to do is: Flickr allow users to type a full name of tag. If people know the exactly name of photo that system will display the full name only. If users not sure the name, it could display separately. (N.Garg, 2008) User also could discussing other people’s images and then presented your mind on the comments. Users can through conversation to communicate their opinions when they feel surprising or interesting. (Nancy A.2007) The contact function provided a chance to prove the relationship between users. When I added some friends on my contact list, it would show their photos on my page, when they were adding or changing their images, I will also got a notice of that. In face, the contact lists are all my friends in the life, because I felt strange if I send my photos to unknown people. According to the report, many people are giving up post photos on Flickr or other social interactive software; they prefer send photos through email. This is the problem that flickr need facing. (Nancy A.2007)

Twitter:
Email and msn are one of the most popular websites for people conversation. Sometimes, I can’t tell friends what I am doing at moment, such as I am cooking or I want to have a shower, it not necessary. (Leelefever, 2008) However, Twitter is a very distinctive tool that adopts one way social interaction, that you can post the thing what you want to do now and what’s your plan. When I used twitter, I found I could receive messages from the users I was following, but they can’t receive my messages because they are not my followers. It’s very convenient for followers that I don’t need go to other users’ page to tell them my action, it’s automatically send to their home page. And my followers would know about what am I doing now, and also, I can send private message to a certain people, that keeping private between us. Twitter also supports many ways of users send their messages to the followers such as using mobile phone. It’s very easy to users to send messages to twitter when they are outside. After I was using Twitter, I found it have some problems.

There are many unknown users I am following, and I want to know about them, however, the following users are not my followers, it’s impossible for me to reply all following users separately, and it’s hard to increasing followers and makes more friends. If twitter can automatically change from following users to followers, it’s much better. The problem of conflict between us is if following users refuse to be my followers, because they are not interested in what I am doing.

The second problem is not easy to find the known users; facebook is much easier than Twitter. When I typed name in search board, it will appear some same names on it that I can’t distinguish which one is my friend if there has no photo on it, and also it has no other information I can know about the person such as profile, it's a agonizing thing for me. I hope Twitter can supply more detail about users’ background.

Blogger:
Blogger is a simple way for us to create our own space and publish articles to all over the world. Blogger have a strong social interactive if user’s blogger has a perfect content, it will attract a lot of people to read it, and you also will be famous, many stars have their own blog to show fans how their daily life looks like. User can follow other member’s blogger to view, or you can invite them to have a look yours; and other users can present their comments on the blogger, it’s a large social community and it’s pretty similar with flickr. After I created my blogger, I wrote something that express my mind and thought, just like write diary, it’s very easy. And then I can post to my blogger or save as a draft. However, I found blogger is not very efficient for us sometimes and how to make blogger more useful? I am not good at writing, and I found Blogger is easy to create but hard to maintain. (McGovern, 2004) If no one read you blogger, what’s value of your blogger existing? My blogger has few people to visit except friends or lecturer, because I don’t have too much interesting things to say and need update frequently, every time I have to rack my brain to think about what I should write in the blogger, it’s really made me annoying. If Blogger have database that can have all articles on the blogger, it’s much easier for users to research other users’ blogger and communicate each other. Also, I found that there are not limitation or protection when people write comments. For example, as anonymous people, they could write anything on the comments, it may include some aggressive language. If blogger only allow registered users to present comments, it can prevent these kind of things and also can make users communicate and change opinions.

Conclusion:
These three social websites supply different functions to make users interaction. Flickr share users’ photos and save a lot of space, Twitters can send messages to all followers, and blogger can expression people’s mind.
How to make these websites better are the purpose of us, such as have databases that make information together, easy to search. And make more detail about users’ background that easy to find people. These ideas can make users feel more nature and closer.

Reference:
1. Flickr and Public Image-Sharing: Distant Closeness and Photo Exhibition; Nancy A. Van House (2007).
www.people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~vanhouse/VanHouseFlickrDistantCHI07.pdf
CHI 2007, April 28_May 3, 2007, San Jose, California, USA. ACM 978-1-59593-642-4/07/0004.
2. Personalized, interactive tag recommendation for flickr; N. Garg and I. Weber(2008); Proceedings of the 2nd ACM International Conference on Recommender Systems, Lausanne, Switzerland, pp. 67-74
3. Twitter in Plain English; Date Published: Mar 5 2008; By Leelefever
http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter
Blogs and blogging: advantages and disadvantages; By Gerry McGovern, August 23, 2004
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2004/nt_2004_08_23_blogging.htm
4. Advantages and disadvantages of blogging platforms
http://anyonecanblog.com/blogger-advantages-and-disadvantages/