Reflection

Reflection

Malcolm Solman

40768502

Introduction

Social Computing applications are becoming more and more common in this era of technology. In this blog post I’ll be reflecting on my experiences and opinions on the social and mobile computing applications that I have signed up to and used over the years. The applications I’ll be talking about are Lastfm, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious and Proboards. I’ll be mentioning how I’ve used them and how others have used them and the different options that these software applications give in the world of socializing online. This leads to one thinking “how useful or useless are these social systems really” and why some cause arguments in these online social settings.

Background

Lastfm is a web application that is music based. It allows users to scrobble songs onto their profile. Scrobble being the term used when the program imports a song into the most recently played list and adds the band and song to your library. In order to scrobble songs you have to first install the Lastfm client/program and use the plug-in option to connect it to the music player of your choice. You get play counts similar to iTunes on the songs when you listen to the whole song, but scrobbling doesn’t require one to listen to the whole song. Once one as scrobbled a couple of songs the recommendations can really begin, based off of what you listen to it can gain other bands that are similar. The other way recommendations are made is by other users who like those bands that you enjoy, have other bands they listen to and can possibly play those songs to see if you may like them. To make the website more on the social side of things they have the shout box which allows people to give comments to other users personally, or comment on their favourite songs or bands with other users.

Twitter is a web application in the form of an instant message like system. It uses the question “What are you doing?” to get people to simply let others know what you are currently up to at a given moment in time. The people that can see your tweets as they are called are the people that are following you. You can see all the people following you and can follow them back if you like. There is the option for direct messages if you want to privately message people and they have recently added the @ reply function which publicly shows the message to your followers but shows who it was meant for. Other options are favourites for the tweets you want to favourite and the ‘everyone’ option which is a public area where everyone can post messages for all to see.

Flickr is a system that can allow you to upload pictures for people to see, and allow people to comment on them like photos from holidays, artwork, or any picture you upload. You can add other users that will be able to see your pictures when they log in without needing to search for your username. Flickr also has option to mark your own material as copyrighted. Other options are creating groups for whatever purpose you want.

Delicious is a system that allows users to share their bookmarks with others. It allows you to upload all your current bookmarks if you want and also allows you upload any others by URL. You have the option of exporting your bookmarks saved on Delicious as a backup to transfer into your browser if you happen to lose them.

Proboards is a site used to create and maintain forums [1]. It allows people to communicate in a common place over what the forum was created for in the first place, like music, games, and other common interests. It is an easy to set up forum which makes it a commonly used forum for people especially creating one for a clan or guild in an online game.

Focus

The focus on this blog post as mentioned in the introduction is to talk about how I’ve experienced using these applications in the different ways they supply interaction and show how useful and useless these tools can seem to be and how circumstances with these tools can lead to arguments between people in an online environment.

Reflection

Lastfm

Lastfm was a site that I used most out of the sites I had signed up for given my interest in music it tended to appeal to me just a little more then the others. I found it fascinating how the recommendations feature worked given it mostly got bands that I already liked. There was occasionally the odd band I’d never even heard about that did appeal to me, like the intended idea of the feature. I found myself commenting with other users on bands I liked and friends in my buddy list. I found it quite useful being able to talk or comment on the band or their albums with other fans. However like a lot of social systems you get a person who decides to post messages like “they suck” or worse which leads into an argument. The ease of use for this site isn’t quite as simple as some of the others, given sign up then download and install a few things for it to work. But given the installation is not to difficult it is nothing users should have a too many problems with.

Some of these arguments tend to be over things that are quite pointless. One example of these arguments which is over some people thinking the band’s genre was tagged incorrectly and therefore leading into an argument what it should be or drifting into which type of genre or even sub-genre is better [2]. Overall though most tend to avoid the pointless arguments and just mention some things that are more relevant like talking about which album they like more.

Twitter

Twitter, I used occasionally but it had quite a number of things about it I found very interesting. Following people to receive their updates on what they are doing at a given time has the ability to be useful and useless at the same time. Quite useful since your aware of what other people are doing and when, which allows anyone to view whether you’re busy or even running late for a meeting. One person used twitter freebies to travel his way from the UK, and other countries until he got to New Zealand [3]. Twitter was quite useful in late January 2009 when a news story found its way onto twitter and people expressed their feelings on the news story by using twitter [4]. Useless things that twitter is used for is the spam of random comments people usually will do on things like this, I’ll admit I did a couple myself. Other reasons you might find twitter useless is because as Liz Lawley mentions in her review of twitter “who really cares about that kind of mindless trivia about your day” [5] but as she also mentions family and close friends do tend to care.

Arguments are possible on twitter as I’ve seen occasionally in the twitter public area where everyone can post. How these people really keep up with an argument in there is beyond me, given the area updates so often that you can easily miss something. This lead into the idea that it might be just a difference of opinions but given tone is very difficult to convey online it’s very hard to be certain.

Flickr

Flickr I found myself using it similar to photo bucket where I’d store pictures that I liked however I found that it can be more useful than that. It can be used for posting your own artwork or photos for other users to comment on, you can create groups and even change copyright settings which are quite interesting. It’s most useful function is the comments on pictures that are the users own artwork because it allows people to give constructive criticism on the pictures. Flickr seems to be generally useless if you do not really want to display your holiday photos or artwork since it becomes something on the lines of what I only used it for a place to put pictures that I liked.

I personally couldn’t see arguments starting on this site unless someone takes the criticism of one of the pictures a little too personally, or someone literally insulted the picture. In general though there seems to be no presence of this kind of thing which is probably a first, but maybe I just didn’t look hard enough.

Delicious

Delicious I tended to find the most useless since I thought “sharing bookmarks who the hell wants to do that” but I did go a little more into what the site gave the users to find out just how useful this site really could be. The site does give users the ability to backup bookmarks that they uploaded onto Delicious in case they may have lost their previous ones and they can export it to their browser which I must say I found to be a useful idea. Another useful aspect is being able to look at the most popular bookmarks. However there isn’t really much direct social interaction like we have seen on Twitter and others given the only thing you do is share the bookmarks with users and that’s it, they do have a forum but it appears to be used only for FAQ’s and problems rather than anything else.

Proboards Forums

Proboards is a forum distributor I’m quite familiar with given I’ve joined a few of them that people have made with it. Proboards is quite useful in starting a forum with a common interest which allows people to register using an e-mail address. Ones I’ve joined are based off on online game were we can meet without having to be in the game itself and even be able to meet people who we may not have even meet in the game due to different time zones etc. Other useful things about the forum are that the admin for it can change and moderate the content for users to see. One thing that makes the forum useless is lack of activity from members, where people just can’t be bothered looking at it due to lack of material or decent conversations about the forums purpose. An example is a forum a friend and I set up which is technically a dead forum at the moment [6]. The other thing that makes the forum useless is the spam ability given some people may use it just simply to get their post count up for some random reason, especially if the forum administrators choose to make ranks that are based off the number of post counts, turning the whole forum into a post count war in a way.

Arguments tend to be quite common on forums given disagreements on opinions will happen a lot based on a topic discussed. Some of these situations are where people interpret something the wrong way which is easy to do given some things are very hard to convey online for example the tone that someone is saying something.

Conclusion

In conclusion each site generally has its use in a social context. However this varies from application to application. The uses in a social context are: Lastfm allows people to communicate about the bands they like or to their buddy list; Twitter allows communication to each other on what they are doing, Flickr allows communication between the users about the pictures on the persons account, Delicious tends to only have private messages in the inbox and the help forum, and Proboards having a common interest. Another major use for these sites and any other social websites is the ability to meet people from other countries because of these common interests, which happens more on Lastfm and Proboards.

However each also has its useless elements, Lastfm being like a website version of iTunes, Twitter having people think who the heck wants to tell others messages like that, Flickr being just another photo site, Delicious having people wonder why you bother sharing bookmarks, and Proboards being a spam magnet. Arguments online in these social applications are easy for people to start even if it’s over something very pointless and stupid. As to why someone may start an argument or even excessively use social sites might be because of something called Continuous Partial Attention as talked about by Linda Stone [7] stating people may not want to miss anything or just simply want to be heard.

Generally how these applications can be useful or useless depends on how people use the application, whether they use it for socialising or just for the sites general functionality. Overall there will always be people that find the sites useful and like them and people who find them useless and dislike them [8, 9]. As for me it really depends on what the site can be used for before I’d decide to socialise using such applications.

References

[1] http://www.proboards.com/ - Proboards Main Page

[2] http://www.last.fm/music/Machine+Head/+shoutbox?page=2 – Example for pointless arguments on Lastfm

[3] http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,25268025-8362,00.html – Courier Mail News, news story on man who travelling using twitter freebies

[4] http://twitterfacts.blogspot.com/ - Twitters Facts, peoples thoughts on news story using twitter

[5] http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/03/06/thoughts_on_twitter.php - Web blog on social software by Liz Lawley

[6] http://orochiclanforum.proboards.com/ - Example of inactive forum I manage

[7] http://openthefuture.com/2006/08/continuous_partial_social_atte.html - Open the Future, Article on CPA by Linda Stone

[8] http://www.socialtwister.com/2007/03/19/is-twitter-the-myspace-of-geekdom-or-rise-of-the-microblogdum/ - Social Twister 2.0, shows the different sides of liking and hating Twitter

[9] http://www.blippr.com/apps/336659-Flickr - Blippr, shows some peoples thoughts on Flickr