Social
Liu Cong
41316786
Introduction.
As a good example of social mobile computing and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), Web 2.0 has largely promoted the level of web development and design. Its concepts led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications, such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wiki, blogs, and folksonomies. Today`s internet users can not only use the web to get information but also make friends, leave comment for something interesting, share pictures and videos, add the geotags for the pictures they upload. Therefore, with the great benefits shown above, it is not difficult to understand why this service is so popular. This article draws on the experience of the writer and related literature to investigate the relationship between advantage of the social software and user`s feeling of connection to peers.
Background
After using and investigating social websites for several weeks, I will illustrate the background of four social websites in this section. All these social websites are in current, popular use worldwide.
Facebook is a free-access social networking website. Users can add friends and communicate with others via messages, they can also manage their personal profile and update personal information to notify their friends. The networks are organized by city, workplace, school, and regions. People can join them to communicate with other people in same network.
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook>
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send brief updates in less than 140 characters. Users can post and receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS (receive only), or through applications such as Tweetie, Twitterrific, Twitterfon, TweetDeck and Feedalizr. < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter>
Flickr is an image and video hosting social website that enable uses to share personal photographs, It also supports folksonomic tagging, commenting and groups. People can upload their personal picture and add geotags on their pictures for location. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr>
YouTube which is a video sharing website supports video upload and view functions. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtube>
Focus
The reflections below are based on the my personal using experiences. In this session, I focus on the advantage of functionality, whether these social software can increase the people`s feeling of connection to their peers and how can they increase.
Reflection
Facebook:
As a good social website, facebook has become ever-increasingly popular. Due to its powerful function and simple interface, it is very attractive to teens and college students. On this platform, people share their opinions, their media as well as their academics with other peers. Therefore, the connections between peers have been enhanced by using this social website. There are many advantages of facebook like application using, group function, new event notification and so on. However, how facebook`s advantage can increase the people feeling of connection to their peers is the many problem we will discuss in the section.
Facebook users are allowed to create album and upload their favourite pictures and videos. Although this function looks common, it can increase people`s connection with peers. Taking an example, i have using facebook for a long time. If I do nothing on the facebook, my friends would not comment on my wall. However, when I upload pictures frequently, many people would comment on my walls and pictures. Someone even scan and comment on my album. And then I will give them some feedback to their comments. Therefore, album and uploading function can increase people`s feeling of connection with their friends on facebook.
New event notification is another good function for facebook to enhance people`s feeling of connection to their peers. When users upload pictures or videos or update their own profile, the notice will be displayed on their friends` home page to notify their new events. So their friends can know their recent status via this notification and comment on their wall. This function positively encourages users` interaction with their peers. Thus they can strongly feel the connections to their peers.
Facebook supports many kinds of applications which include quiz, website games, Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, your blog, news feeds and so on. All those applications can also increase users feeling of others. Some of those applications like website games require users and their friends play together on facebook website. Users have to interact with their peers constantly on the web page. Thus they can strongly feel that their connection with others become more frequent.
Twitter:
As the most popular microblogging application, twitter have almost one million users who can send and receive messages via the web, SMS, instant messaging clients and third party applications. Compared with facebook , functions of twitter maybe not so diverse, and it also has the 140 text characters limitation for posting. However, twitter has its own advantages.
First and foremost, simple design and trendy interface is one advantage of twitter. I find that new users can understand functions of twitter very easily due to its simple design. Users do not need waste long time to study the instructions. For me, I only use 2 minute to understand settings , update and following functions. Therefore, I feel it is a time-saving social software.
Another particular character of twitter is that twitter use “following” rather than friends to establish the relationships between users. In facebook, users who want to communicate with others they have to establish their relationship. They have to send friend require firstly and wait for the feedback. However, it is different that twitter users can follow anyone they want. They do not need to wait for the approval from the person they want to follow. Thus it is more flexible than facebook from the angle of social connectivity.
In aspect of feeling of connections to peers, although twitter is not so dynamic like facebook, it can also increase the feeling of connections to peers. Because of its diverse connecting measure instant messaging, SMS or website, all these things can support diverse communicating ways between different users. Therefore, this social website can bring great convenience to users, although it is lack of multi-media like pictures and videos. All in all, twitter can increase people`s feeling of connections with peers.
Flickr:
As an excellent image and video hosting website, flickr is becoming more and more popular. Not like facebook and twitter, flickr is more concerned about image and video communcation. Flickr users are allowed to upload their pictures or videos to their album and share them with other users. Flickr has a really powerful image searching system.. In facebook, searching engine always focus on users themselves like name, network, degree, region and so on, while flickr prefers to pictures searching. With the help of flickr engine, you can search any related public images which are uploaded by other users as you want.
There is a good merit of flickr that it uses image as the main communicating measure. Using images have many advantages which is better than text. Firstly, pictures are more straightforward. People who upload their own images can describe their recent life very exactly without any text explaination. In addition, other users who are scanning the pictures can quickly understand what has happened in the picture rather than text. Attractive is another advantage of using mages especially the beautiful images. According to my using experience, it is easier for users to be attracted by multi-media than paper.
Map tagging function is also a good advantage of flickr. Flickr users can put geotags on the pictures they have uploaded to show the exact location of the pictures they were taken. With the combination of vivid images and stereoscopic coordinate, other scanners can clearly understand what they are doing, where they are and what those pictures are talking about. Therefore this function offer more convenience for users to understand other users and share their own lives.
About feeling of connections to peers, flickr can largely increase this feeling. User upload their pictures to flickr can attract their friends to view and comment on their pictures. They can also comment on the pictures their friends update. In addition, group function is allowed by filckr. Therefore users boost their communication through establishing group with their friends.
YouTube
As a video sharing social website, youtube focuses on video searching, video sharing. Its idea is different with the other social websites we have mentioned above. Video applying is the most important character of youtube.
Therefore, the advantage of youtube is just the advantage of video. As the combination of image ,sound and time, video is the most powerful media. Text can explain everything very exactly, but it is invisible. Image can show something just like the same, but it can not explain anything. Compared with images and text, video can not only illustrate everything but also show dynamic version. In the youtube, users is able to upload their favourite movies or movie clips to the big database and share them with other users. The searching engine can help users find the video they want and view the videos online.
Youtube can also help users to increase the feeling of connections to their peers. Taking an example, I can always find the videos about study in UQ, and some of those videos are made by current UQ students themselves. After viewing those videos, I can understand what their lives look like. Furthermore, I can comment on their video to explain what I am thinking. On the other hand, I can also upload videos about my life which is made by myself to share with other UQ students. Most of youtube users focus on the videos they feel interested. After searching, they can find many people who feel interested in same things. Thus they can communicate with others via comments.
Conclusion
In this article, we have introduced, discussed and reflected four social websites facebook , twitter, flickr and youtube. After reflecting their advantages, we have recognized that all of them have their own special character.
About the feeling of connection with peers, all of those social websites can increase this feeling with different extents. However, it is not hard to conclude that facebook has the best effect on the rise of feeling of connection with peers among those four websites due to its powerful social functions, followed by youtube and flickr. And twiiter has the worst effect due to that it is lack of multimedia data.
Reference
[1] , Socialstream.
[3] The Disadvantages of Twitter: Quiting Twitter[March 8, 2009] http://creativefusionmedia.wordpress.com/
6 comments:
The simple design and trendy interface you mentioned about Twitter really makes sense. The unique "following" and "followed" mechanism makes Twitter stand out from the crowd.
I found the disadvantage of application in Facebook. Even though it includes quiz, website games, Twitter, Flickr etc. In my experiment, I rarely use these applications. Thus, I don’t think it can improve the relationship between friends.
Different to the pervious comment, I love the applications in facebook and I think it is still a way to improve relationship between friends. For example when I send a application to you, maybe you will not use the application but you will notice me. Perhaps you will click into my site and see my recent activities and things.
I agree with you, it's easy to understand how to use twitter. And it's easy to following other users but hard make other users to following you.
I don't think Twitter ever had the aim to be just like Facebook, i think they were actually branching out from the idea without all this multimedia data. I don't think it was Twitters intention to recreate a feeling of connection peer to peer. Just provide a service where people can talk to anyone in the world and have everyone read your comment.
I have different feelings about Youtube. I find it hard to be connected with others. Most of the time, I only search and watch videos instead of leaving comments on them, because even if I do so, I rarely receive feedback from my comments, so I am not motivated to interact with them.
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