Reflection on social networking websites

Name: Yanling Han

Student ID: 41331949

Introduction

Web 2.0, improving websites’ diversification and personalization by expanding the information source of Web 1.0, has opened up a new prospect for modern websites. For many years, internet users can only browse articles or do other limited activities on the websites the content of which can only be modify by website owner. Comparing to traditional websites, in the Web 2.0 era, social networking websites have offered greater convenience and usability for internet users by giving them the rights to own and control the data themselves. Social networking websites not only improve the website performance, but also provide a terrific platform for internet users to interact with each other, which is the most important contribution they bring to us.

In this reflection, three typical and popular social networking websites: MySpace, Facebook and Twitter are chosen to discuss. I will give a laconic description on what these social websites are. Then in the reflection part each social networking websites will be discussed with my suggestion attached to the end of each section. Conclusion will be made after the reflection part.

Focus

This reflection will focus on finding out the reason why social networking websites are so popular based on the research I have done in the selected social websites. Moreover, these websites’ unique features will be discussed during the discussion.

Background

Following is the description of three social networking tools I have chosen to look into:

MySpace: One of the most popular social networking website with an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos for teenagers and adults internationally. Its development is the most successful story in the Web 2.0 era.

Facebook: The most famous social networking services around this planet. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people by updating personal profiles, sharing photos, playing web based games in Facebook system.

Twitter: A social networking service which allows user to send their updates to cell phone or some personalized websites in the form of messages while other users can read their updates.

Reflection

MySpace VS Facebook

Being considered as the most successful case in Web 2.0 era, by 2006, after four years’ developing, MySpace hits 100 million accounts.[1] Now in 2009, it has more than 200 million accounts. April 2008, Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors and became the most popular social networking websites around the world. [2]

Even though most of Facebook’s user growth is in international markets – MySpace still dominates the markets in North America, which, in my opinion, Facebook will beat MySpace sooner or later.[3]

Features which are almost the same:

Both of these two social networking websites are excellent websites for making friends. Many functionalities these two social networking sites provide are pretty much the same such as blogs, groups, videos, music and comments, etc.

These two sites both have the friend searching system. You can search friends by name, age, school, city, etc. Additionally, these two websites both support searching friends by user’s own email address. If you go to a friend’s website, you can see the list of his/her friends which give you the chance to know more people and enlarge your circles of friends.

Another beautiful functionality which I want to mention about is video recording. Both MySpace and Facebook support making self videos. It is very handy for a user to record his own video clips using a PC camera and then share with his friends.

The photo tagging tool is a really creative feature in these two sites. When a user is uploading or editing a photo, he/she can add tags to his friends. It is a much more easy and effective way to introduce their friends to other users.

Different features:

Some features, however, vary between these two social networking websites. Take advertisement for example, I think nobody like advertisements on the websites because they distract our attention when we are browsing websites. Facebook’s performance is much better than MySpace at this point. You seldom see any advertisements on Facebook while sometimes you will get annoyed with the ads that flashing around in MySpace webpage.

Comparing to MySpace, a large amount of interesting and interactive applications makes Facebook more competitive. Furthermore, Facebook provides a tool that allows users DIY their own applications. I guess the playability of these fascinating applications is one of the important reasons why most users joined Facebook. MySpace is imitating Facebook’s way in this respect; however, there is still a long way for it to catch up.

In my first exploration in MySpace, I found an amusing feature that Facebook does not provide, the “Photo Cube”. Instead of normally uploading photos to your albums, “Photo Cube” allow you to create a cute photo cube using the photos in your albums as source. The 6 photos selected will be pasted on the 6 phases of the hexahedron you created and the hexahedron can be set as your picture shown on your home page. Though it is just a simple application, it makes our websites more vivid and attracting.

Suggestions:

The embedded instant messenger adds vitality to these two social networking websites. We can find it in the corner of the webpage. It greatly enhances the usability for these two web services. It means our communication will not be limited to use traditional instant messenger like MSN and ICQ anymore. I felt so excited the first time I was chatting with my friends using the Facebook’s embedded instant messenger until I wanted to have a video chat. It let me down because it does not support that function at all. Finally a web chatting tool called “Tokbox” can be embedded as an application in MySpace and Facebook solved this problem.[4] Alternatively, a firefox plug-in called “TokBox Voice and Video Calls” can also fulfill the chatting needs in while chatting using Facebook’s IM. Even though these problems can be solved by installing third party plug-ins, I still strongly recommend MySpace and Facebook develop their own video chatting function in order to make it more convenient for users.

Twitter

I still remember my feeling the first time I used Twitter, bored. I even thought it was useless. It looks like a bunch of people who don’t know each other talking about some meaningless things. I do not understand why numerous people spend so much time on it. After several days’ digging into it, however, I realized Twitter still has its own advantages.

Why is Twitter everywhere?

Unlike MySpace and Facebook, Twitter does not have that many attracting tools and applications and function. What it has is only a text-based post of up to 140 characters and a social network formed by people following each other. So what makes Twitter so popular? If Twitter is too simple comparing to other social networking websites, if all the functionalities can be found in other social networking websites, why bother to use Twitter? I guess the answer would be: “The simplicity”. Let me ask, what is the most important phase in our daily life? The answer should be conveying information and exchanging messages to each other. Do we have to send photos to each other to describe things that just happen? No, not necessary. Chatting, however, is the original and fundamental communicating approach which must exist. That is the reason why text messaging service in mobile becomes so popular. Meanwhile, it explains why so many people get indulged in Twitter. Let us take another look at MySpace and Facebook, the most valuable information that users are interested in is the text messages they sent to each other after removing all the stunning features such as games, photos and videos. Twitter is an advanced version of text message. It can be sent across different platforms including internet, cell phone and other devices. Let us image we were talking to each other while sitting around a table. We listen to someone saying something we are interested in while we still can hear other people depicting something we do not care about. Even though most of the time the topics we talked about are meaningless, this is the most natural way of communicating and it is exactly what Twitter is doing. Twitter becomes a successful social networking system because it perfectly represents a normal social life.

Is Twitter useless?

I believe anyone who dares to say “Twitter is useless” will definitely get drowned in all “radical” twitter’s spittle. The main concept of Twitter is “What are you doing?” Users share his status and thoughts with all his followers. I used to think it is useless until I saw a woman asking “I wanna go to new york! What do u guys think?” Then I recognized that Twitter is not limited in sharing thoughts and what users are doing, it can also be used to gain suggestions. In real world, you always ask friends for help when you are in trouble. It is exactly the same in Twitter. Since I have not been to New York before, I looked into her other followers’ reply and I saw lots of suggestion they gave her. That’s it! In Twitter, you have millions of brains working for you if you have millions of followers.

Suggestion for Twitter

I have been following a productive user who updates his thoughts every half hour. Some of his updates are valuable to me but most of them are worthless. All his trivial updates bother me so much and my home page is full of his updates. I want to stop following him but treasure some of his opinions. I would suggest that a filtering system be embedded in Twitter so that users can filter the information by their preferences.

Conclusion

From the discussion above, we can have a clear picture in mind what a social networking website looks like. They are mimicking almost all human behavior that we can find in the human society. Social networking websites are virtual world without blue sky and firm ground; however, they are so real that users can do most of the things they behave in the real world such like chatting, playing games, voting, etc.

MySpace and Facebook are the two leading virtual social networks of the world. They provide users with their creative features while Twitter sticks to its particular thoughts about human’s original ways of communicating. There are several reasons for them being so popular. First, their concepts are brand new comparing to the websites in the Web 1.0 era. Second, they are supported by the latest internet technology such as AJAX, XHTML, etc. Last but not least, they are building a real human society on the internet that greatly facilitates the communication between people.

References

[1] P. Cashmor, "MySpace Hits 100 Million Accounts," http://mashable.com/2006/08/09/myspace-hits-100-million-accounts/, 2006.

[2] M. Arrington, "Facebook No Longer The Second Largest Social Network," http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/12/facebook-no-longer-the-second-largest-social-network/, June 12, 2008.

[3] C. Beam, "How Facebook could crush MySpace, Yahoo!, and Google.," http://www.slate.com/id/2168872/, June 22, 2007.

[4] K. Nicole, "TokBox Brings Video to Facebook IM Chat," http://mashable.com/2008/07/02/tokbox-facebook-cha/, July 2nd, 2008.