Virtual World Versus Real World
Social Mobile Computing Tools
S41531404 Sean Tan Soon Yee
Introduction
This article is about the perception of the writer’s views on Virtual versus Reality through the usage social and mobile computing tools. In this article, there will be reviews on the background of the different kinds of social mobile tools being outlined like, Delicious, Twitter, Last.FM, Blogger, Flickr, FriendFeed and Yahoo!pipes. The focus of this article will be the differences of the virtual world people indulge in, using these applications to share, connect and communicate, with the actual world we live in. We will look into human behaviour in both the different worlds and the sort of lifestyle it affects. This piece also touches on the level of privacy a user can control, and the sort of perception he wants to project through the medium of these social computing tools. Lastly, the basic topic of how people share and connect in these tools and application will also be touched on through this review and reflection.
Background
Social Computing is a collection of technologies driving an evolution on the web. It illustrates the fundamental shifts in communication, computing, collaboration, and commerce brought about by this trend. A large number of new applications and services that facilitate collective action and social interaction online with exchange of multimedia information and evolution of aggregate knowledge is represented in this article. Many online networks have grown significantly, which affect the users lifestyle dramatically. Social Computing shifts computing to the edges of the network, and empower individual users to manifest their creativity, engage in social interaction, contribute their expertise, share content, collectively build new tools and disseminate information. The types of tools used are changing, and computing is moving to a more network-centric, less desktop-bound stage. It transform the way individuals process and interact with information, rendering a more dynamic and mobile information domain centered on individuals who interact through wide variety of tools like those to be mentioned below. (Parameswaran and Whinston, 2007)
Delicious
Delicious is a social bookmarking tool. It is a simply to use interface since 2003. It has a strong community and rich layer of content, making it good for a new user. The one click bookmarking allows users to save their bookmarks and search through them, add friends and browse through their bookmarks, or even search through popular and newly added websites added by the large community of users. Delicious is a powerful tool for sharing content with other users.
The good thing about Delicious is that it imports bookmarks from your web browser. It is also able to tag pages according to topics and let you share your bookmarks with other users. It is simple to use and can save up to 5MB of content. However, the disadvantage would be it does not detect broken links or merge the similar tags. There is also no simple option to delete multiple bookmarks at once. There should also be a small preview of the page being bookmarked so it will enable the user to decide whether or not to view the site.
In my personal opinion, I think Delicious is a fantastic way to share interesting sites to people in and out of my network. I also feel that it provides me a very good way to see what my friends and other people are looking at. For instance, if I am bored and what to check out new and interesting sites or if I am researching on the same topic as my friend, I can look at what he has checked up so far for ideas on Delicious. However, the only problem I think was annoying about delicious is that I have to bookmark my sites on Delicious and my browser. The idea of redundancy and duplication is very much on my mind when I am introduced to Delicious. And because I have to share my bookmarks, I selectively choose what to present on Delicious as a protection to my personal privacy.
Twitter
Twitter is a social messaging utility based on a question: “ What are you doing?” It is a mix of instant messaging, email, Facebook and text messaging. It is basically a network of users following one another. You have 140 characters of text to update, and as soon as you upload your message, the people following you can immediately see what you are up to. It is a social networking and microblogging tool where you can understand people through quick takes such as “ I hate assignments”.
The pros about Twitter is it is lightweight posting compared to blogging. And it summarises your feeling or thoughts at that moment. It very much allows you to view the updates of people you are following at a glance. The cons in Twitter would be it is a rather simple tool and besides updating your thoughts, there is pretty much nothing you can do on it. It will be Twitter’s challenging to make it more interesting.
My personal take from Twitter is that I enjoy just posting random thoughts and feeling as and when I like to allow people following me or in my network to know what is happening in my life. It is a good way to keep people connected, especially if you have not been in touch with the person for sometime. However, I felt that because the posts are so general, you might not understand the topic you are following, as they can be very specific in terms of knowledge. For example, “ I love my 180SX”, not everyone would understand it is about a car. This is the disadvantage of microblogging as compared to blogging. As mentioned earlier, I think Twitter needs to have more functionality, because I could just use Facebook to microblog its very much the same thing as Twitter.
Last.FM
Last.FM is a UK-based music player for personalised radio. Started in 2002, Last.FM is good for people who enjoy listening to music and wants to discover new tracks. It is a breakaway from regular radio. The software can track what a user listens on iTunes, their iPod, similar players and allowing it to create a playlist based on your musical taste. Users can also custom their own profile, make their own radio station based on what they listen to and add friends to listen to their stations to find new music. This way, people can share music and exchange their different taste.
The good thing about Last.FM is that it has a huge storage of music and is a very good player. It has good quality music and you can make it your default player. It also allows networking with other users and it makes choices for user input simple and much easier. The bad thing is it monitors user behaviour, and your listening choices are restricted.
I personally feel that Last.FM makes a very good player other than my iTunes. It also allows me to come upon new tracks or albums through similar artist of music. Although the tool is useful to me, I find a few flaws with it like the navigation of the site can be indirect and take you all about. Streaming the radio can be slow at times and taking up quite a bit of Internet quota as compared to just listening to my iTunes. I also cannot listen to my favourite track over and again in Last.FM. I feel these are some of the improvements that can be made to the music tool.
Blogger
Blogger is probably the largest online blogging tool with 1.5 million users. Google recently acquired it in 2002 turning it into a full-featured blog platform. It very much resembles WordPress, with the ability to modify templates, drop in external RSS feeds, customise CSS, post photos, send post to email address, post entries, comment, and present them in a simple interface. Blogger provides a free platform for users to broadcast themselves and write about any subject and share part of them to the world via the widely used web.
The amazing part of Blogger is that it provides a simple interface for people to edit instead of using HTML. It is simple to use with drag and drop editors, and it is able to host your own domain name. The down side of Blogger is that it does not allow simultaneous writers editing the post and does not allow a particular post to be made private.
With my experience using Blogger to post my blog, I find it very simple to use with the text editors like font type, size, bold and italic functions, URL links, uploading of pictures and all. With the ability to edit the post or templates in HTML, it gives advance users more of an option to customize their blog too. Blogger allows different style of blogging to take place, whether its word entries or photo blogs, depending on the user’s preference. Blogger is like my online journal, allowing me to broadcast my thoughts and show pieces of my life. Blogger bring people who do not know me well enough closer to understanding me, and people close to me to know what is happening in my life. The only problem I have with Blogger is that it does not allow me to restrict the people viewing my blog and making my entries private to protect my privacy and forces me to blog with caution.
Flickr
Flickr is a place where people upload and share their photography. You can create photo albums for others to browse, view the pictures as a slideshow, personalise your profile and create groups. Flickr has a public database of pictures sorted into categories and unlimited storage spaces for users to upload their photos. Flickr allows people to share photos and network through common interest in photography. Comments on photos like the user know what people think of their pictures. The attractive interface using thumbnails and the ability to navigate around those images makes Flickr a very good tool for an online photo gallery.
The pros of Flickr are the option of securing your photos, tagging, commenting, and organising them in the application. Flickr can also be used to incorporate into blogs and websites. It also provides privacy by making some or your entire pictures private. The cons of Flickr are that it has an upload limit of 20MB/mo, so you cannot upload large images and they would automatically resize it for you.
In my opinion, I think Flickr is a fantastic site to share your photography and works. It not only acts as a database to store your images, it also allows you to showcase them in a form of a mini gallery for people to view, comment and tag them. For users who are into photography, it is a very useful tool as these comments can help in your skill of taking pictures and it adds more perspective and approach to your work. I can also use Flickr to search for images and people with common interest. The only thing I dislike about this photo-sharing tool is that people may just grab your picture off the site without you knowing and this brings me to the issue of copyright of works. If Flickr allows users to personalise the outlook of their photostream, we can use it as a platform for our portfolio or online gallery, a point Flickr can improve for the better.
FriendFeed
FriendFeed is an application that aims at enhancing sociability among people by sharing online content. It allows members to remain up to date about websites, blogs, photos, videos and music shared by friends. The site automatically imports common materials across the web when the users tell the feed the network its information belongs to. One of the users materials would be sent as part of the feed to the rest of the members in the group. It does not require the need of communicating the links among friends. Basically, the concept of FriendFeed is to add accounts across different social networking services, so friends can follow what you are doing.
The main benefit of FriendFeed is it strings together all your social networking sites and gives you a shot of what is happening on Twitter, Flickr, Delicious at a glance if you have no time to be surfing all of them. It also has Rooms to enable discussion either in terms of public or private. Most application let you build network within that network but FriendFeed allows networking outside of itself. The only imperfection with FriendFeed is the layout could be more distinct to differentiate the different feeds are it can get quite messy when viewed as a whole.
My take on FriendFeed will be it is a very good aggregator that incorporates all my social sites together and view at as a whole. I can also view what my friends are up to in the fastest way possible. However, I am also afraid as a user to be virtual stalk by people whom I do not know and it presents my information readily available to anyone.
Yahoo!pipes
Yahoo!pipes is a hosted service that allows you to remix RSS feeds and create a new data mashup in a visual programming environment. You can either create a new pipe, browse through existing ones or even cone a pipe to make your own adjustments. Yahoo!pipes provides drag and drop editor that allows you to connect Internet data source, process them and redirect the output.
The advantage of Yahoo!pipes is that it allows all your site with RSS feed to be centrally stored together, and it provide you with a single RSS feed. It also allows you to browse other pipes, discuss and even documentation on the pipes. However, the problem with pipes is that it always seems to have errors and bugs. Due to the fact you have to copy the RSS feed of other sites, it creates a lot of problems and the connection always seem to break somehow.
In my opinion, I think Yahoo!pipes is a good tool to remix popular feeds without having to code, but the amount of error that occurs while using it is frustrating. The connection does not seem to always work between the feeds and it can prove to be a point to improve.
Focus
This article will discuss the human behaviour in the virtual world of social networking tools and the actual behaviour they take on in their daily lives. It will compare the different approach people take to shape an image or perception they want to project, in contrast to their actual character and lifestyle.
Human are fundamentally social creature. From young we orient to other people, develop abilities to interact with one another through expression, gesture, spoken and written language. However, when we move from face to face interaction to digitally mediated interaction, everything changes. The subtle social cues we use in our real world interaction are absent. In the digital world, we are socially blind and we communicate differently. Things take required little effort in face-to-face settings like noticing someone’s behaviour, requires a lot of effort in the online setting. (IBM Research Social Computing Group, 1998)
Reflection
This article will touch on two questions to explore the topic of Virtual versus Reality:
1. Virtual Identity and Social Perception; who do we want to be?
2. Privacy and Online Stalking; how are we being followed?
Virtual Identity and Social Perception; who do we want to be?
Social networking websites have been so popular worldwide that it has became part of most people’s lives. With networking tools mentioned previously in the background, many users are hooked on to their computers for hours checking out what is happening to people’s life, updating their profiles and even sharing content and information to one another. It has became a daily habit that these people will browse through even if it is for a couple of minutes to check through what is happening in the online community they are participating in. Since we understand that the virtual world is evolving into a stand-alone dimension itself, we cannot ignore the fact that people’s behaviour in this new world they participate in is ever changing as well.
Identity plays a key role in virtual communities. In the disembodied world of virtual community, identity is also ambiguous. Do virtual personas inherit the qualities –and responsibilities – of their creators? For assessing the reliability of information and trustworthiness of a confidant, identity is essential. And care of one’s identity, one’s reputation, is fundamental to the formation of community. Identity cues are sparse in the virtual world, but not non-existent. Virtual reputations are established and impugned. ( Donath, 1996)
As a member of the online community, we create profile so people will know what kind of person we are. We do so by upload our pictures, write about ourselves and many other different way to express as much as we would to the virtual friends around us. However, are we really the identical people we project ourselves to be online? How much of the information we give about ourselves are true and not what we perceive or wished to be perceived as? There are many different ways to manipulate the way we want people to look at us. For example, one could edit his photographs and upload it one Flickr or Facebook so people would think he or she looks cool or his or her photography skills are fantastic. One can also grab attention from posting entries on blogs or Twitter by saying things that did not actually happened. One can also add music he do not listen to in Last.FM because he wish to be in the same group as his friends who love rock and be seen as a guy who likes rocker vibes. There are many way people can pretend to be what they what to be in front of others, so as to be accepted by the community or even gain popularity out of it. I am not assuming everyone is pretentious in the online community or ever piece of information you see for a particular person is false and you have to be cautious. Whether it is harmful or just plain fascination piece of content you receive on the other end, you have to know that in the virtual world, it is very much unlike the world we live in, where people cannot escape from being themselves.
The virtual world provides a space for people to behave differently from what they are in real live, attract more friends through different personality and even provide an escape from the harsh facts of life. The question to ask yourself at the end of it is, what do you want to be?
Privacy and Online Stalking; how are we being followed?
The previous section talks about virtual identity and perception over the online community. Having such identity could lead to popularity among the community and in turn result in other people virtually stalking you. Be it that you are a famous Blogger or even someone’s previous girlfriend. Somebody out there using a social computing tool can be stalking you online. It may not be as serious as it will be if someone literally stalks you home from work, but having people whom you may or may not know constantly checking out your profile or updates can be quite scary as well. You may come to find out if the person is stalking your profile when random people or friends come up to you and say, “ I heard you went to Europe lately, saw the pictures on Flickr” or “ Try to cheer up, it not the end of the world, I saw your Twitter post” and even “ You like The Killers too? I saw your library on Last.FM”. It is amazing how people can follow your life so closely when you do not even realise it, it may not be harmful but it brings about the issue of personal privacy.
The study of Facebook users shows the implication on personal privacy quoted below. “It would appear that the population of Facebook users we have studied is, by large, quite oblivious, unconcerned, or just pragmatic about their personal privacy. Personal data is generously provided and limiting privacy preferences are sparingly used. Due to the variety and richness of personal information disclosed in Facebook profiles, their visibility, their public linkages to the members’ real identities, and the scope of the network, users may put themselves at risk for a variety of attacks on their physical and online persona.
Some of these risks are common also in other online social networks, while some are specific to the Facebook. “ (Gross and Acquisti, 2005)
Personal online privacy is very much related to online stalking. No matter how much you set your private setting to, the user cannot control the amount of other information he is risking putting up onto the web through social sites. People can still virtually stalk you through your photo albums, your microblogs and even your favourite bookmarks. Be it intentional or people are just checking you out for personal interest. For example, even before you enter for a job interview, the boss already know your bio-data through MySpace. There is nothing much a user can restrict the moment he post something on the applications. A little part of you wants to share this piece of information to others while another part of you hopes not everyone is looking at it. The bottom-line is the virtual world is unlike the real world, your privacy as a person is very much hang on a thin line even though applications like Facebook allows you to choose people you allow to view, for that particular content. The crucial question that is at the back of every member’s head is, how are we being followed.
Conclusion
In conclusion, knowing that different people have different identity online in comparison to the real world, and some other users out there maybe virtually stalking your web post, the degree of privacy you would want to receive and the content you wish to make private, very much depends on how much sharing and connection you wish to establish with other users. In the virtual world so complex and ambiguous, how much of sharing would one be able to review and how much connection do you want to establish with others?
The bottom-line is that every user needs to know how to moderate each different circumstance. Valid judgements and concise decision like those you would make in the real world situation still very much applies to the virtual world. After all, we are still communicating with fellow humans through a different medium. Basic instincts about one another still very much applies in this context.
Lastly, as we seek to improve our social computing environment, we have to consider these issues discussed in the article and apply it to new applications to better serve the online community in creating a better virtual culture.
References
Acquisti, Gross (2005) ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES): Information Relevation and Privacy in Online Social Networks (The Facebook case).
URL : http://72.14.235.132/search?q=cache:APZ0BgjsFDsJ:www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/papers/privacy-facebook-gross-acquisti.pdf+privacy+and+online+stalking&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk
Donath (1996) Prepared for: Kollock, P. and Smith M. (eds). Communities in Cyberspace: Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community.
URL : http://smg.media.mit.edu/People/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html
Parameswaran, Whinston (2007) Communication of Association for Information Systems:Social Computing: An Overview.
URL : http://72.14.235.132/search?q=cache:eNuuUsvMUgMJ:cism.mccombs.utexas.edu/data/papers/Parameswaran_Social%2520Computing_CAIS07.pdf+social+computing:+an+overview&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au&client=firefox-a
Social Computing Group (1998) IBM Research:Research Babble.
URL : http://www.research.ibm.com/SocialComputing/
Social Mobile Computing Tools
S41531404 Sean Tan Soon Yee
Introduction
This article is about the perception of the writer’s views on Virtual versus Reality through the usage social and mobile computing tools. In this article, there will be reviews on the background of the different kinds of social mobile tools being outlined like, Delicious, Twitter, Last.FM, Blogger, Flickr, FriendFeed and Yahoo!pipes. The focus of this article will be the differences of the virtual world people indulge in, using these applications to share, connect and communicate, with the actual world we live in. We will look into human behaviour in both the different worlds and the sort of lifestyle it affects. This piece also touches on the level of privacy a user can control, and the sort of perception he wants to project through the medium of these social computing tools. Lastly, the basic topic of how people share and connect in these tools and application will also be touched on through this review and reflection.
Background
Social Computing is a collection of technologies driving an evolution on the web. It illustrates the fundamental shifts in communication, computing, collaboration, and commerce brought about by this trend. A large number of new applications and services that facilitate collective action and social interaction online with exchange of multimedia information and evolution of aggregate knowledge is represented in this article. Many online networks have grown significantly, which affect the users lifestyle dramatically. Social Computing shifts computing to the edges of the network, and empower individual users to manifest their creativity, engage in social interaction, contribute their expertise, share content, collectively build new tools and disseminate information. The types of tools used are changing, and computing is moving to a more network-centric, less desktop-bound stage. It transform the way individuals process and interact with information, rendering a more dynamic and mobile information domain centered on individuals who interact through wide variety of tools like those to be mentioned below. (Parameswaran and Whinston, 2007)
Delicious
Delicious is a social bookmarking tool. It is a simply to use interface since 2003. It has a strong community and rich layer of content, making it good for a new user. The one click bookmarking allows users to save their bookmarks and search through them, add friends and browse through their bookmarks, or even search through popular and newly added websites added by the large community of users. Delicious is a powerful tool for sharing content with other users.
The good thing about Delicious is that it imports bookmarks from your web browser. It is also able to tag pages according to topics and let you share your bookmarks with other users. It is simple to use and can save up to 5MB of content. However, the disadvantage would be it does not detect broken links or merge the similar tags. There is also no simple option to delete multiple bookmarks at once. There should also be a small preview of the page being bookmarked so it will enable the user to decide whether or not to view the site.
In my personal opinion, I think Delicious is a fantastic way to share interesting sites to people in and out of my network. I also feel that it provides me a very good way to see what my friends and other people are looking at. For instance, if I am bored and what to check out new and interesting sites or if I am researching on the same topic as my friend, I can look at what he has checked up so far for ideas on Delicious. However, the only problem I think was annoying about delicious is that I have to bookmark my sites on Delicious and my browser. The idea of redundancy and duplication is very much on my mind when I am introduced to Delicious. And because I have to share my bookmarks, I selectively choose what to present on Delicious as a protection to my personal privacy.
Twitter is a social messaging utility based on a question: “ What are you doing?” It is a mix of instant messaging, email, Facebook and text messaging. It is basically a network of users following one another. You have 140 characters of text to update, and as soon as you upload your message, the people following you can immediately see what you are up to. It is a social networking and microblogging tool where you can understand people through quick takes such as “ I hate assignments”.
The pros about Twitter is it is lightweight posting compared to blogging. And it summarises your feeling or thoughts at that moment. It very much allows you to view the updates of people you are following at a glance. The cons in Twitter would be it is a rather simple tool and besides updating your thoughts, there is pretty much nothing you can do on it. It will be Twitter’s challenging to make it more interesting.
My personal take from Twitter is that I enjoy just posting random thoughts and feeling as and when I like to allow people following me or in my network to know what is happening in my life. It is a good way to keep people connected, especially if you have not been in touch with the person for sometime. However, I felt that because the posts are so general, you might not understand the topic you are following, as they can be very specific in terms of knowledge. For example, “ I love my 180SX”, not everyone would understand it is about a car. This is the disadvantage of microblogging as compared to blogging. As mentioned earlier, I think Twitter needs to have more functionality, because I could just use Facebook to microblog its very much the same thing as Twitter.
Last.FM
Last.FM is a UK-based music player for personalised radio. Started in 2002, Last.FM is good for people who enjoy listening to music and wants to discover new tracks. It is a breakaway from regular radio. The software can track what a user listens on iTunes, their iPod, similar players and allowing it to create a playlist based on your musical taste. Users can also custom their own profile, make their own radio station based on what they listen to and add friends to listen to their stations to find new music. This way, people can share music and exchange their different taste.
The good thing about Last.FM is that it has a huge storage of music and is a very good player. It has good quality music and you can make it your default player. It also allows networking with other users and it makes choices for user input simple and much easier. The bad thing is it monitors user behaviour, and your listening choices are restricted.
I personally feel that Last.FM makes a very good player other than my iTunes. It also allows me to come upon new tracks or albums through similar artist of music. Although the tool is useful to me, I find a few flaws with it like the navigation of the site can be indirect and take you all about. Streaming the radio can be slow at times and taking up quite a bit of Internet quota as compared to just listening to my iTunes. I also cannot listen to my favourite track over and again in Last.FM. I feel these are some of the improvements that can be made to the music tool.
Blogger
Blogger is probably the largest online blogging tool with 1.5 million users. Google recently acquired it in 2002 turning it into a full-featured blog platform. It very much resembles WordPress, with the ability to modify templates, drop in external RSS feeds, customise CSS, post photos, send post to email address, post entries, comment, and present them in a simple interface. Blogger provides a free platform for users to broadcast themselves and write about any subject and share part of them to the world via the widely used web.
The amazing part of Blogger is that it provides a simple interface for people to edit instead of using HTML. It is simple to use with drag and drop editors, and it is able to host your own domain name. The down side of Blogger is that it does not allow simultaneous writers editing the post and does not allow a particular post to be made private.
With my experience using Blogger to post my blog, I find it very simple to use with the text editors like font type, size, bold and italic functions, URL links, uploading of pictures and all. With the ability to edit the post or templates in HTML, it gives advance users more of an option to customize their blog too. Blogger allows different style of blogging to take place, whether its word entries or photo blogs, depending on the user’s preference. Blogger is like my online journal, allowing me to broadcast my thoughts and show pieces of my life. Blogger bring people who do not know me well enough closer to understanding me, and people close to me to know what is happening in my life. The only problem I have with Blogger is that it does not allow me to restrict the people viewing my blog and making my entries private to protect my privacy and forces me to blog with caution.
Flickr
Flickr is a place where people upload and share their photography. You can create photo albums for others to browse, view the pictures as a slideshow, personalise your profile and create groups. Flickr has a public database of pictures sorted into categories and unlimited storage spaces for users to upload their photos. Flickr allows people to share photos and network through common interest in photography. Comments on photos like the user know what people think of their pictures. The attractive interface using thumbnails and the ability to navigate around those images makes Flickr a very good tool for an online photo gallery.
The pros of Flickr are the option of securing your photos, tagging, commenting, and organising them in the application. Flickr can also be used to incorporate into blogs and websites. It also provides privacy by making some or your entire pictures private. The cons of Flickr are that it has an upload limit of 20MB/mo, so you cannot upload large images and they would automatically resize it for you.
In my opinion, I think Flickr is a fantastic site to share your photography and works. It not only acts as a database to store your images, it also allows you to showcase them in a form of a mini gallery for people to view, comment and tag them. For users who are into photography, it is a very useful tool as these comments can help in your skill of taking pictures and it adds more perspective and approach to your work. I can also use Flickr to search for images and people with common interest. The only thing I dislike about this photo-sharing tool is that people may just grab your picture off the site without you knowing and this brings me to the issue of copyright of works. If Flickr allows users to personalise the outlook of their photostream, we can use it as a platform for our portfolio or online gallery, a point Flickr can improve for the better.
FriendFeed
FriendFeed is an application that aims at enhancing sociability among people by sharing online content. It allows members to remain up to date about websites, blogs, photos, videos and music shared by friends. The site automatically imports common materials across the web when the users tell the feed the network its information belongs to. One of the users materials would be sent as part of the feed to the rest of the members in the group. It does not require the need of communicating the links among friends. Basically, the concept of FriendFeed is to add accounts across different social networking services, so friends can follow what you are doing.
The main benefit of FriendFeed is it strings together all your social networking sites and gives you a shot of what is happening on Twitter, Flickr, Delicious at a glance if you have no time to be surfing all of them. It also has Rooms to enable discussion either in terms of public or private. Most application let you build network within that network but FriendFeed allows networking outside of itself. The only imperfection with FriendFeed is the layout could be more distinct to differentiate the different feeds are it can get quite messy when viewed as a whole.
My take on FriendFeed will be it is a very good aggregator that incorporates all my social sites together and view at as a whole. I can also view what my friends are up to in the fastest way possible. However, I am also afraid as a user to be virtual stalk by people whom I do not know and it presents my information readily available to anyone.
Yahoo!pipes
Yahoo!pipes is a hosted service that allows you to remix RSS feeds and create a new data mashup in a visual programming environment. You can either create a new pipe, browse through existing ones or even cone a pipe to make your own adjustments. Yahoo!pipes provides drag and drop editor that allows you to connect Internet data source, process them and redirect the output.
The advantage of Yahoo!pipes is that it allows all your site with RSS feed to be centrally stored together, and it provide you with a single RSS feed. It also allows you to browse other pipes, discuss and even documentation on the pipes. However, the problem with pipes is that it always seems to have errors and bugs. Due to the fact you have to copy the RSS feed of other sites, it creates a lot of problems and the connection always seem to break somehow.
In my opinion, I think Yahoo!pipes is a good tool to remix popular feeds without having to code, but the amount of error that occurs while using it is frustrating. The connection does not seem to always work between the feeds and it can prove to be a point to improve.
Focus
This article will discuss the human behaviour in the virtual world of social networking tools and the actual behaviour they take on in their daily lives. It will compare the different approach people take to shape an image or perception they want to project, in contrast to their actual character and lifestyle.
Human are fundamentally social creature. From young we orient to other people, develop abilities to interact with one another through expression, gesture, spoken and written language. However, when we move from face to face interaction to digitally mediated interaction, everything changes. The subtle social cues we use in our real world interaction are absent. In the digital world, we are socially blind and we communicate differently. Things take required little effort in face-to-face settings like noticing someone’s behaviour, requires a lot of effort in the online setting. (IBM Research Social Computing Group, 1998)
Reflection
This article will touch on two questions to explore the topic of Virtual versus Reality:
1. Virtual Identity and Social Perception; who do we want to be?
2. Privacy and Online Stalking; how are we being followed?
Virtual Identity and Social Perception; who do we want to be?
Social networking websites have been so popular worldwide that it has became part of most people’s lives. With networking tools mentioned previously in the background, many users are hooked on to their computers for hours checking out what is happening to people’s life, updating their profiles and even sharing content and information to one another. It has became a daily habit that these people will browse through even if it is for a couple of minutes to check through what is happening in the online community they are participating in. Since we understand that the virtual world is evolving into a stand-alone dimension itself, we cannot ignore the fact that people’s behaviour in this new world they participate in is ever changing as well.
Identity plays a key role in virtual communities. In the disembodied world of virtual community, identity is also ambiguous. Do virtual personas inherit the qualities –and responsibilities – of their creators? For assessing the reliability of information and trustworthiness of a confidant, identity is essential. And care of one’s identity, one’s reputation, is fundamental to the formation of community. Identity cues are sparse in the virtual world, but not non-existent. Virtual reputations are established and impugned. ( Donath, 1996)
As a member of the online community, we create profile so people will know what kind of person we are. We do so by upload our pictures, write about ourselves and many other different way to express as much as we would to the virtual friends around us. However, are we really the identical people we project ourselves to be online? How much of the information we give about ourselves are true and not what we perceive or wished to be perceived as? There are many different ways to manipulate the way we want people to look at us. For example, one could edit his photographs and upload it one Flickr or Facebook so people would think he or she looks cool or his or her photography skills are fantastic. One can also grab attention from posting entries on blogs or Twitter by saying things that did not actually happened. One can also add music he do not listen to in Last.FM because he wish to be in the same group as his friends who love rock and be seen as a guy who likes rocker vibes. There are many way people can pretend to be what they what to be in front of others, so as to be accepted by the community or even gain popularity out of it. I am not assuming everyone is pretentious in the online community or ever piece of information you see for a particular person is false and you have to be cautious. Whether it is harmful or just plain fascination piece of content you receive on the other end, you have to know that in the virtual world, it is very much unlike the world we live in, where people cannot escape from being themselves.
The virtual world provides a space for people to behave differently from what they are in real live, attract more friends through different personality and even provide an escape from the harsh facts of life. The question to ask yourself at the end of it is, what do you want to be?
Privacy and Online Stalking; how are we being followed?
The previous section talks about virtual identity and perception over the online community. Having such identity could lead to popularity among the community and in turn result in other people virtually stalking you. Be it that you are a famous Blogger or even someone’s previous girlfriend. Somebody out there using a social computing tool can be stalking you online. It may not be as serious as it will be if someone literally stalks you home from work, but having people whom you may or may not know constantly checking out your profile or updates can be quite scary as well. You may come to find out if the person is stalking your profile when random people or friends come up to you and say, “ I heard you went to Europe lately, saw the pictures on Flickr” or “ Try to cheer up, it not the end of the world, I saw your Twitter post” and even “ You like The Killers too? I saw your library on Last.FM”. It is amazing how people can follow your life so closely when you do not even realise it, it may not be harmful but it brings about the issue of personal privacy.
The study of Facebook users shows the implication on personal privacy quoted below. “It would appear that the population of Facebook users we have studied is, by large, quite oblivious, unconcerned, or just pragmatic about their personal privacy. Personal data is generously provided and limiting privacy preferences are sparingly used. Due to the variety and richness of personal information disclosed in Facebook profiles, their visibility, their public linkages to the members’ real identities, and the scope of the network, users may put themselves at risk for a variety of attacks on their physical and online persona.
Some of these risks are common also in other online social networks, while some are specific to the Facebook. “ (Gross and Acquisti, 2005)
Personal online privacy is very much related to online stalking. No matter how much you set your private setting to, the user cannot control the amount of other information he is risking putting up onto the web through social sites. People can still virtually stalk you through your photo albums, your microblogs and even your favourite bookmarks. Be it intentional or people are just checking you out for personal interest. For example, even before you enter for a job interview, the boss already know your bio-data through MySpace. There is nothing much a user can restrict the moment he post something on the applications. A little part of you wants to share this piece of information to others while another part of you hopes not everyone is looking at it. The bottom-line is the virtual world is unlike the real world, your privacy as a person is very much hang on a thin line even though applications like Facebook allows you to choose people you allow to view, for that particular content. The crucial question that is at the back of every member’s head is, how are we being followed.
Conclusion
In conclusion, knowing that different people have different identity online in comparison to the real world, and some other users out there maybe virtually stalking your web post, the degree of privacy you would want to receive and the content you wish to make private, very much depends on how much sharing and connection you wish to establish with other users. In the virtual world so complex and ambiguous, how much of sharing would one be able to review and how much connection do you want to establish with others?
The bottom-line is that every user needs to know how to moderate each different circumstance. Valid judgements and concise decision like those you would make in the real world situation still very much applies to the virtual world. After all, we are still communicating with fellow humans through a different medium. Basic instincts about one another still very much applies in this context.
Lastly, as we seek to improve our social computing environment, we have to consider these issues discussed in the article and apply it to new applications to better serve the online community in creating a better virtual culture.
References
Acquisti, Gross (2005) ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES): Information Relevation and Privacy in Online Social Networks (The Facebook case).
URL : http://72.14.235.132/search?q=cache:APZ0BgjsFDsJ:www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/papers/privacy-facebook-gross-acquisti.pdf+privacy+and+online+stalking&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk
Donath (1996) Prepared for: Kollock, P. and Smith M. (eds). Communities in Cyberspace: Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community.
URL : http://smg.media.mit.edu/People/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html
Parameswaran, Whinston (2007) Communication of Association for Information Systems:Social Computing: An Overview.
URL : http://72.14.235.132/search?q=cache:eNuuUsvMUgMJ:cism.mccombs.utexas.edu/data/papers/Parameswaran_Social%2520Computing_CAIS07.pdf+social+computing:+an+overview&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au&client=firefox-a
Social Computing Group (1998) IBM Research:Research Babble.
URL : http://www.research.ibm.com/SocialComputing/
2 comments:
This is a good informative post. I learned a lot of things from reading it. A suggestion, if you use firefox you can add a plug-in which will connect to delicious (with this you shouldn't need to duplicate your bookmarks). If you don't use firefox, you should ;).
Your first question of the virtual world vs reality provides many examples of pretentiousness I have seen before (maybe even done). I believe the majority of people do use these deceptions to "attract more friends", but interestingly I have seen instances of online personas with the sole purpose to "attract more enemies".
Privacy is obviously a large issue with these services, but as you said it is up to the user's common sense to make sure they protect their important information.
I agree with what you said about delicious. It's great that you can use your bookmarks on any computer, but It's too clunky to be useful. I hate the idea of having to login to access my bookmarks. Aren't we logging in too many times on the uq computers already.
You mentioned photographers using flikr, this made me think about a site called deviant art where many photographers post there works as well as having the site provide options for selling prints or larger resolution digital copies.
If someone wants to download a protected copy on deviant art, it will be watermarked with the owner's name. I think this is something flikr could employ to protect people's photos.
Post a Comment