You Two Know Each Other? (An essay on social navigation within social networking applications)

Social networking applications on the Web serve two purposes: creating and viewing a certain kind of content, and interacting socially with the people who use or provide the content. But could they really be useful to someone like myself - an apprehensive, cloistered young man with little real-life social contacts and plenty of hesitations about meeting strangers? How useful and effective are these applications at expanding one's social network?

In this post, I shall reflect upon my brief introductory interactions with three such applications, Flickr, Delicious, and Twitter, and, with regards to informing the design and construction of a social networking application of my own, analyse what mechanisms such web applications most need to be able to provide in order to best facilitate social navigation and exploration.

Background & Focus

For each of these social networking applications, their complete functionality can be split into two categories –Personal Functionality (that is, the basic, prima facie purpose of the application which benefits the users individually) and Social Functionality (that is, that functionality which facilitates social interaction and discovery based on how other people use the Personal Functionality.) Personal Functionality typically revolves around perusal or submission of a certain type of content, be it images, hyperlinks, videos, or simple textual messages. Social Functionality typically includes such features as metadata – the ability to assign data to submitted content which is used to organise or connect like or unlike content – profiles – personal descriptions of the users which other users can access - feedback – the ability of users to respond to other users’ content, be it in the form of text comments or the posting of derivative content – subscription – the ability to track another user’s content and follow it as it updates - and/or messaging – the ability to directly contact a particular user of the application, in much the same manner as an email, or a ‘private message’ in a web forum.

I shall now introduce these applications in terms of these two levels of functionality, and of what particular Social Functionality features they provide.

In the case of Flickr, its Personal Functionality is image and photo hosting - providing free web space for the user’s photos, artwork and graphics, which can be accessed from anywhere on the web. In this respect, it is similar to the non-social image-hosting website ImageShack. Flickr’s Social Functionality is quite wide – it includes metadata in the form of tags, feedback in the form of comments, subscription in the form of ‘Favourites’, profiles, and messaging.

Delicious is primarily an online bookmarking service, whereby its users create personal lists of web bookmarks. Its Social Functionality includes metadata (in both the descriptions of bookmarks and the tags one can assign to them), messaging (in the form of sending a bookmark to another user) and subscription to the bookmark lists of other users (referred to as one’s ‘Network’).

Twitter presents itself as an omnipresent diary that you can add to (in 140-character ‘micro-blog’ posts) at any point during your daily life, and that any other web user can peruse and follow. While this primary functionality in and of itself has social applications (such as using it to contact friends or fans, or broadcast one self’s social availability at the moment) I shall also focus upon the Social Functionality that is complementary to the primary functionality. The most prominent of these is subscription (following many other users’ accounts simultaneously) and feedback (writing a post in direct response to another user’s, and said response automatically linking back to the precursor post) but also includes messaging (in the form of private entries between two users), and a rudimentary form of metadata (in the form of ‘hashcode’ tags embedded in the message itself.)

So, having introduced these applications, I shall now review and reflect upon how well these social applications encouraged or assisted me in learning more about other people. While I only experienced four weeks of inconsistent interaction with the applications, I feel that my findings and experiences are sufficient to reach a meaningful conclusion. I will address these three questions:

• How well do these applications communicate their intended socially beneficial usage to the user?

• How effective were these social applications at helping me meet and learn about people?

And, in conclusion:

• What does a social application most need in order to best facilitate social exploration?

Let’s proceed to the first of these questions.

How well do these applications communicate their intended means of social interaction to the user?

With the functionality of social networking applications split between providing the primary service and facilitating social interaction within its users, it is entirely plausible for a user such as myself, unfamiliar with the applications, to grasp and utilise the primary service to my satisfaction without noticing or comprehending the Social Functionality resting above it. How, then, do the applications and their interfaces assist the new user in embracing the social aspects of the software?

Flickr’s interface is, from my experience, quite encouraging. When setting up an account on Flickr, I was presented with a checklist of tasks to fulfil. The first and third of these – “Personalise your profile” and “Find your friends on Flickr”- are entirely related to Flickr’s Social Functionality, and making my account visible to others. Furthermore, a user’s ‘welcome page’ sufficiently emphasis on its two primary social functions: contacts (subscription to other users’ accounts), and groups (a function that lets one subscribe and provide feedback to a common subset of users).

Given how communication-based Twitter’s Personal Functionality is, its Social Functionality – in particular, its subscription features - is very prominently displayed within it. The user is always aware of how many other users are subscribed to their account, how many users they are subscribed to, and what the most recent posts of those to whom the user is subscribed have been.

Somewhat less successful was my initial experience with Delicious. As mentioned above, the Personal Functionality of Delicious involves creating bookmarks. It took many days of using it for me to gradually realise that Delicious’s conception of a bookmark differs from my own preconception. Having used them in web browsers for most of my online life, I had developed the conception of a bookmark as a web location saved simply because you want to return to it and won’t be able to remember it otherwise. Thus, I refrained from including websites that I would visit on a daily basis, or that I had memorised the URL for.

Delicious’s conception, however, is that of a bookmark being a ‘vote’ for a website – a declaration to the world that you feel that this website is special or worthwhile. It is through these ‘votes’ and selections that the popularity of a particular website can be measured, and the interests of a particular user are, through the user’s bookmark selections, revealed to other Delicious users. (Consider, for instance, how many times its users have bookmarked Google.com as a Delicious bookmark – over 34,000, and over 39 times just on the day of April 2, 2009.¹ Clearly, the intention for making such a bookmark is not as a memory aide.)

This is not, in and of itself, incompatible with my aforementioned preconception, but by restricting my bookmark choices to those which I did not visit regularly or were particularly well-known enough that I would effortlessly remember, my Delicious account’s outward presentation of myself was skewed in favour of sites that I have only a momentary or transitory interest in, and one of Delicious’s Social Functionality features – showing how popular one’s website interests are with the rest of the user base – was underutilised with regards to my actual interests. Some may interpret this as an error in Delicious’s choice of metaphor for its content (it is, if one refers to the guidelines of Kim Madsen, not building upon a user’s pre-existing metaphor, but modifying it²) and that its term ‘bookmark’ should perhaps have been substituted for the term ‘favourite’ used by Microsoft Internet Explorer – which has similar but subtly different connotations. Personally speaking, I feel that this discrepancy of assumption is narrow enough that a mere change of emphasis on the part of Delicious’s interface (emphasising bookmarks as signifiers of personal taste) can bridge it.

How effective were these social applications at helping me meet and learn about people?

Given that I was eventually able to understand how each application facilitated social interaction, how effective were the applications, in the weeks in which I used them, in fostering social exploration?

The most interesting and telling results came from my Twitter use. Being, as previously described, a shy, cloistered fellow with few real-life contacts, I was hesitant to search for any arbitrary Twitter account without some form of external validation for that choice. That being said, I was able to discover the Twitter feeds of a few very minor Internet celebrities that I personally respect. From there, I found myself naturally led to the Twitter accounts of those people’s friends, who were validated in my eyes not because of their being passively listed in that person’s Following list, but because the person was actively conversing with that friend. I found several different Twitter accounts, many of which I decided to follow since then.

This, then, reveals what I consider to be the most significant factor in a social application’s encouragement of social navigation – its ability to allow users to navigate relationships between other users, as those relationships manifest in the form of interactions. Steward Butterfield once defined social software as software which lets people interact with each other using the mechanisms of Identity, Presence, Relationships, Conversations and Groups³. From my experiences, I have come to the conclusion that while each of these mechanisms allows a limited degree of social interaction, it is through a combination of Relationships and Conversations that users can most easily engage in social navigation. Without conversations, subscriptions between users aren’t indicative of active, socially significant relationships.

My experiences with the remaining two applications serve to demonstrate how without both of these mechanisms, social interaction is rendered comparatively ineffective.

Flickr possesses, across all of its functionality, Identity, Groups, Conversations and Relationships. However, outside of comment threads for each individual image, its conversations happen exclusively within groups and private messages, and don’t necessarily highlight the actual relationships between users at all. You might wonder why conversations within Flickr groups are less socially effective than conversations within relationships. In my experience, I found Flickr groups to be somewhat impersonal collective entities of individuals, who are linked by a common interest or theme but not necessarily a significant relationship to one another. They are, ultimately, better at grouping similar content rather than similar people.

And finally, Delicious is slightly more receptive to the mechanism of Relationships – displaying for each user a more informative ‘Network’ list of subscriptions and mutual subscriptions – but has very little potential for communication between users, beyond exchanging bookmarks. It is thus more likely (and perhaps expected) that a Delicious user will find other users outside of the application rather than within it.

So, what does a social application most need in order to best facilitate social exploration?

What I found from this study of social applications is that social networks are defined by the connections between individuals, and the strength, immediacy and reciprocality of those connections. This, then, means that the most important aspect of a social application's functionality, with regards to social interaction, is its ability to let users converse with each other and form tangible relationships with each other, with each of those abilities serving to strengthen the other. While an application can rise to prominence and popularity on the strength of its content hosting functionality alone, whether or not it will also foster a social sphere depends on its ability to support relationships and conversations.

But, to finish on a personal note, while even the most effective of these applications indeed managed to bring me closer to other people, it is my opinion that they still can’t quite rival genuine, unfiltered human interaction – message boards and web forums.

1. ‘Everyone’s bookmarks for “Google” on Delicious’ ,http://delicious.com/url/6ab016b2dad7ba49a992ba0213a91cf8 Accessed 3 April 2009.

2. Madson, K. 1994, “A guide to metaphorical design”, Communications of the ACM,
Volume 37 , Issue 12. pp57-62.

3. Butterfield, S. sylloge, http://www.sylloge.com/personal/2003_03_01_s.html#91273866 Accessed 3 April 2009.

‘Social networking Site’ and how I use them

Introduction

When I knew that I will be required to sign up for several social networking sites for Social and Mobile Computing Course, I was really excited. Mainly because I used to like social networking sites, or I should say, addicted to them. It was friendster that introduces me to the social networking hype. I even joined others social networking sites shortly after that. Then as my university assignments, work and other real life activities started to increased, my activities on them decreased. In addition, those sites being a lot less interesting to me, to the point that I see them only as a waste of time and actually feel guilty if I spent my free time for them because it does not serve the my initial purpose of using them anymore.

Therefore I though, this is a good opportunity to start using them again, at least I have enough reason and less guilt to start wasting my time on social networking sites again. I also would like to know what improvements and changes offered by current sites have to offer. This article will outline my experience with the several social networking sites and as the title said how I use them.

Background

This section contains brief descriptions for social networking websites that I have joined in the beginning of the Social and Mobile Computing course.
Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site, is generally a place to share the links to the websites that you interested in with other people. Those links can be described using tags. You can also view other people bookmarked sites and browse it using the tags.
Flickr, a photo sharing site. It is a site for people to upload and share their photo collections. Users can categorised their photo as well as give them tag to describe them, in addition they can also marked the location where the photo was taken [1]. Other users can browse their photos using the mentioned descriptor.
Google Calendar is a solid online calendar application. Users can add events into their calendar by using the site as well as importing the events from other calendar application, on the social aspect users can create public events, invite people and get comments from them. In addition it offers personalisation to the users, enabling them to change the look and feel of the calendar [2].
Facebook, is a social networking website with a lot of promising features. You can send messages to your friend using wall or messages them, share your picture albums and also videos with them, status and news feed to keep your friends updated with your activities and other functions such as pokes and gifts [3]. It also has the application framework, which allows developers to create custom application for facebook to be used by the users.
Last.FM is a music-based social networking website. Last.fm profile allows the users to share the song that they have been listening to with other users. Last.fm then gives the users recommendations based to logged song list, other users can also give recommendations. Other functions such as forming a group based on their interest as well as events which allows users to get notified if events matched their music taste are coming, they can also marked themselves as attendance of the event [4].

Focus

This article will focus on my opinion of the function of the social networking sites mentioned above and how I interact with them. That includes what functionalities that I use and whether I use the social context from the websites and also whether it serves the purpose that I seek from them or my initial thought towards them. Some of the good functions and the drawbacks will be included in order to delivers the main focus of this article.

Reflection

After using the social networking sites for quite some time, I divided them into two categories based on how I use them. First is the ‘good functionality’ websites, they are the ones that offer steady and useful function but I do not really use the social aspect out of it. Del.icio.us, Flickr and Google Calendar fall into this category. Second is the ‘social networking’ websites, they are the ones that I use because of the social context that they offer, such as facebook and last.fm.

Del.icio.us offers quite an interesting and useful service, but I am not really keen to share my bookmark with many people, I do not really want people to know what sites that I am interested in. It is good that I can mark my bookmark to a private, so rather than sharing my bookmark I mainly use it to store my favourite websites then use it a portable bookmark. I have more than one computer and I spend large amount of my time either in the office or campus as well, so it is good to have my bookmarked sites in Del.icio.us. So despite It is a social bookmarking service, I am not using the social part of it to the fullest. Except browsing other people bookmark using the tags that they are given, which is really useful.

I use Flickr to upload pictures to be used on another sites, for example blog, facebook or posting pictures in forum. It is relatively easy to upload pictures into flickr, they have flickr uploader and I can also use it to upload my pictures from iphoto. Because there is nothing artistic with the pictures that I have taken, I do not feel the need to show them off into the world. I used to like drawing pictures and I would love to share my drawings with other people with the same hobby and hear their opinion about my works. So If only I am into photography, Flickr is a really nice social networking site.

Google Calendar despite having a good functionally the social aspect does not appeal to me. The reason being people that are interested in my schedule or the ones that I need to inform of my schedule does not use Google Calendar nor spend the time mostly in front of the computer. Just like Del.icio.us I ended up using it for personal use. I always use ICal as my calendar application, and google calendar offer most, or even more, of the functionality from ICal that I use. I see it as portable ICal. I can export my schedule from ICal to Google Calendar not the other way around. Therefore I do not see it as a replacement for ICal, because I need to synchronise ICal with other calendar in my other gadgets as well.

Facebook offers good and promising social functions for me to use. I signed up because some of my friends that study overseas like myself use it quite often. I was not really interested on it because I was already using friendster, that at that time already not as enjoyable to me as it did and became slowly neglected. I saw Facebook as friendster alternative with better layout and less unappealing users. When I started to really using it in oppose of having an idle account only, and I have to admit it was fun. I found my high school friends and even my elementary school friends there.

Getting touch with old friends, sending messages and know how they are doing and what they up to are the main purpose for me to use facebook. I used to send wall and messages quite often, that was when my friends still use it as the main interaction on Facebook. But my enjoyment in using the facebook start to went downhill after the start of the application era. At first I get hundreds of request for using the application, less that half of them interest me, but those request is not that annoying because I can just reject or ignore it. The fact that rather than using facebook as a communication tools, for most people at my friends list, facebook transforms into online games to fill up their free time to the point that If I do not add the application into my profile I have less interaction with them. Even the wall that was a place to exchange messages, transformed into publicly viewable forward emails, those email you got in your inbox which is a forward from someone then the receiver send it to other group of people and it continues, with all the useless messages and images posted. Therefore I find facebook slowly become less appealing to me as the users do not really use it as social networking websites anymore.

Last.fm is other social networking sites that I truly use the social side of it. I was always interested to sign up on Last.fm but have not got the chance to explore it. The concept of music-based community is really interesting to me. I imagine I can finally find people with similar taste of music then get recommendation of other music that I probably interested in as well. It was not really enjoyable the first time I joined, that is before the songs on my play list scrobbled. As I leave my computer on for couple days just for letting last.fm to get my taste of music from the scrobbled songs, things start to get interesting. The recommendation function which makes me interested in the website truly delivers what I wanted to get. I do not listen to radio that often anymore because I do not like half of the song get played anyway, so it is a nice way to know what other music I might like and listen to them. I can also find the videos from the artist that I like on last.fm, I usually search for them through youtube which sometimes showing the fan made videos instead, although marked as official by the uploader. Besides that, there is also neighbours users, you can see their profile and find out what other artist that people who listed to the same music taste with you.

For me, last.fm have a ‘show off’ factor into it, which in this case is not a bad thing. If you want to show off your music taste, the concerts that you have been going into or if you want to be the one that most listened to the songs for particular artist, last.fm is a nice website to get it. You can also show your taste of music with application for other websites [5]. The good thing about Last.fm is that it offers fewer holes for the users to abused them and transform it into personalisation nightmare. Although, you cannot avoid raging fan defending their favourite artist or the ones that feel the need to say a bad things about certain artist just to make the fan upset. Last.fm offers different thing from the social networking sites that I have joined such as facebook, friendster or my space, mainly because there is a thing that keep me interested in using it, which is music.

Conclusion

The enjoyment of using Social Networking Sites will be different for all people. It is based on their personality, preferences as well as security concern. For myself, I want to use Social Networking Sites to communicate with old friends or find people with the same interest as myself. There are things that I would like to maintain for myself thus make the social context from some sites unappealing to me. In addition to that, how people interact with these sites are varies as well which for some add into negative sides. The disappointing acts from other users in the social networking sites is one of the main reason for me to dislike a social networking site.

Reference

[1] http://www.flickr.com/tour/
[2] http://www.google.com/intl/en-GB/googlecalendar/tour.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_features
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last.fm
[5] http://build.last.fm/

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Aristyaningtyas Kusumo