An Addictive Reflection

Douglas Wilson - s4121621

Cigarettes, alcohol, chocolate, they're all addictive, and we know why they are. But what about social networking sites on the Internet such as Facebook or Twitter? These two applications are addictive, as I discovered when my family came into my room the other day, telling me “You've had enough of Facebook and that annoying 'bird' website that keeps texting your phone for today, how about you come outside.” At which I replied, in my flat toned voice, “Just a few more hours”. At this point a suddenly came to the realisation that yes, I am addicted to Facebook and Twitter.

OK just to clear this up, this actually never happened, but you can imagine if it did. The way I really know I'm addicted is when I go on the sites when ever I sit down at a computer. Whenever I see someone on the pages I go on too. And when I am at home, sitting down at my computer I automatically load up the pages. I usually just keep Facebook running in the background, I feel naked if its not there, I use it that much.

So, is this a bad thing? Is it a bad thing that I want to know what my friends (and people I really don't know that well) are getting up too? That may sound a little creepy, but I assure you my intentions are entirely honorable.

Anyway... In this review I'm going to be talking about what makes the Social Networking sites on the Internet addictive, and just to clear my conscious, is this a bad thing.

Facebook

Launched on the 4^th of February, 2004, Facebook is now one of the largest social networking sites available to the general public. Originally this wasn't the case. Created by a Harvard University student called Mark Zuckerberg, the site was only available to students at his University. It then eventually became access able to all Uni students and then finally everyone over the age of thirteen. Facebook now has sixty four million active users and has an average of fourteen million pictures uploaded daily. So what is all this fuss about? What makes Facebook so popular? Well the main reason is that it lets you keep track on your friends and that your able to communicate with them, much like a email account, but the messages tend to be more conversational then the typical email. Facebook, is a substitute for the instant messaging system MSN or AIM. If the users friend is not on MSN then they would send a message through Facebook that is a very relaxed writing style, much like they would be talking face to face. This message can stay on their page forever, much like an email can. So its a fun and easy substitute for MSN, so what? I hear you say. Facebook has an endless list of applications that can be added to the users site. These applications include, likeness tests, movie quizzes, Jetman, Graffiti, Super Poke and my personal favourite Hobo wars. Each program lets the user interact in someway with one of his friends, weather it be competing with each other; seeing who gets the highest score or a certain way of communicating, for example you can poke someone until your fingers bleed, or even throw the odd sheep at someone. Each program is seemingly pointless but never the less fun, and that's what Facebook is all about.

Twitter

Having never heard of twitter since starting Comp3505 I was a little unsure as to what it was all about. So lets take a look at the deep and dark mysteries that befuddle us all, that is the mighty Twitter. Launched in July 13, 2006 by the start-up company Obvious, LLC. Twitter is an online social networking system that allows the users to send updates of what they are doing to all of their friends. Here is a quote from the site itself explaining what it is.

“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

To put it bluntly Wikipedia describes it as a Micro-Blogging service. So what twitter requires of its users is to post a small comment on what they are doing at that exact time. Allowing everybody else to see, as long as they are following your feed. This is the big daddy of stalking services. Now you may think, people cant say what their doing at that exact moment, because surely all they could say is 'cdougw – using a social networking site'. But the person writes 'walking the dog' they really are not walking the do

g, because to twitter requires you to be on a computer. Unfortunately for the human race it is now possible to be walking the dog and twittering at the same time. Twitter allows the user to send text messages through their phone onto the website. More on this controversial subject later, for now, I must move on.

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is indeed delicious. In late 2003 a genius of a man called Joshua Schachter founded this social bookmarking site. It lets users add bookmarks to their profile, allowing everybody else who uses the site to see what you've made a link too. This site could be seen as a replacement for Google, if your only looking for popular sites. In del.icio.us you can not find Abdul's Egyptian restaurant, but you can find the most popular site within the del.icio.us community for Golf. You may think this is a little pointless, as Google can find you both of these things, but can Google show you your friends favourite or interesting websites that they've found? I rest my case.

Blogger

Blogger was launched on July 3st, 2000 by Pyra Labs, and was bought by Google in 2003. Blogger is a Blog publishing system that lets the users to publish their thoughts on any topic, upload images and give and receive feedback on Blogs. The norm for a active user is to make a blog post once a day. Its an online diary if you will. Although usually peoples diary's are entirely private these ones are open to the public so generally the topics are restrained to under sixteen viewers, although I have seen some pretty saucy blogs. The general length of the blogs tend to be a bit long, much longer that Twitter or Facebook handles. The user could write a whole book and that would be perfectly acceptable. Frankly I don't really have much interest in Blogger, I am not willing to read a three thousand word blog some random I don't know made about their sad and lonely life or what they had for breakfast that day.

My experience with these social and mobile computing tools is that they can indeed be addictive. To understand why I am addicted, I'm going to take a closer look at Facebook and Twitter to see if I can unveil the mystery of my and many other peoples (perhaps unfortunate) addiction.

Lets start at the very beginning, a very good place to start (thanks Julie Andrews). Facebook and Twitters meet with me did not go down well. I loathed them both, recently coming out of a bad relationship with Myspace, I was looking for a replacement website to upload my photos, comment people and stalk my friends. Eventually finding the very boring looking website, I struggled to get to grips with its very different interface. I somehow managed to find my friends and add them. This was a grave mistake as a flood of invitations came for random quizzes and weird games with Pirates and Ninjas, and someone who I shall not name threw a sheep at me. I gladly accepted them all, which instantly filled my page up to the point of crashing my web browser. It literally took me three days to scroll down to reach my Wall to see the comments made. After a few weeks of this I became even more aggravated. I then realised that Facebook had taken control over me, enough was enough. After much searching this site I found the page where you can delete the applications. With a few clicks they were gone, and so was my hate for Facebook. This is where my addiction started. Facebook is now insanely easy to use, making it a pleasure to work on. And getting pleasure out of something is the first stage of addiction. So there's part of the first question answered, Facebook was extremely pleasurable to use.

A few more weeks passed and I became more involved in what other people where doing on their own profile. The home page or commonly known as the News feed allows me to 'stalk' my friends, seeing exactly what their doing, even if they really don't want me to see. For example I can see Lex Hyde's comment he made on some random person that I don't knows picture. I began to care about what people were doing, it was like the six o'clock news but on the Internet, and about my friends, and their friends. I watch the six o'clock news religiously, why? Because I have the desire for knowledge. This desire is the same I get with Facebook and Twitter, so there is the second part for the first question, why are they addictive.

Twitter is entirely the same for me, I did not like it at first, but after a while I became familiar with the interface and became addicted by the same reasons I became addicted to Facebook. Its a very fun program to use, very easy. And second of all I wanted to know what everyone was up to, its the same desire for knowledge I have with Facebook and the six o'clock news.

Time for the second and final question, is this addiction a bad thing?
As I discussed earlier, twitter seems to be taking over peoples lives. Technology in general is taking over our lives. Is this a bad thing? Well I'm sure the previous generations will say 'Yes! This is terrible, kids should be out outside, running around, getting their hands dirty.' Well this is entirely possible, twitter allows you to be anywhere in the world and still get updates about what people are doing and are able to send information about what they are doing themselves while they are getting their hand dirty. So in this brief argument I think I have justified that being addicted to twitter isn't a bad thing, but what about Facebook. Facebook does not allow you to be anywhere when gaining information about your friends, you have to be at a computer. Again the oldies will say, 'get outside, do something, meet people!' But we are doing something, we are being very socially active with our friends and sometimes meeting new people. So with that comment, I don't believe that being addicted to these sites is a bad thing, I am socially communicating with people.

So some social networking sites are addictive, they provide a pleasurable experience, and gives the knowledge that I crave. Facebook and Twitter may not be the type of addiction that I get violent and start shaking when I've been away from it for a while. But it certainly is enough to miss it, even for a day without them. And now that I have proved that there is nothing wrong with this, I can enjoy their company, guilt free.

REFERENCE

[1] http://twitter.com/
[2] Viller, S. (2008). Lecture Notes – Week04 Social SW-Handouts. Retrieved March 20, 2008, from http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~comp3505/Lectures/Week04-SocialSW-handouts.pdf.
[3]Livingston, S. Young People and New Media: Childhood and the Changing Media Environment,
Sage Publications, London

Impacts of Social Network Participation Style

Matthew Salmon
s4116665@student.uq.edu.au


Introduction:

Services such as Twitter, Del.icio.us, Last.fm, Flickr, Google Calendar, and Facebook are all based around social computing. They all require user input, whether active or passive, to do what they set out to do. My experiences with these services vary but from a social perspective I feel that active participation is a necessary ingredient for a good experience. It creates better awareness of other users, and makes the participant feel more involved, and therefor important.

Background:

Twitter is a relatively new service designed to let you update your family, friends, and the whole world if you choose, on what your doing right now. Socially it works by using a system of followers; you can follow someone, or they can follow you, or you can both follow each other. It takes a text input of at most 140 characters and publishes it on your Twitter page at the same time as pushing it out to all your followers. An interesting aspect of Twitter is it’s ability to work with mobile phones by pushing out updates as SMS text messages, it also allows you to post messages by sending text messages to the Twitter service.


Facebook is a social network platform in the traditional sense. It allows you to create a profile and then add all your friends who also have profiles, creating a giant address book of people you know (known as your “Network”). It allows you to communicate with these people publicly or privately and has a host of other features such as event planning and photo storage built in that all become social on the back of your network. Facebook also allows developers to build other applications that take advantage of your network information to do exciting new things. Facebook is easily the most popular service of those discussed here.


Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site, you use it by posting links to pages that you find of interest and tagging them. You can create a network by adding people’s user names to your network list. It’ll also show you who’s added you to their network. Once you’ve created this network Del.icio.us will aggregate everyone's links onto one page so that you can see what all your friends have been bookmarking. It also incorporates tagging into the mix, allowing you to tag links with keywords to enable searching by tag and letting you tag bookmarks for people in your network.


Last.fm is a social music site. It aggregates a users listening habits and uses that information to recommend them new music based on what other people with similar habits have liked. It also allows you to friend people so that you can keep tabs on what they have been listening too. Last.fm performs other functions such as event tracking, but music recommendations are it’s core service.


Flickr is the popular photo sharing site. You upload your photos to flickr where they are advertised in a main feed, and kept in your profile page. Depending on your privacy settings, anyone can see and comment on your photos. You can also add all your friends to create a community for easier photo sharing and collaboration.


Google Calendar is Google's web based calendar application. It explores interesting new avenues in calendar integration by allowing you to share your calendars with other uses, though at it's heart it is a calendar application that is built for the web browser.


Focus:

I’ve chosen to look more closely at the differences between active participation and inactive participation across a variety of services based on social computing. On the active side we have Twitter, Flickr and Del.icio.us, and on the passive side Last.fm and Google Calendar. Facebook sits in the middle taking aspects from both sides.

Twitter requires the user to actively input data in order for it to be effective. It creates a social experience by passing that data on to other users in your network, known as followers. Twitter was built around communicating actively, it’s intention is for you to be able to fill friends and family in on what you’re doing right now [1]. This isn’t the only active use for twitter though, it can be also used as a tool for micro-blogging [2] or chat like communicating. It’s a tool for actively publishing you.

Del.icio.us was built as a site that could grow [4]. It’s goal is to organise information a lot like google does, only using the power of people rather than algorithms. This social organising of data has led to an experience in which you can tag things for your friends, or even follow what your friends have been bookmarking, and visa-versa. Social bookmarking requires users participate actively by bookmarking sites and tagging them so they can be organised.

Flickr is another service that requires active input in order for the user to take full advantage of it’s social platform. The service, designed for photographers of all levels, is used for picture hosting, sharing, and critiquing. It is a portfolio of your work, instead of storing all your photos locally you put them on Flickr so your friends can see what your up to with your photography, and give you their input. Flickr lets you actively take the solo experience of photography and turn it into a social activity.

Facebook attempts to take parts from both passive and active involvement. Actively you can communicate with your friends both publicly and privately, and you can add photos and events and a host of other things. Passively facebook can collect data on your activities from services that it partners with. This can then be added into main feeds of your activities. It also inserts data other people have added about you into these feeds. Facebook’s decision to collect data about you from sources other than facebook cause large outcry’s from users concerned about their privacy, forcing facebook to turn this feature of by default [3]. It seems that the thought of facebook publishing information about you gathered totally passively was a little to risqué; users want some more active control over the service.

Last.fm in particular is different because it’s primary input is completely passive. It happens in the background. You download and install the Scrobbler which captures data on what your listening too and pushes that up to the Last.fm service. It the creates feeds of that information that your friends can see. Apart from being able to see what your friends have been listening too, or recommended, there is very little in the way of social interaction. Capturing all this data does however, make the service very good at showing you music that you’ll like. You don’t ever need to actively participate with this service.

Google Calendar takes user input of calendar data, but everything after this step is passive, and communicating with other people about their calendars is limited. Just because you can see someone else’s calendar doesn’t make you aware of their active presence, in fact their presence doesn’t impact your use of the service. Google Calendar is an aggregation of calendar information, not an active social service.

Reflection:

I really enjoy using twitter, it’s a constant stream of information from people you know. I find that it lets you get to know them better as well as keeps you in touch. I like that when I push something out there I can get responses from anyone I know rather than the specific people I would usually address. It’s also fun to think up interesting ways of saying what your doing right now. I think twitter would be far less amusing if you were just sitting back watching everyone’s tweets come in instead of getting involved and pushing out your own life. Sure it can be a little creepy at first, broadcasting pretty much everything your doing to pretty much everyone, but once I got over the initial privacy concerns that all went away and I just love using twitter.

In the case of Del.icio.us, it’s cool to see what my friends have found interesting and provides great conversation stimulus in the real world. Unfortunately only a few of my friends actively used the site, which limited it’s potential. I feel that a better way to find and manage connections with your friends would make this service more popular I feel. In the mean time I’ll keep using del.icio.us because I like sharing cool things that I come across.

My experience with the flickr service started off slowly. It took me a little while to figure out just what I was supposed to be trying to achieve, which I’m putting down to poor design of the sign-up system because it didn’t really give me any good tips. Then I really started to get what Flickr was about, and found a couple of interesting groups to participate in. I also started to browse around and check out other peoples works, there really are some amazing photos on there. Feedback through commenting seems to work really well on this site, it promotes good discussions with friends and random people alike. I like to call this creative collaboration, because it generates new ideas and lets you constantly improve your skill set, learning from other users. Using this service encourages me to take more photos because I feel that I should continue to update my photo portfolio for my friends to see.

Facebook is a monster of a social site, it can be really useful when you figure out how it works and what you can do, but the learning curve is quite steep. I find interacting with facebook to be overwhelming due to the sheer scope of it. There are so many ways of both actively and passively participating that you can lose hours getting continuously side-tracked. I feel that the application experience, while good in principle, has created a mess of confusion that swamps people, requiring forced and unwanted types of active participation. I like to think of facebook as a giant address book and message system, with an event planner tacked on. If facebook concentrated on these three things and made the experience with each really good, it would be a much nicer place.

In the end I found Last.fm to be a completely passive service. I tried getting involved in the social experience actively, by adding friends and trying to communicate, but the process of interacting socially sucks. It’s difficult to find friends, the communication methods are bad, and simple things like navigating the website are painfully difficult. At the end of the day, going through that horrible task of adding friends was pointless because, surprise, I don’t share the same taste in music as any of my friends. Having said that the music recommendations service that uses collected user data to recommend music is really good.


Google Calendar was really useful as an individual calendar, and could be great at creating and sharing group schedules, but the social experience is non existent, and being able to see my friends calendars is entirely useless. For starters, their calendars aren’t updated often enough to be usefully accurate, so when they are listed as free they may have something the want to do during that time that they didn’t feel was worth listing. I think that the service could be improved with a better event planning and co-ordination system, this would allow users to participate more actively.

Conclusion:

The type of user participation a service uses has a huge impact on it’s effectiveness as a social application. While passive participation is certainly useful when it comes to adding value to services, such as in the case of Last.fm, where aggregated data on peoples listening patters makes the service excellent at recommending songs, it doesn’t provide a fantastic sense of social awareness. So while some users may not like having to actively participate with a service, it seems that in order for true social awareness to occur, where one is actually engaged with other users, active participation is a requirement.


Refrences:

[1] Linda L Briggs, “Micro Blogging with Twitter”, March 5 2008, http://campustechnology.com/articles/59315/

[2] Anita Hamilton, “Why Everyone’s Talking about Twitter”, March 27 2007, http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1603637,00.html

[3] Om Malek, “Is facebook beacon a privacy nightmare?”, November 6 2007, http://gigaom.com/2007/11/06/facebook-beacon-privacy-issues/

[4] Rands, “A Del.icio.us Interview”, December 3 2004, http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2004/12/03/a_delicious_interview.html

Reflection on Social Software and Groups

Kim Lerchbacher 40761679

Introduction

With the rise of web 2.0 and social software in recent years, we are seeing new ways of using the Internet. Millions of users are engaging in social software. As Shirky states, we have reached the stage where, in some cases, all members of a social group have access to the Internet [6]. This opens up a myriad of possibilities for online group interaction, and social software is being used in new and innovative ways to develop social groups and enhance their functionality.

Background

Over the past weeks I have been using and investigating social software. The following five websites are in current, popular use worldwide and will form the basis of this reflection.

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service which allows users to save and tag personal and public bookmarks, and discover new sites based on tags on popularity.

Last.fm, "the social music revolution", uses a plugin installed on a user’s computer to track which songs are played. Data is compiled to provide statistics and recommendations. The site also features information on music and artists and offers a range of tools to support social interaction and group building.

Flickr is a platform for sharing photographs and other user-created images. It supports folksonomic tagging, commenting and groups.

Twitter is a social networking service based on users posting brief updates in less than 140 characters.

Facebook is a social networking site which allows users to define friendships and join networks based on real life information such as school and location. Facebook offers photo sharing and discussion tools, and provides a platform for user created social applications.

Focus

The following reflection examines these social software systems in light of my personal experience, evaluation and research. I will be outlining my observations on the social functionality of the systems and how this affects the formation of groups within them.

Del.icio.us

With search engine results based on various metrics that can be skewed by marketing and other factors, I found Del.icio.us to be an effective way of locating valuable resources that might get hidden amongst the masses of sites that form the Internet. Search engines are great for finding something specific, but personally I enjoy perusing new things on the Internet that I didn't know existed. Del.icio.us fills this gap by providing a database of current sites which other people have found worthy of attention and thus, I might also find useful.

The primary purpose of the site is to allow users to collect and tag websites. The social aspect of Del.icio.us is limited and largely impersonal. Adding a user as a friend simply shows their bookmarks on your "network" page, essentially bookmarking a set of bookmarks. While the site does support a community between all users, there is no direct interaction between specific users.

The power of Del.icio.us lies simply in users bookmarking and tagging sites, creating an index of the Internet based on popularity and content. Users do not have avatars or personal details listed publicly, only a username. Any kind of identity must be deduced from a user's bookmarks, tags, notes and friends. All users are counted equally, and bookmarks make it onto the front page based on their popularity alone.

By Webb's [8] attributes of successful social software, Del.icio.us has minimal identity (sufficient to support basic reputation association by users), limited presence and relationships, and no conversations, groups or additional reputation mechanisms. By using additional tools, these can be pushed to external mediums e.g. many sites offer commenting services, which can allow conversation with other users. The core site is primarily about sharing. In [6], Shirky provides examples of group downfalls, which largely revolve around the issues of free speech. The absence of conversations and sub-groups has allowed Del.icio.us to become and sustain a cooperative group without any moderation (which would be required if these aspects were implemented).

It will be interesting to see if Del.icio.us can remain a "pure" system, without being devalued by spam, advertising, or websites falsely boosting their numbers.

Last.fm

Similarly to Del.icio.us, Last.fm appears to focus on collecting data from users to populate a database of music, artists, listeners, etc. Individual users can contribute to the community and gain value from the system without having friends on the site. As repeatedly noted, the recommendations, neighbours, automatic artist/track information retrieval, etc. are all valuable to many people, yet only require installing the scrobbler and listening to music as per usual.

The site features journals/articles, and forums/discussion groups for both individual users and groups, reducing the need for users to migrate to other sites for more general textual communication. The group tools allow users to manually form social groups based on musical taste. As in traditional discussion group software, the group creator becomes the leader and holds administrative privileges. The group pages follow a similar format to the main information sections of the site, allowing more intimate groups to form and develop their own area on the site.

Artist and music information is in the form of a highly structured wiki. Users are free to contribute to the biography, events, videos and pictures for each artist. Users can comment on artists, albums, videos, pictures, events, you name it. A high level of connectivity between information and users is developed by linking artists/albums/events from user and group pages, and vice versa.

Being in a real-life community does not necessarily mean seeing other people everywhere you go. Browsing Last.fm feels like exploring an environment built by the people that live in it. On some pages you'll find statistics and content (only traces of the inhabitants), and on others will be a strong user presence, showing thoughts and identities.

One common identity-building feature which is noticeably absent from Last.fm is the ability to customise the appearance of user profiles. Customisation is an important part of sites such as Myspace, where users can essentially "dress" their personal area on the site to support their identity. This creates a stronger sense of ownership and personal connection to the site, much like decorating a bedroom or dressing to create an impression. Last.fm takes a divergent approach by creating a music identity from track listings and thumbnails of recently listened to albums. As a result the site is able to retain a clean and consistent presentation and maintain ease of use across the site. This attracts a different user base to sites that employ the customisation technique, and changes the overall social experience.

Despite its plethora of social tools, I believe that Last.fm's strongest point will always be the indirect connection between users created by scrobbling; the presence of the entire community felt through statistics and recommendations. Other tools require significantly more time and energy to use. While some people may be inclined to talk about music, it will always be, first and foremost, for listening to.

Last.fm is a music site, with social features, in comparison to Myspace, a social site with music features. It is logical that Last.fm will attract only those interested in music, while Myspace can be used by anyone. Naturally, one can expect that Last.fm will never reach the kind of popularity that a general social site can attract. High usage may not necessarily mean an improved user experience for all, but it certainly means more money.

Interestingly, despite the rise of Last.fm and Myspace, mp3 blogs still seem to be persisting despite their writer-centric focus and limited user contribution.

Flickr

Flickr follows a similar vein to del.icio.us and last.fm, except that this time it is photos being collected and tagged. As Last.fm uses statistics to generate interesting ways to find music, Flickr generates interesting ways to "explore" public photos. Users are able to describe and tag photos, provide data on location and camera, and organise their photos into sets. Social tools on the site include groups (containing discussion boards and image pools), relationships, testimonials on users, and comments and notes on photos. I found notes (comments attached to a specific area of a photo) to be an innovative communication tool appropriate to the content. Users are also able to tag photos that do not belong to them.

The idea of exploration is reinforced in the interface design. Relevant thumbnails, tags and other information are displayed/linked making it very easy to wander around the site and become immersed in the images.

I had previously used photobucket as an image hosting service, which is aimed at image and video hosting primarily for blogs. I have found Flickr community to be more closely aligned with my attitudes and interests. The differences in design and functionality of the sites reflect the disparate audiences. Photobucket uses the term "find stuff", displays images on the front page based on popularity and features large flashing ads on every page. Flickr uses "explore", promotes photos based on "interestingness", has minimal content related ads and a clean visual design akin to an art gallery. Comparing the sites on alexa.com [1] indicates that photobucket is the more popular choice. My investigation of both products leads me to believe that flickr nurtures community moreso than photobucket. As stated by Schroeder [4], "While Photobucket focuses on hosting the images, Flickr focuses on sharing them".

Consistent with my experiences on other image/art sites, comments on photos are fairly infrequent, typically a very low percentage of the total views. Photos which display a high level of quality or appeal are more likely to recieve comments from strangers, and such photos which are highlighted on the Explore page even more so. Users are able to create invite-only groups, to restrict membership based on relationship or quality. The latter appears to be quite common. Various pools exist composed of high quality photos gathered by posting exclusive invitations on specific photos. As such, a user can builds a reputation based on the responses of other users. This in turn incites competition, which I have found to be a necessity in any group of creatives. It encourages improvement, builds respect and increases perceived value in being a member of a group. It can prevent continued use from becoming stale.

The intended use of Flickr is sharing photos, which immediately brings to mind sharing personal photos amongst family and real life friends. These real-life social groups are reproduced online as an enhancement to real life socialisation, but rely on Internet connectivity and computer literacy of family and friends. It is also likely that personal photos are made private or restricted, and this may affect the public appearance of group activity on Flickr.

The Explore section of Flickr seems to focus on art photographers. Coupling this exposure with the fact that it is generally inappropriate for strangers to comment on personal photos, the art community has a much stronger opportunity to flourish than that of personal photo sharers. That said, it is possible for both uses to continue simultaneously as Flickr provides different contact classifications and allows photos to be made available to users of specific classifications. While art photography may remain at the fore, people can continue to share private photos discretely behind the scenes.

While photos may have been Flickr's focus, groups of non-photographic artisans have also developed around the collaborative aspect of photo pools e.g. Illustration Friday, Crafting 365. Supporting alternative use, Flickr provides the means to classify and search images as "photos" or "other". Interesting social activities with participants from across community include what's in your bag and memory maps.

Twitter

As the simplest of the assessed tools, I found twitter the easiest to use regularly. Taking only 30 seconds to read through updates and 30 seconds to post an update, I felt that I was getting my time's-worth of social connectivity.

One aspect of twitter which I found particularly reassuring was the use of the term "follow" rather than "friend". I am constantly concerned by use of "friend" on social websites as I am unsure whether adding a friend might be overstepping social bounds, or implying some kind of obligation to interact. "Following" a user on twitter holds no implications about relationships or previous and future interactions. Thus I am quite happy to follow whichever random user takes my fancy, regardless of whether or not they are following me.

Originally, Twitter was intended to enhance real-life social interaction, provide awareness of friend's activities and help organise physical events. Initially I began using it in this way, to attempt some kind of interaction with other COMP3505 students. It did increase my feeling of connectedness considering that previously I'd had essentially no connection at all. Eventually this began to feel a little pointless so I took to following any users with updates on topics of interest to me. Similarly, other users are moving away from the original intended use. Twitter can be used for marketing, news, updates on products and services, the list goes on [3]. I has been used to coordinate a protest [7], and for marriage proposals [5].

Twitter's simplicity and flexibility allows these different uses to be supported simultaneously. Users can utilize twitter as best suits their needs, contrasting with sites which have a more rigid functionality which is either useful to you or not. Diverse groups will be formed as a result, and will likely continue to morph as different uses of twitter are uncovered and drift in and out of vogue.

Facebook

As mentioned in previous reflections, Facebook is inherently social. Other social software examined all have a specific focus which limits their user base. Del.icio.us is for bookmarks, Last.fm is for music and Flickr is for photos. Facebook however, is for connecting people. The most basic functionality is defining relationships, and from there, interacting with friends in whatever ways are made available by application developers. I imagine that this is a factor of Facebook's initial popularity and success. Practically everyone knows people, and therefore everyone has a potential use for Facebook.

Facebook is the only website which I had used prior to this course. It seems to serve as an accompaniment to real life rather than a virtual community. Of all the social sites I have used, my activities on Facebook are most closely aligned with my real world social life. I use Facebook to keep track of what the people I know are doing, browse photos of social activites, and use applications to interact with real life friends. Statistics show similar activities from other Facebook users [2].



I have come to view Facebook as something of a playground for grown-up children. Not to make light of the discussion boards and other more conventional tools available (which I personally do not use), but the bizarre array of small applications have been the most socially beneficial aspect of the website.

Facebook has provided a means to maintain relationships where real life meetings are difficult to organise and phone calls would be 90% awkward silence. Throwing a sheep at someone may seem childish and only requires 3 mouse clicks, but it says that you still care and want to maintain contact. I have been able to maintain high school friendships and keep in contact with my sister in Tasmania by using facebook applications in such seemingly trivial (and even slightly annoying ways). I have also found facebook to be particularly useful for birthdays. Even if I remember dates, I'm often too caught up in other business to realise when they pass.

Organising events with friends was previously done via email which resulted in various conversation break-downs e.g. forgetting to reply to everyone or sending to old email addresses. Creating a private group and event on Facebook, we were able to coordinate our efforts with greater ease. As well as solving the previous problems, entire discussions were immediately visible and it became easier to share links to information on transport options. However the novelty of the group for general communication wore off very quickly as there was simply nothing to be said to a bunch of people I saw once or twice a year.

One issue which I have encountered is the implication of Facebook friendship. A month ago, I was offered friendship by a friend of a friend whom I had no recollection of. After several days of deliberation I accepted the friendship to avoid being rude. I have since had no real interaction with this person and still do not know who they are, but have received about 50 forwarded emails and an invitation to play badminton from them. I have no intention of responding to these emails. This kind of situation is the product of a label ("friend") which has no well defined meaning. To me, a friend on Facebook is someone that sits on my friends list. To my new forward-happy associate, it means something else entirely. This is not helped by differing uses of the word "friend" on other social websites.

Conclusion

These examples of social software all have specific functions (although Facebook and Twitter have a little more flexibility) and people must recognise value and worth in the software before investing time and energy in using it. As such, the kind of people which choose to use the software will be influenced by initial perceptions of the software. In turn the groups and networks which are formed will depend on the interactions supported and shaped by the software and the nature of the users.

It is evident that users are developing new ways to use the tools available. In the case of Twitter and Flickr we are witnessing some divergence from the original intended use (most notably in Twitter), while Facebook supports highly interactive user generated content for more technically skilled users. In all cases, external tools are continually emerging which can be used to build another level of social interaction, developing even more complexity in the affect of software on groups.

According to alexa.com [1] Del.icio.us use has been steadily declining for the past year and Flickr use no longer appears to be increasing. While Twitter, Last.fm and Facebook are still on the rise, the question begs to be asked; how long will people continue to use these social tools? Will they eventually be passed off as novelty items and fade into disuse, or could they ever reach the value and persistence of search engines and email?

References

[1] Alexa Internet Inc, "Alexa the Web Information Company," 2008. http://www.alexa.com/.

[2] M. Freiert, "14 million people interacted with Facebook Applications in August," 14 September 2007. http://blog.compete.com/2007/09/14/facebook-activity-breakdown-application/.

[3] Maki, "17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners," 15 January, 2008. http://www.doshdosh.com/ways-you-can-use-twitter/.

[4] S. Schroeder, "Photobucket Gets MySpaced - Time to Switch to Flickr?," 27 May, 2007. http://mashable.com/2007/05/07/photobucket-myspaced/.

[5] S. Schroeder, "Did We Just Witness a Twitter Marriage Proposal?," 21 March, 2008. http://mashable.com/2008/03/21/max-emily-twitter-proposal/.

[6] C. Shirky, "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy," 1 July, 2003. http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html.

[7] S. L. Stirland, "S.F. Activists Use Twitter, Pirate Radio to Manage Anti-War Protesters," 19 March, 2008. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/03/san-francisco-a.html.

[8] M. Webb, "On Social Software Consultancy," 28 April, 2004. http://interconnected.org/home/2004/04/28/on_social_software.

A Quirky Reflection

A Quirky Reflection

One of the best things about social networking sites is that you can totally lose yourself in them - they are the ultimate time-wasters!

Perhaps time-waster is not the best word, since they can be very useful... oh, who am I kidding. I have lost many hours a week fiddling with these sites in one way or another.

After looking at the provided list of social websites to sign up for, I quickly realised that I regularly use many of them, and have at the very least heard of the rest. This presented me with an interesting situation - what is the best way to immerse myself in applications I am already familiar with?

I decided the best way is to reflect on my recent experiences with each of the social sites I am familiar with, and describe my first impressions of the ones I am not.

Facebook

Been using for: 3 years

Facebook is an entrepreneurial goldmine. Within one month of launch in 2004, three-quarters of Harvard students were signed up to the social website ¹. Four years later, it is ranked as the 6^th most visited English website in the world, up there with the likes of Google, YouTube, and Yahoo ².

Unfortunately, one can get lost for hours in Facebook. There just seems to be an endless supply of pages to click to - one minute you can be looking at photos of last night’s pub crawl, and the next, you are deciding whether to add an application that will tell you who you should date!

While on the topic of applications, I should point out that they are a major annoyance to me. If I tell Facebook once, I should not have to tell it ten more times: I do not want to add the Vampires application! I have the notification settings down as low as they go, so at least my Inbox does not get flooded with emails - but it is still not enough.

The sign up process still sticks in my head - even though it was about three years ago! I am not sure if it is still the case, but it would not let me sign up using a non-University email address! This was very annoying, and took a long time to change once signed up. The idea of separating people by their educational institution still puzzles me - it does not seem to reflect the evolved concept of the mature Facebook.

Personally, it is a site that has sucked up an undeserved portion of my time for the last three years, and one that will not stop doing so for quite a while!

Last.fm

Been using for: 1 year

One word to describe it - awesome.

Many people (myself included) just think that Last.fm is a way of logging your music listening habits. After clicking around a bit, I found that there is a lot more to the application than initially meets the eye. The feature that makes it a very relevant social application is its ability to show you people with similar music tastes.

When I first signed up, this feature did not work properly. I have since realised that it requires a great deal of history on your profile (and other people’s profiles) to determine your compatibility. Now that I have around two years worth of history, this social networking feature works quite well.

I recently finished writing a Python logging program for Last.fm. Why you may ask? Well, I like reinventing the wheel. It can pick up songs from my music player of choice, log it to a local database, and then update my Last.fm profile from there. Writing this made me realise how well designed the internals of Last.fm are. Everything you see on my profile in the last month has been scrobbled by my own program.

Twitter

Been using for: Never

Up until this course, I had never used Twitter. I always thought it to be a pointless application, since most of the other social networking sites (Facebook and the like) allow you to do list your current status.

Being the go-with-the-masses person I am, I set up a Twitter account, and started... twittering? (I still have not found a verb that I like). What I found was exactly what I had thought in the past - I just honestly do not see a point in it. Why have a totally separate system that only shows your status to others, and nothing else?

If anyone disagrees, please let me know - I am more than willing to accept that I am wrong!

Google Calendar

Been using for: 6 months

The idea of keeping a computerized calendar is far from new. Google has taken a simple idea, and provided a way for people to access their calendars from any Internet-enabled computer or device in the world. Yes - even mobile phones.

I have tried many different calendar solutions over the years, and Google Calendar seems to be the best I have come across. Sure, it has its annoyances (such as having a web browser open all the time), however all in all is a very solid application.

The biggest difference Google Calendar has with conventional calendar applications is its idea of categories - there are none! Took me a while to figure out that the way to do it in Google Calendar is to create one calendar per category! This is very useful, since you can set notifications, colour tagging and sharing all based on each calendar.

Flickr

Been using for: 2 years; recreated this year

A photo sharing application. How original. I suppose you do not actually have to be original on the Internet, just do it well. Flickr is a perfect example of this.

I have had a Flickr account for quite a while now, but have never used it. I recreated it from scratch for this course, just to compare how the sign up process was two years ago to now. First impression? Same as it used to be. Still takes less than two minutes before you can start uploading. The ease of use is probably a contributing factor in why Flickr is such a popular website.

Yahoo Pipes

Been using for: Never

This site fascinates me. Apart from its slow Flash-based pipe designer, it produces an interesting result. I have always used a dedicated RSS feed reader (Liferea) to fetch all of my regular (and not-so-regular) feeds. I can definitely see the usefulness of ‘mashing’ together feeds based on categories, people, or any number of things.

I have set up the pipe for this course (see http://www.sjkingston.com/mash), but have also started experimenting with the other, more obscure features that Pipes has to offer.

Blog

Been using for: Various blogs over six years

For many years, I have had a personal blog - LiveJournal (back in 1999 when it was actually cool to have one), Blogger, WordPress, and most recently, a blog written and hosted by myself. I have settled on my own blog for various reasons, mainly due to my fascination with reinventing the wheel! I have (re)created by Blogger account for use with this course, however all of my old blog posts are long gone, so it is very blank at the moment!

In closing...

Social and mobile computing has certainly taken off in the last few years - and for good reason! With the continued evolution of the Internet, social sites will only grow in numbers. Some will use them, some will not. The most fascinating thing about social websites is that they allow people with similar tastes and hobbies to stay in contact 24 hours a day, 7 days a week - regardless of timezones.

And to ‘digg’ a self-hosted social system - come join myself and others on my IRC network: irc.sjkwi.com.au (channel #jicks) - we have a ball - err, sometimes!

A final quote you for to ponder:

‘Google is the modern-day Pacman - gobble, gobble, gobble!’

References

¹ Ross, E. & Holland, A., 2007. 50 Great e-Businesses and the Minds Behind Them. Sydney, Australia: Random House Publishing, p. 44.

² Alexa Internet, Inc. 2008. English - Alexa Top 100 Sites. [Online]. Available at http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=lang&lang=en [accessed 20 March 2008]

Sam ‘Kingo’ Kingston
41196616

A Reflection by Corrine Donaldson

Reflection on social networking applications
By Corrine Donaldson 41165210

Online Social Networking is all about creating your own social networks with others with similar likes and dislikes. It's about connecting with others who share the same interests in numerous topics like music, activities, sports etc. When using Social Networking sites you can become "friends" with friends and family, as well as complete strangers who may also have the same interests. Social Networking users also "build online profiles and share media such as photos, music and videos" [1].

At the beginning of this course the only social application I actually used was Facebook. While I knew about the other applications, I was never motivated to sign up for them. Though now that I have signed up for applications like Twitter, Blogger, Google Calendar, Flickr and Last FM, I’m definitely enjoying the exploration stage of using the tools. Presently I’m constantly on Last FM and checking my Twitter page to see if anyone has updated their status. Therefore due to my attachment to those particular tools, I will share my experiences with my interaction. While lightly comparing them to the interaction I had with the other applications.

I honestly think the best way to understand how a new tool works and how to use it to its full capability, isn’t to ask some one who already knows but to actually sit there and explore it yourself. Test things out, make mistakes, click on random buttons etc. It took me awhile to properly understand how to use both Last FM and Twitter, but once I understood they have consistently been used.

Last FM

I must admit before starting this course, I was told about Last FM from a friend and urged to join. But of course I never got around to it and eventually forgot about it, until now. I now regret that I never took my friend more seriously.

At first it took me awhile to figure out how to use Last FM. I initially downloaded the Last FM application to my mac and tried to figure out how to listen to music. It asked me whether I wanted to connect with my I-tunes. Since I use I-tunes predominately to listen to music, I readily agreed. Unfortunately what I didn’t account for, was the fact that connecting to my I-tunes meant that it would display every song I listen to publicly on my profile. While normally I would be ok with that, however whether you like it or not it also displays the songs you listen to, that you’d prefer no one to know of. I’m talking about that one song that you can’t help but love, but due to your other musical interests it stands out like a sore thumb and defiantly not in a good way.

That small issue aside, after removing the scrobbling, I began to explore the Last FM website, it took me awhile to figure out how to listen to entire songs, as most artists only have 30 second clips of their music. Even if you do listen to the 30-second tracks they don’t appear on your list of recently listened music. After more exploring of the site, I figured out how it basically works. You enter a name of an artist you like into the search function of the listen tab, Last FM then plays a random song by said artist and from there each song it plays after that is by another artist with similar styles.

At first after entering one artist that I like and listening to the random song Last FM chose to play, it would go onto play another track by a similar artist, usually a song I already knew and liked. It then went onto play songs by bands I’ve never heard of, most of which I instantly enjoyed, others not so much. I’m always interested in finding and listening to music, so I application that does it all for me based on my current musical interests is perfect!

One thing I have to get over is the fact that when I listen to a song, I sometimes skip the song half way through without finishing it, to get to the next song. Last FM only acknowledges you listening to a song if you actually listen to a song. So if I want my recently listened list to actually show the music I listen to, then I actually have to listen to the whole song. I’ve learnt to listen to the “whole” song now and as a result it now appears on my recently listened music list on my profile.

In the social side of the application, it allows you to be add friends, and from there you can generate the ‘taste – o – meter’, which displays your music compatibility with your friends. At the moment I am mostly aware of the music tastes of my friends on Last FM, but its interesting to see it displayed on screen, especially if you already know whether your musical interests are similar or not. I also like the aspect that you can see what songs your friends have recently listen to, if you do have a high music compatibility with that particular friend then you can get an idea of what unfamiliar artists to listen to.

In all I think Last FM will be new favourite obsession. In fact I have it playing right now…

Twitter

When I first started using Twitter during the first week of uni, I really didn’t see the point in it. Though at that point I was probably only following 2 or 3 people, and unless they updated frequently, there really wouldn’t be much change day to day. However as more people from this course started signing up for accounts and began to update their status, it got a little more interesting. Personal for me to see the benefits in using Twitter, there needed to be a large number of others I know to become aware of the application and to sign up for an account, before it became interesting and useful.

It wasn’t till a week or so after I signed up for Twitter that I decided to connect it with my phone, so that I could get notifications sent to my phone as the people I followed posted them. I was a little skeptic at first, as an over thinker, I was worried that I would be charged ridiculous amounts of money to receive messages. It’s hard not to be skeptic with the ways people get fooled when it involves mobile phones and receiving something from a third party, like a ringtone or something as equally pointless.

That aside the results of connecting my phone to Twitter to receive notifications didn’t really become apparent till a comp3505 tute. During the second tutorial more people began to sign up to Twitter and as a result I was being followed and following more people. I didn’t seem the harm to click ‘on’ to everyone I followed to receive their status updates. Big mistake as I later discovered half way through the tute, where my phone would constantly go off every 5 seconds. The problem with social networking sites like Twitter is that it’s easy to get carried away and you can abuse the fact that people may be following you through their phone by updating your status so much that it actually acts like spam. So learning from that mistake, I changed my settings to only receive messages from a select group of people and only between reasonable hours.

On a positive note, I do like the idea that Twitter is considered micro-blogging. "Micro-blogging allows you to write brief text updates about your life on the go" [3]. Within Twitter it requires the user to update their status in 140 characters or less, which means as readers we don’t have to read through pages and pages of babbling text to understand the message the person, is trying to send. In 140 characters we can literally say where we are and what we are doing and either update it via text or web. "Everyone really loves it’s simplicity" [2], I completely agree, it's simple to use, just type a few words, post it and everyone who follows you will get an immediate update about your current status.

I must admit social networking websites like Twitter and Facebook allow for a certain degree of stalking. In those 140 characters of text we learn a little more about each person based on what they have shared to everyone. Unlike applications like Facebook, Twitter allows any users (even those you don’t follow or follow you) to read your updates. That aspect is definitely a bit intrusive, but with all social applications we as the users have to personally decide how much personal information we are willing to share with strangers. However Twitter is a great method to communicate with others it "makes existing professional relationships stronger and more intimate" [5]. By updating statuses we know where people are and what they are doing as the post it. It's a way of getting to know others that you normally don't socialise with outside of work or university. You can tell a lot about a person with the way they update their status, in terms of contents and frequency of updating.

In terms of updating my status it’s something that I’ve done in the past through either Facebook or MSN. As one source says Twitter "It’s really just a glorified Facebook status" [4], but with both of those applications, I tend to forget to change it, and basically leave it with the same message for several weeks. With Twitter however, because everyone is constantly updating his or her status, I too want to update my status. However now I literally hit two birds with one stone when it comes to updating my status on Twitter, now that I’ve connected my Twitter status to Facebook. The updates I write on Twitter now appear on Facebook, therefore making it easier to update my status on more than one application at the same time.

Final Words

Currently I find Last FM and Twitter slightly addictive, I don't know if it will continue to feel that way later on. At the moment I see Twitter as a novelty item. Something I like to use at the moment, but may lose interest in it. It's something that needs to be used constantly by everyone. Its one thing updating your own status, if no one else updates their own status then it loses usefulness. Last FM however may be also be a Social Networking site in terms of sharing music tastes, it is also a source of music. Personally I don't see it that important to make sure my friends are also listening to music, because listening to music is something I like to do alone (most likely due to the fact that I like to sing along with it) and it's not absolutely necessary that everyone else listens to their music using Last FM. Sure it's interesting to see what others listen to, but it's not vital for me personally to continue using it. Unlike Twitter, Last FM doesn't need to have a lot of people using it to see the usefulness and benefits of using it.



Resources

[1] http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/08/digging_deeperyour_guide_to_so_1.html
[2] http://www.dred242.com/?p=255
[3] http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/05/for_the_uberconnectedyour_guid.html
[4] http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/19/sxsw-showdown-dodgeball-vs-twitter/
[5] http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/03/15/eight-ways-twitter-is-useful-professionally/