Preview of Del.ico.us 2.0

Recently, Del.ico.us launched a small invite-only preview of the new look and feel for the next version of their site.

TechCrunch has an article about the preview along with some screenshots.

Integration (Nathan Hoad, 40760104)

Integration

Nathan Hoad
40760104

There are countless social networking sites spread throughout the many tubes that we call the Internet. Some of these sites succeed, but most of them are never even known to the general public (until they try to sue one of the popular ones). There are many factors that might contribute to a popular social networking site but in this article, I will focus mainly on the one that I think is most important; the openness of a sites data. The ability for a site to cooperate with other software, be it another site or desktop software, is what makes a site more appetising to users. Google, for example, has opened up many of its collection of sites by allowing developers to use public APIs. This has paved the way for countless other uses for their original data and only made said data more popular. In this article, I will be talking about social networking tools such as Google Calendar, Twitter, Last.fm, and Facebook.

Firstly, I thought I'd mention that anything that comes out of the Google factory is bound to be awesome and Google Calendar is no exception. Google Calendar is, as it's name suggests, a calendaring application and is available to any Google account holder. Adding new calendars is as easy as clicking a button. Adding events to a calendar is similarly as easy; click the time of an event and give the event a name. There is a page full of extra options for events if a user needs them. For students entering their university timetable *cough* they can set the events to repeat by week and expire after the semester has finished. Once a user has a calendar they can share it to allow others to see the events it contains. Using the other side of the same process, users can find and view other people's calendars. Google Calendar integrates well with Gmail, another Google service by allowing users to send event information via email. When a user receives an email containing event data, they can simply click it to add it to their own set of calendars. Google Calendar also cooperates well with various desktop calendaring solutions, though some need extra plugins to work properly. The Mozilla Calendar project, in the form of Sunbird and Lightning, gives users a desktop interface to view and edit their Google Calendars through the use of the Provider plugin. Google Calendar users with blogs can easily incorporate any of their calendars into a little calendar application that Google provides. Google Calendar also kind of integrates with Sinet, and before you say “No it doesn't” read my story: I always put my proposed uni timetable into Google Calendar (I used to put it into Google Spreadsheets) once class times are available ready for signon. My fiancé used to just keep her proposed timetable in an excel file on her computer ready for signon. Then, last semester, we weren't at home during the first round of signons. I had my times worked out and available from Google Calendar whereas my fiance had to go back through Sinet and re-work-out her timetable before she could complete her signon.

Twitter is for people who like to make sure that their friends know exactly what they are doing at any given time. When using Twitter, people are asked a simple question: What are you doing? Users can answer this in any way they see fit, as long as they keep their response under the 140 character limit. Users can update their Twitter status in a number of different ways. Twitter can accept status changes from Instant Messaging (with Google Talk, etc), from mobile phones (with SMSs), or from the user logged into the Twitter site. Twitter also has an open API and various other methods of updating your Twitter status have been created. Twitteroo and Twitteriffic are desktop applications that have been developed for Twitter that give users another way to update their status and perform other Twitter related tasks. I don’t use Twitter that often for one main reason: unless you keep updating your status, they become out of date. If there was some kind of calendar based software that integrated with Twitter to update your status based on your timetable I might see Twitter being more useful.

Last.fm is a music based social networking site. Once registered, users can download a plugin for most desktop audio players (some players, such as Amarok, have the plugin built-in) that ubiquitously reports what music they listen to and when. After the plugin has reported, or scrobbled, a few songs, users can begin to see their listening habits mapped out over time. After a while the user can begin to view extensive charts listing things like their weekly top artists, weekly top songs, monthly top artists, monthly top songs, etc. For example, my top artist for this week (5 August – 12 August) is Alain Boublil & Claude-Michel Schönberg after scrobbling the Miss Saigon album on infinite loop for a while. My top artist overall is John Williams after countless scrobbles of his countless soundtracks. Last.fm can take data like this and start to hypothesise about a users taste in music and give recommendations about other music that the user might like. If you like a lot of a certain kind of music and someone else likes a lot of that kind of music then, chances are, you would like most of the other music in their collection. Last.fm offers these recommendations in the form of a neighbourhood radio. This integrates well into some desktop audio players. I use Amarok, a desktop audio player for Linux, to listen to music. Amarok makes use of Last.fm to deliver the same neighbourhood radio. From within Amarok you can either start listening to your own neighbourhood or simply listen to any Last.fm within a given genre. Last.fm also contains an embedded streaming radio that users can listen to within the page itself. Although it has very little to do with integration, I think this also helps Last.fm to be a very useful tool. For example, while I am at work I just load up my Last.fm page and listen to my music collection using the embedded player.

Facebook was built as a general tool to help users keep track of their college friends. The original Facebook wasn’t much more that a bunch of linked profiles. Over time it grew and more features were added and more people joined and so on and so on. In May of this year Facebook released The Facebook Platform, an API for developers to start making applications to interact with the various features of Facebook. In the few months since then, a plethora of applications have been created to integrate the data from other social sites into Facebook. At the last count, there were around 2200 applications. There are applications that provide interfaces to most of the other popular social networking sites. On my Facebook I have the Last.fm application installed which lets viewers see what songs I listened to recently and displays my favourite artists. I also sometimes use the embedded Last.fm radio stream to listen to music when I’m not at home. Delicious, a social bookmarking site, also has a Facebook application that displays users Delicious bookmarks as part of their profile page. Facebook recently announced its new iPhone integration feature that lets iPhone owners fill their hunger for Facebook even when they aren’t near a computer. Facebook has done a very good job of letting itself be connected to almost any other useful site that users can think of.

Integration is an important factor in why some sites seem to be more popular than others. Sites that play well with others often attract a bigger user base and, when talking about social networking sites, a big user base can only make the site more useful. Some connections between tools come from places that you wouldn’t normally expect (eg. Google Calendar and Sinet) and begin to add more utility to the software than the developer could have imagined. Some pieces of social software present countless means of integration through the use of an extensive API which means more opportunities to integrate with other tools. Facebook is great because it acts as a central meeting point for all the other social networking sites. Facebook doesn’t really try to beat everyone at their own game; it just lets people bring their game to Facebook to play. My conclusion: Rather than trying to change people’s habits, sites should just make software that integrates into what people are already using.

Links used in article

Google Calendar – http://www.google.com/calendar
Twitter – http://www.twitter.com
Last.fm – http://www.last.fm
Facebook – http://www.facebook.com
Facebook gets sued – http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2004/8/5/harvardGradsFaceOffAgainstThefacebookcom
Facebook for iPhones – http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=5353402130
API Information – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API

Assignment 1: Reflection on social & mobile computing.

This article will focus on how the different applications in Facebook facilitated people in getting to know one another in a shorter amount of time which may not have been possible without them. There is a vast array of social computing tools available on the web and my experiences in using them the past few weeks gave me an idea that such tools can also be used in support of education as they are able to draw people together in many different ways in subtlety. Facebook has succeeded in putting various tools together into one customisable package and is able to integrate the usefulness of other social networking sites as well. Experiences with some tools are described as a background to understanding what it does and how it could be useful when it is used together with Facebook.

Flickr is an online photo management and sharing application created for photo enthusiasts, families and friends who want to share photos with loved ones across the world. It makes it easy for people to keep in touch and update on one another’s lives by sharing photos that they have recently shot.

Food enthusiasts are also using Flickr to upload pictures of the new food creations they have come up with and travellers are also using Flickr to show to the world where they have been to in the hope that it will help others who are interested in those places to have an idea of what that place would be like. (Although there is a website called WAYN – Where Are You Now that mainly caters for travellers and locates the whereabouts of people.)

An interesting observation is a trend in artists who love to have their own online gallery to show the world their works of art. Several Flickr accounts I have come across has works of art digitised and having an explanation of how it was being developed and what it was all about. It is like walking through an art gallery and a rather interesting and radical way for new and up coming artists to share their works of art without having to pay heaps or find a space to have an art gallery show of their works.

For educators like art teachers , it would be very useful to have their pupils display works of art that they have done on Flickr and allow the whole class or world to view it, and the processes that go behind it, not only the final piece. It gives an insight to the viewer in greater detail of what went through the child’s mind and allows them to practise verbalising their thoughts onto each piece.

Last.FM is basically a ‘scrobbler’ that allows users to collectively build a large social music platform as tracks are added to their servers and users with similar music tastes can be connected together and get to know one another. It works by having a widget that keeps track of all the songs that a user plays on his/her media player on the computer and later recommending songs to the user with regards to his listening patterns. However, I find it rather intrusive that a widget is actually keeping track of the songs that I played with my media players and keeping that data somewhere else. There is another similar application to this, by Yahoo called ‘Launchcast’ that does a similar thing but instead of keeping track of the songs that is being played on the computer, it has its own interface that plays songs like a radio and the user can choose to rate those songs or junk them, and the database keeps track of what was junked or rated and not just by the songs that are being played.

Before Facebook came into existence, Friendster first came out in 2002 as a social networking site, which allowed people regardless of geographical location to get to know one another. It accumulated about three million users within months of its launch. Accessing its content slowed down quite dramatically as too many users were logged on. In 2003, MySpace was founded and quickly overtook Friendster as the most popular social networking site. However, MySpace had problems with its layout and spamming with heaps of notorious profiles being posted that made it quite revulsive to some people. When Facebook was founded in 2004, it came out with a crispy clean interface and differentiated itself from its predecessors with its ability to have 3rd party applications added on to it and supporting several other more specific social networking sites like Flickr (for photos), YOUTube (for videos) and Last.FM. It has at least 3000 applications from 22 different categories at the moment and still more are being developed. The fact that it is quite a flexible social networking site and allowed integration to other more specific social sites made it more attractive and usable in many different ways. It allowed users to customise their profile page by allowing them to add in applications that reflect their personality and tastes.

Twitter did not really appeal to me as all it basically did was to keep track of what I was doing at any given time, and to tell others about it, so it didn’t really serve much purpose to me to update the world on my conquests. However, it might be useful for those who love to tell the whole world what’s going on in their lives.

Del.icio.us was created for book marking websites that I have been to and sharimg them with friends and contacts, and the main advantage it had over book marking directly on a browser is that the user is able to access their own bookmarks anywhere without having to go back to their own computer to access them.

Among the few different tools that I had to experiment with in the last few weeks, I find Facebook to be the most interesting and addictive. It worked really well for its purpose of getting people together and learning about one another. It is customisable and allows integration of the other tools that were chosen for this social computing experience with the appropriate applications installed. With its wide variety of applications to choose from, there will always be something that would be of interest to anyone, and if not, the application will probably be built sometime in the future which can be used as an add on and be monitored in Facebook. The applications are also built by other developers, not only by Facebook, and comments on errors and reviews on how it could be improve are kept together with it so users who are about to download it have an idea of how effective the application is , or if its worth installing.

Some examples of applications that can be installed onto Facebook that would allow blogging. Each has its own flavour of usage and users can choose to add on whichever one that suits them best or they can have a few different types of bloggers on their Facebook account if they choose to.

For music enthusiasts, Facebook also has numerous applications that enables the user to integrate music sites that they are already registered in so it is able to display their tastes and also play their favourite tunes depending on the application that they chose to install. There are also video sites like YOUTube that can be integrated into Facebook that would enable music videos to be put into the users’ profiles so visitors to their profile can have a taste of their favourite music video collection. This really enhances the feel, user experience and enjoyment that users get when using or browsing Facebook sites.

The same goes for calendar organizers, there are heaps of calendar applications that is available for integration that probably suits better than just Google calendar. For users of Flickr with a large database of their photos already uploaded on that site, there is a number of Flickr related applications that enable them to bring in their Flickr photos onto Facebook in a manner that suits them best so they need not upload their already compiled photos on Facebook manually again.

There are also other applications that allow users to interact with one another in a subtle way, like sending flowers to someone’s garden, giving them gifts or writing on their walls. In doing so, users indirectly feel a certain positive emotion for the sender (provided its something good). With the music and video applications, it allowed users to convey their own feelings about the type of music they like and characterises their moods as well.

In conclusion, I find that Facebook is the most useful and worked really well as it is able to integrate the specifics of most of the other sites with the add-on applications that made it very universal . Facebook has suceeeded very well in terms of being able to cater to the different needs of a wide variety of users that none of the other social sites can handle individually. It actually allows users already registered on multiple specific focus sites to put together a collage of their differing needs into one platform so they need only to log on into one and be able to access all areas of their social life on the internet. Its like a ‘one-stop’ networking site and I find that most of the time I just log on to it and is able to leave it on all day and monitor the updates to the various applications that I have added on that integrates with the other websites so I need not have multiple tabs or windows open for the different sites.

Manage Your Life with SMS

Hi all

I thought I'd share this article on Life Hacker about how more and more social networking sites are becoming mobile with the help of SMS.