Researching into Existing Social Networking Sites - Assignment Example

uconnect A social networking site with a difference Chapter Introduction We all form networks of relationships in our lives. It starts off from within our families. As we start schooling, a new set of friends join our personal network. Studying further in college and university we expand this network. In our work life we meet a whole lot of people and our social network continues to grow on and on. A social network is a "social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency". [1] These interdependencies include factors such as values, vision, interests, friendship etc. As our social network continues to grow, we find it difficult to manage. We forget some of our close friends at school. We lose connections with important people whom we like to keep in constant touch. Isn't it nice if we have some kind of a computer system to help us keep track of our personal network Social networking sites do just that. In addition to being a tool to manage your existing relationships, they also help you to build new relationships. With the popularity of the World Wide Web and the increased penetration of Internet access, a number of such services now exist. This report presents a proposal for a new social networking site called "uconnect". Rather than being yet another social networking site, uconnect tries to be a one with a difference. Chapter 2 will present the findings from research in to existing social networking sites such as MySpace (www.myspace.com) and Facebook (www.facebook.com). Variety of user experience and the tools which enable individuals to be online publishers will be explored in chapters 3 and 4 respectively. Chapter 5 will focus on the features of uconnect which will make it special. A comparison of the existing sites will be presented in chapter 6 followed by a summary of the report in chapter 7. Chapter 2: Research on Existing Sites History of social networking on the Internet goes back to as much as late 1970s. Community interactions services such as Usenet were among the first networking services to operate. [2] Though it's predominantly a textual medium, Usenet is still in widespread use among various interest groups such as academic, technical, social and much more. Site such as Classmates.com, SixDegrees.com and Epinions.com were developed in the mid to late 90s. [2] Sites with much more rich multimedia capabilities became popular after the turn of the new millennium. Out of these sites MySpace and Facebook stand out today as the two most popular social networking sites. [3] However, there are other popular sites such as Bebo, Xanga, Orkut, Friendster, Hi5, Blogger and Window Live Spaces. Features offered commonly are the ability to set up personal profiles, customizing the profile pages to suit your styles, setting up blogs, instant messaging, sending of invitations to friends and photo and video uploading. Youtube is another social networking site which offers a different type of service. Its main focus is letting people share multimedia (primarily video) content. People upload content varying from home made fun movies to sports events to incidents that capture news highlights day to day. Youtube calls the profiles as "Channels". As the name suggest, people can broadcast their own video channel over Youtube to a worldwide audience. Social networking sites exhibit a come and go type of existence. According to an analysis published by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, these sites are "unusually vulnerable to the next 'new new' thing. As quickly as users flock to one trendy Internet site, they can just as quickly move on to another, with no advance warning". [4] This is further evident in the decision of Yahoo to shut down its social networking arm, Yahoo 360o, recently. [5] Also, there is an element of hype around the potential value of these sites. For example, though certain analysts claim Facebook to have a value $100 billion, a recent article on Economist.com argues otherwise. According to this article, trying to call Facebook the next Google is a bit nave. [6] Social networking sites are, however, not without problems. Violation of members' privacy rights, crimes committed as a result of publicizing private details on the web, difficult to control what people publish and abusing which occurs as a result are the main issues. Crimes committed by obtaining personal information of teenagers have gone up seriously in the recent past. According to a press release from the Office of the Attorney General of Kentucky, USA, "In 2006 alone, the nationwide media reported almost 100 criminal incidents across the country involving adults who used MySpace to prey or to attempt to prey on children". [9] Downside of making publishing on the web easy for individuals is that it also makes it easy for them to post harsh or harmful content. Such content can then be held against those individuals by the law enforcement bodies. Incidents where school administrators have expelled students due to publishing gay photos, police arresting a student who threatened to kill another have been reported. [4] Chapter 3: User Experience at uconnect uconnect will offer a lot of features comparable to existing networking sites. Profiles - All networking sites offer profiles. uconnect profiles will offer the best of features found in other sites. Uploading photos, entering personal information, education background and work experience will be supported. Custom layouts and color schemes will also be provided. For advanced users, HTML editing similar to MySpace will be supported. Friends - Users will be able to maintain their network of friends. Searching for friends, sending invites to join as friends, accepting or rejecting invitations from others will be supported. Groups - A group or forum is an online community of people with similar interests or from a single organization such as a high school. Groups help them to communicate, discuss and share interests, opinions etc. uconnect will allow members to create groups, join or leave groups and participate in group discussions. LetterBox - This is a way for friends to leave messages for a particular user. Facebook offers a similar feature called the Wall. A friend, in the real world, who visits your home, finds that you are not at home and then drops a note in to your letter box. This idea is from that metaphor. Instant Messaging and Conferences - Have instant chats and group chats with your friends who are online simultaneously. Chapter 4: Publishing Tools In addition to the features listed in Chapter 3, uconnect will provide a host of online publishing tools for its users. Blogging - A blog is a short name for "web log". In other words, it is an online diary. Users of uconnect will be able to maintain their own blogs or group blogs. They will also be able to import their external blogs similar to the facility provided in Facebook. Videos - Upload videos and share it with everyone. This feature will be similar to what is offered in Youtube. Viewers will be able to rate and comment on the videos uploaded by others. Photo Albums - uconnect will allow users to publish photos online with slide show facility as well. They will be able to annotate each photo with additional information. Again, others will be able to comment on the photos. Chapter 5: Specialty of uconnect uconnect will not be yet another social networking site. It will be a site with a difference, by offering a mix of the most popular features of existing sites while at the same time eliminating main drawbacks of those sites. As stated under chapter 2, damages to members' privacy are a major concern in most of the existing sites. To overcome this problem, uconnect will provide enhanced privacy controls. A feature similar to access control lists or role based access control will be provided. In this approach, members will be able to define roles to represent their varying levels of relationship to people. For example, they can create roles or groups (not the groups mentioned under forums) named such as 'Extremely Close Friends', 'Very Close Friends' and 'Friends'. Each of these groups can then be configured as to what "viewing permissions" are set to them, allowing more fine grained control over what people can see from a user's profile. Then friends in a member's profile will be added to these groups depending on how much they should be allowed to view. This type of privacy control allows more control over ones privacy settings than a simple Blocked Users list or Limited Profile Users list as in Facebook. Another major problem is the limitless publishing ability. Since no one is there to "edit" what members post, they can end up with posting harmful or defamatory comments to themselves or others. Three approaches will be taken to control this at uconnect. First is the "Report Abuse" feature found in most networking sites. This is a community based filtering mechanism. People who see abusive content will be able to report them to the site's administration, who will then take corrective action. Second will be "moderation". However, moderating each and every post or upload is not practical. Therefore, site administrators will be able to examine content on a random sampling basis. Third will be an automated mechanism. This is mainly possible with textual content that members post in to their blogs, in forums or letter boxes. The written content will be automatically scanned for possible harsh content. Simple methods such as spotting bad words, looking for multiple exclamation marks (as in !!!!!!!!!!), or detecting content written using ALL CAPS (because all caps give the impression that you are shouting) can be used to detect and warn users of harsh content. If such content is detected, a friendly advice can be shown to the users such as: "Your post seems to contain material written out of anger. Posts you do on the Internet will be picked up by search engines and can be viewed by many people even many years down the line. Are you sure that you want to post this content Press Yes to continue or Cancel to go back and edit your post" Even a simple warning such as the above can prevent people from posting harsh content. If the users anyway want to post them, at least it will ensure that they will do so consciously, knowing possible future consequences. uconnect will ensure that people will connect with a purpose and not just because everyone else is doing. This will be done by forcing members to be part of at least one group (forum). Think of uconnect as a Google Group (www.groups.google.com) with more rich content. Generally, people join groups because of some good purpose. And groups generally have the property of self moderation; i.e. members of the group itself object harmful content. It could be an old school friends' network, an undergraduate/graduate study group or a group with a common interest such as a nature lovers' group. This will enable uconnect to last long and not just die off as when the hype is over, because people will keep coming back to interact with the group. Eventually, uconnect will be a network of "sub social networks" and not one gigantic network. It has also been observed that unlike networks such as telecom networks "social networks lose value once they go beyond a certain size". [6] Chapter 6: Comparison of existing sites As stated earlier, MySpace and Facebook are the two leading networking sites today. These and other sites, while provide many common features, also differ in certain features and other aspects such as usability and design. This chapter will provide a comparison of the features provided by these digital meeting places. In a comparison of MySpace and Facebook, Ben Gold argues that Facebook is superior on many aspects. Comparing the two sites on Design, Media capabilities, Community features, Usefulness and Ease of Use, Ben picks Facebook as the winner. [7] The following table provides a side-by-side comparison of the features available on some of the popular networking sites. Feature MySpace Facebook Hi5 Orkut Friendster Xanga Live Spaces Profiles Profile Page Customize Profile Avatars (cartoons instead of your photo) Media Upload photos (Albums) Link external photos Music Slide shows Video Communication Instant messaging Blogs/Notes/Scrapbooks Forums and Groups Chat rooms Other Earn Money Gadgets (external tools) Source: personalweb.about.com [8] As can be seen from the above table, all sites have the concept of a personal profile with most providing the ability to customize it. Uploading of photos albums, music and video are also common with Orkut being the one exception which does not support music and video. All of them provide more than one way of communicating with friends such as blogging (or sometime called Notes), messaging (or the Wall in Facebook) and groups. Earning money is an ability provided by Live Spaces and so far, other sites do not provide the ability for the members to earn from their private spaces. Gadgets, which are small utility programs developed by external people can be added to MySpace, Facebook and Live Spaces. Gadgets are an interesting feature which helps these sites to bring in more visitors and increase profits. In fact, after introducing gadgets in May 2007, Facebook has seen a tremendous growth which may even help it surpass MySpace. [6] Chapter 7: Summary This report presented a proposal for a new social networking site named "uconnect". It included a survey of existing social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook covering their feature and also potential problems. A comparison of these sites was also provided. Features proposed for uconnect were presented in chapters 3 and 4. Special attention was given to how uconnect can be made unique and safe compared to other networking sites and a detailed description of this was provided in chapter 5. In conclusion it could be stated that social networks are here to stay. Though individual sites may come and go, the concept will remain in this information age. They will be used for business purposes such as customer relationship management, as well as for personal and many other reasons. It will take some more time for the hype to settle down and the sites that cater for the persisting and durable needs of social networks, rather than the fun side of it, will emerge winners at the end. Appendix 3: References [1] "Social network". Wikipedia. < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network> [2] "Social network service". Wikipedia. [3] "Facebook & Bebo: The Assault on MySpace". Nielsen/NetRatings. 28 Jun 2007. [4] "MySpace, Facebook and Other Social Networking Sites: Hot Today, Gone Tomorrow". Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. 03 May 2006. [5] "Friend accepted". The Economist. Oct 25 2007. [6] "Social graph-iti". The Economist. 18 Oct 2007. [7] "Facebook Hammers MySpace on Almost All Key Features". Ben Gold. 10 Jun 2007. [8] "Tour of Social Network Sites". PersonalWeb.About.com. [9] "Attorney General Stumbo to Get Info on Thousands of Sex Offenders Found on MySpace". Office of the Attorney General, Kentucky. 21 May 2007. Read More