Social Networking

Recently in class, we had a visit from social networking/media expert Wayne McPhail. He discussed Web 2.0 and some associated concepts. Web 2.0 is a buzzword I’ve heard a lot recently, but I don’t think I really knew what it was all about until Wayne explained it.

Basically, Web 2.0 is a marketing term that refers to several current trends in web based media. Web 2.0 encourages community and collaboration, encourages shared content, focuses on single tasks, uses clean clear interfaces, supports tagging and social bookmarking, and moves data and applications from the desktop to the web.

Social bookmarking moves personal bookmarks to public space. It makes use of tagging, which means creating adhoc keywords that are non-hierarchical. Social bookmarking creates collective intelligence and collective editing. A prime example of a site dedicated to social bookmarking is del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a collection of individual people’s personal favourite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes, etc, that can be shared with friends, coworkers, family and the del.icio.us community. The result is that everything on del.icio.us is someone’s favourite, which promotes community because it helps you remember your favourites and share them with others who may benefit from them, plus you can access your favourites from any computer on the web.

Another social bookmarking tool that Wayne discussed is Jaiku. Jaiku allows you to create your own activity stream where you can post Jaikus, add icons, customize your design, share your Web feeds. The result is an aggregate of all the flakes of your presence on the web. Every time you post a photo, video, comment on twitter, it gets collected into one RSS feed. You can also see what your friends are up to;  you can see their availability, location, and calendar events if they have Jaiku Mobile on their phone.

Another social media tool that Wayne showed us is the mogulus player. Mogulus allows you to start a live broadcast from a webcam by creating your own broadcast channel. The prospect of broadcasting live in real time directly on to the web is extremely exciting. At any given time there are 26 different live broadcasts within the Mogulus grid running simultaneously. You can even share your channel with others by embedding it on your blog or Facebook profile.

A tool that works really well in conjunction with mogulus is the ability to stream live video directly from your cellphone, which you can do with QIK. Currently, they only support Nokia S60 phones. If you have one of those phones you can stream videos directly from your phone to the Web. You can even stream directly to friends in Facebook, Twitter, or to your channel in mogulus.

Wayne also made some interesting points about the rules of social networking/media. The same basic rules and values that apply to society such as awareness, education and involvement also apply to social networking. You should participate in a social network rather than using it to sell stuff. This is where one could criticize perhaps the biggest online social network of them all – Facebook. Many people have signed up on facebook to share pictures, create events and reconnect with old friends, but there is no doubt that it is being heavily plagued by excessive advertising. You definitely can’t just enjoy a nice game of scrabulous without seeing a billion ads. The take home message is that social media is a conversation, not a broadcast. It is like an ecosystem where everyone has a niche and their footprint in that niche can impact others either directly or indirectly. The ecosystem has a much better chance of proliferating if the organisms within it obey the rules of give and take so that it does not become a monoculture.