In my last blog post I'll be pointing out an issue that's been bothering me as long as we've had the wonderful, joyous, utterly great Facebook available for use. It is how Facebook ignores and overlooks user privacy issues – and especially how it has the habit of not informing about changes, which are constantly made on different user profile settings, etc.
As I've understood, most of us (at least somehow IT and computer oriented users) are less or more aware of how Facebook is lacking visibility and just not telling, how it handles user privacy issues. Usually we users do not appreciate these things, and it's quite common that from time to time, there's some informative posts on status feed, when someone has found out some new privacy hole or unfair protocol, and users have to inform each other, how to change their settings in order to maintain control for example over it, what it's automatically told about you, for example when your name is simply googled by someone. So, people don't like these thing, but they are tolerated, for the sake of profits using Facebook on the other hand gives.
Below there's a link to a graph which illustrates, how privacy issues of Facebook have evolved over time. It certainly gave me thoughts, hopefully it will for someone else too...
http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/
PS. I tried to find some paper that would introduce a good guideline for privacy ethics on social online services and communities, but didn't find any (only marketing and consumer privacy papers were found). It would be interesting to read some paper related especially on social services...
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Friday, February 25, 2011
Google Wave
I wan´t to talk about the Google Wave which was supposed to be the next generation of e-mailing. It combines e-mail, instant messages, wikis and social networking and was centered on online real-time collaboration.
The idea was to evolve the use of e-mail as to make it more conversational by showing all the messages as one conversation (the Wave). It includes IM:s so that users can have real-time conversations as in the IRC. Users can also edit messages and files as collaborative works and embed them in wikis, blogs and forums.
This next big thing was introduced by Google in 2010 but soon after the release it was handed over to Apache Software Foundation which continues to develop it as Wave in the box -server based product. The reason was that it was too confusing to use and people didn´t know how all things should work together. It was called "overhyped disappointment for the first generation of users" by the Linux Mag 2009.
I tried it when it was released to public in 2010, because the idea sounds pretty amazing. I didn´t need a lot of time to realize that although the idea is good, it isn´t easy to implement all those things together so easily.
But although the first release wasn´t what we all expected there is still hope in the WIAB project.
The idea was to evolve the use of e-mail as to make it more conversational by showing all the messages as one conversation (the Wave). It includes IM:s so that users can have real-time conversations as in the IRC. Users can also edit messages and files as collaborative works and embed them in wikis, blogs and forums.
This next big thing was introduced by Google in 2010 but soon after the release it was handed over to Apache Software Foundation which continues to develop it as Wave in the box -server based product. The reason was that it was too confusing to use and people didn´t know how all things should work together. It was called "overhyped disappointment for the first generation of users" by the Linux Mag 2009.
I tried it when it was released to public in 2010, because the idea sounds pretty amazing. I didn´t need a lot of time to realize that although the idea is good, it isn´t easy to implement all those things together so easily.
But although the first release wasn´t what we all expected there is still hope in the WIAB project.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Writeboard
Writeboard is a collaborative writing tool that is, like google docs, easy to use and efficient.
It lets users to write, review and edit any document, see several previous versions of the document and even work on the previous versions if the latest version is not what a user wanted to have. Hence it makes the comparison of different versions of a document alot easier.
A person can create his on writeboard, give it a password and then invite others to work together on any document. The person who is invited does not need to have a user account to get access to the writeboard but the link of the writeboard and the password to access it is sent which is enough to work on the writeboard.
It lets users to write, review and edit any document, see several previous versions of the document and even work on the previous versions if the latest version is not what a user wanted to have. Hence it makes the comparison of different versions of a document alot easier.
A person can create his on writeboard, give it a password and then invite others to work together on any document. The person who is invited does not need to have a user account to get access to the writeboard but the link of the writeboard and the password to access it is sent which is enough to work on the writeboard.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
About Separate Writers Strategy
It was noticed at the lecture that many use for example Word document in groupworks
document writing. In my case, many of the documents that are done in groupworks, are written so that the group decides what and who writes and then the actual writing is done individually in different places and time. In Posner's paper [1] this is called separate writers strategy. Here I'm going to discuss a little about the separate writers strategy in a situation where the document isn't handled in one place and time.
Good side in separate writers strategy in my opinon is, that everyone can write what is agreed when ever they wan't (of course keeping in mind the deadlines). That's also sometimes a bad side, since the written text is often depended on earlier text. Waiting for others might not be nice...
After everyone have written their part of the document, someone should review the text. It is sometimes hard to follow which text part should be where and it is someones duty to add all the text together and make everything sound fluent (different writing styles often occur..). This problem with lacking uniform style was noticed in Posner's study [1]. It is said in the paper that "Following the separate work there still remains the need to unite the resulting segments in order to create a uniform style.". That creates more work and who should do the uniting?
I think that the relationships between the writers has an influence in the writing style. Posner's study also says that separate writing can be effective when writers understand one another. Posner's paper presents an example of a pair of researchers who had a long history of working together. They had all details clear when they started to write and they send the document back and forth and gave feedback to each other. I think that it shows how the document shaping can happen fluently when writers know each other and have a history together. Giving feedback might be easier. I have also noticed that writing a document with people I have worked with earlier, is more fluent and maybe the sharing of work is more easier to decide.
Here are some of my thoughts, what are yours?
References:
[1] Ilona R. Posner and Ronald M. Baecker, How People Write Together. Proc. 25th HICSS Conference, 1992.
document writing. In my case, many of the documents that are done in groupworks, are written so that the group decides what and who writes and then the actual writing is done individually in different places and time. In Posner's paper [1] this is called separate writers strategy. Here I'm going to discuss a little about the separate writers strategy in a situation where the document isn't handled in one place and time.
Good side in separate writers strategy in my opinon is, that everyone can write what is agreed when ever they wan't (of course keeping in mind the deadlines). That's also sometimes a bad side, since the written text is often depended on earlier text. Waiting for others might not be nice...
After everyone have written their part of the document, someone should review the text. It is sometimes hard to follow which text part should be where and it is someones duty to add all the text together and make everything sound fluent (different writing styles often occur..). This problem with lacking uniform style was noticed in Posner's study [1]. It is said in the paper that "Following the separate work there still remains the need to unite the resulting segments in order to create a uniform style.". That creates more work and who should do the uniting?
I think that the relationships between the writers has an influence in the writing style. Posner's study also says that separate writing can be effective when writers understand one another. Posner's paper presents an example of a pair of researchers who had a long history of working together. They had all details clear when they started to write and they send the document back and forth and gave feedback to each other. I think that it shows how the document shaping can happen fluently when writers know each other and have a history together. Giving feedback might be easier. I have also noticed that writing a document with people I have worked with earlier, is more fluent and maybe the sharing of work is more easier to decide.
Here are some of my thoughts, what are yours?
References:
[1] Ilona R. Posner and Ronald M. Baecker, How People Write Together. Proc. 25th HICSS Conference, 1992.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Social Navigation: browsing like ants
We are influenced by others in everything we do. Our behavior in the Web is no exception. As noted by Dieberger et al. [1], however, most of the Web sites are not designed to support this kind of social behavior. They coined a term "social navigation" to describe navigation that is informed by the actions of others.
Dieberger et al. discuss that we often utilize social navigation in the physical world [1]. Similar behavior can also be observed in other species. In particular, ants use this kind of navigation pattern to find food around the nest, following pheromone trails left by other ants. The analogy is well described by van den Berg et al. [2]:
However, I'm a bit concerned by this in some scenarios. Should we really design Web services that try to guide our decisions to match the decisions made by others? Taken to the extreme, are we becoming ants that just follow the footsteps of others? Making some decisions is difficult, and sometimes design should reflect that. So let's design for "individual navigation" that encourages users to think for themselves.
[1] A. Dieberger, P. Dourish, K. H\&\#246;\&\#246;k, P. Resnick, and A. Wexelblat. 2000. Social navigation: techniques for building more usable systems. Interactions 7, 6 (November 2000), 36-45. DOI=10.1145/352580.352587 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/352580.352587
Dieberger et al. discuss that we often utilize social navigation in the physical world [1]. Similar behavior can also be observed in other species. In particular, ants use this kind of navigation pattern to find food around the nest, following pheromone trails left by other ants. The analogy is well described by van den Berg et al. [2]:
"The ability of ants to find efficient (i.e. short) routes between nests and food sources suggests an approach to cost-effective, flexible and implementable wayfinding support. Paths identified by ants are not pre-planned, but emerge, spontaneously, as a result of indirect communication between members of an ant colony - a form of indirect social navigation."It seems reasonable that social navigation should be supported by design, as it simplifies our decision making. For example, it is easier to find interesting books in Amazon based on the recommendations.
However, I'm a bit concerned by this in some scenarios. Should we really design Web services that try to guide our decisions to match the decisions made by others? Taken to the extreme, are we becoming ants that just follow the footsteps of others? Making some decisions is difficult, and sometimes design should reflect that. So let's design for "individual navigation" that encourages users to think for themselves.
[1] A. Dieberger, P. Dourish, K. H\&\#246;\&\#246;k, P. Resnick, and A. Wexelblat. 2000. Social navigation: techniques for building more usable systems. Interactions 7, 6 (November 2000), 36-45. DOI=10.1145/352580.352587 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/352580.352587
[2] Bert Van den Berg, Rene Van Es, Colin Tattersall, Jose Janssen, Jocelyn Manderveld, Francis Brouns, Hub Kurvers, and Rob Koper. 2005. Swarm-based Sequencing Recommendations in E-learning. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications (ISDA '05). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 488-493. DOI=10.1109/ISDA.2005.88 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISDA.2005.88
About activity theory and WoW
During this week I've been thinking about the activity theory introduced in the slides [1.] and also about computer games in which there's a strong social aspect present. Gaming has been discussed on other posts on this week as well. [2],[3]
As most of us probably know, today's most popular MMOPRG is World of Warcraft. WoW has 12 million subscribers [4]. The social aspects of the game play in mind, I've been wondering especially why Wow is so popular...
Maybe the most interesting thing is that it is the community of players themselves who create most of the content of the game. The story, the characters, the adventures, the fights. So it seems quite obvious that the key issue (at least one of them) in the gaming is it's social nature.
Citing what's been said about the activity theory on the slides: “Using activity theory as a framework suggests that program development must attend not only space, the external physical context, but also to the context the individual brings to the situation, the context of the tool/device, the information context, and finally the context created by the activity itself” [5]. It seems that the theory goes very well with WoW. Players are the contributors, the game is the tool, there are common rules, and so on. Finally the outcome of the process is the whole, social gaming experience.
[1] https://learning.uta.fi/mod/resource/view.php?id=203938
[2] http://mission-groupware.blogspot.com/2011/02/gratification-of-online-games.html
[3] http://awarecrew.blogspot.com/2011/02/addiction-to-unreal-world-online.html
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft
[5] https://learning.uta.fi/mod/resource/view.php?id=203938, slide 47.
As most of us probably know, today's most popular MMOPRG is World of Warcraft. WoW has 12 million subscribers [4]. The social aspects of the game play in mind, I've been wondering especially why Wow is so popular...
Maybe the most interesting thing is that it is the community of players themselves who create most of the content of the game. The story, the characters, the adventures, the fights. So it seems quite obvious that the key issue (at least one of them) in the gaming is it's social nature.
Citing what's been said about the activity theory on the slides: “Using activity theory as a framework suggests that program development must attend not only space, the external physical context, but also to the context the individual brings to the situation, the context of the tool/device, the information context, and finally the context created by the activity itself” [5]. It seems that the theory goes very well with WoW. Players are the contributors, the game is the tool, there are common rules, and so on. Finally the outcome of the process is the whole, social gaming experience.
[1] https://learning.uta.fi/mod/resource/view.php?id=203938
[2] http://mission-groupware.blogspot.com/2011/02/gratification-of-online-games.html
[3] http://awarecrew.blogspot.com/2011/02/addiction-to-unreal-world-online.html
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft
[5] https://learning.uta.fi/mod/resource/view.php?id=203938, slide 47.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
virtual identity
A virtual identity is a persona used to interact with others on the internet. Because it is not associated with the user's physical body, the persona is infinitely malleable. In the physical world, an individual's identity is determined by visual, aural and textual cues that are given to the community to establish reputation. The elements, such as who, what, where and when, of an individual's life that traditionally establish identity in the physical world can be fabricated in the virtual world.
A virtual identity is a persona used to interact with others on the internet. Because it is not associated with the user's physical body, the persona is infinitely malleable. In the physical world, an individual's identity is determined by visual, aural and textual cues that are given to the community to establish reputation. The elements, such as who, what, where and when, of an individual's life that traditionally establish identity in the physical world can be fabricated in the virtual world.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)