Social Networks

Brief History

This week's post is very interesting as social networks are very common amongst net users. From the beginning of the internet and even before social networking was always present in the digital world. Social networking in the PC is the interaction of users using computer networks so the early Bulletin Board Systems can also be considered as Social networking tools. There were various attempts to create social networking sites, and some were very successful in their era. I don't remember any old social networking tools and I don't know how they  worked or their capabilities.

My earliest form of contact to these tools was MIRC with which I used to chat every now and then. I didn't use MIRC much since back then I only had access to a dial-up modem and using the internet was expensive. My real exposure to social networking started when I created a Hi5 account. In Malta Hi5 was very popular and nearly all of my friends had a hi5 account. Hi5 was more conform with the modern idea of Social networking and each user his own profile and virtual friends. Then Facebook popped up and most of my friends migrated to Facebook. I didn't want to switch to FB at first but when nearly all my friends switched I also created a profile. In the same period I tried MySpace, which at the time was very common especially amongst artists. More Recently I created Twitter and Linkedin accounts and Managed to make an account on Google+.

Social Networking

Modern social networking sites offer many interesting features such as photo and video sharing, photo tags, live chat and nowadays video and group video chats. Some of these web sites have a particular theme or purpose. An example is Twitter. This micro blogging site is mostly used to diffuse information. I don't use twitter that often, but when I am waiting for a particular news or information I usually go to twitter as information flows quickly there. When MySpace was more common, it was an idea place to go to look for information about your favourite artists and also listen to their music in case of musicians.

I consider myself a moderate social networking user as I like to use these services but not too much. I like the idea of sharing information over the internet, but sometimes I am a bit concerned. On tools such as Facebook, anyone can take you a photo and upload it to his profile and put your tag on it. This might not always be a good thing as your private life starts to disappear. There are however benefits of putting up a public profile. For example with Facebook you may keep in touch with friends that you no longer meet often and may also help you make new friendships. Linkedin is also a very common social network but focusses more on business networking which can expose it's users to potential employers.

Technological View

In terms of technology social networks are very interesting. As time passes competitors start to show up and thus major social networks  keep to improve. All social networks that rise amongst the others are destined to fall someday. Currently Facebook is doing pretty well and it is the world's largest social network. Apart from the profile and stream sharing, Facebook has a good layout and is constantly improving and updating. One thing that failed on the previous network MySpace was the ability of the users to create their own style. Since not all users are IT experts, lots of pages were created with erroneous code which might not be interpreted by all browsers, and some pages not readable by screen readers. Custom good looking professional layout is important to a social network such as FB. An interesting feature of FB is the auto tagging when an album is uploaded. Faces on the photos are recognised and tagged temporarily until confirmation from user. Recently Facebook is also rolling video chat to its users and word says that it is doing so in an attempt to counter Google+'s video features. For video chat Facebook uses Skype technology in another Facebook-Skype agreement. These networks already share some chatting features. Facebook Video chat is currently available to a limited number of users. Fortunately mine is available and I already tried it. I must say that it worked good as it should but it is nowhere as interesting as Google Hangouts on Google+.

A newly emerged, but still exclusive social network is Google+. This social network offers interesting features and new concepts. G+ introduced the concept of Circles where contacts are not all considered the same and therefore not given the same level of sharing. With this interesting feature, one could upload and show photos of Saturday nights to his friends without his family(other circle) being able to see them. This improves  the concept of privacy, if any exists on the internet. Another interesting feature is the Google hangout. People are allowed to join in a hangout and video chat, or text chat with a group of friends in a very cool environment. I managed to get invited in to Google+. I liked it a lot and I am very interested to see if these networks will be able to coexist like Facebook and Twitter or if one will crush the other like Facebook crashed MySpace. In my opinion G+ may be a valid competitor with FB, but currently all users seem to be computer experts or work in computer related environments. For Social network to become large it needs more normal casual users.

Another rumour is out saying that Microsoft are coming up with their own social network. Given how their previous attempts failed  (windows live spaces and windows live network) I am interested to see what are they up to.

A little Experiment

Recently I made a little experiment to try Some services offered by social networks and their connection to peripherals.  More exactly, I needed to video chat but had no webcam and I needed a quick fix. Having an android phone really helped, as I downloaded an App to make my phone work as an IP camera. Then I used a special ds filter to turn the IPcam into a sort of webcam. The experiment worked on local applications. For testing I tried Facebook and Google+. This virtual webcam was recognised and worked on skype and facebook video chat, but to my disappointment did not work on G+ hangouts or Google talk. My thinking was that if the cam is recognised locally and by Skype, it should be recognised by everything, well apparently I was wrong. Facebook video chat has a similar experience to video chat on Skype, obviously because they use the same technology. Later I tried Hangouts with a real webcam, and it is quite cool. I did not hang out with many users to test its capabilities, but with a few users it worked well.

Privacy Concerns

As social networks become more and more popular questions about their security and privacy start to arise. In my opinion one must be cautious as what to upload on social networks. Making too much information public on the internet might not be very good. You do not know how that information will be used and by who. Also some pictures might come to haunt you later on in your life or might be seen by people you wouldn't want them to. Some times websites like Facebook make photo sharing easy, but you might end up sharing photos that probably in your real life, you wouldn't. Although the new Social network G+ has features such as circles to limit the view of the posts, once pictures or posts are on-line, you have no control of what the other users might do with them. So I my opinion I would recommend the use trusted social network sites but the user should take special care of what to share, and now with G+ we can also include, with whom to share.