2.3 Social Networking - Twitter

Lecture:
Facebook under18's is their communication platform, twitter as a social network,
Read the Report on the way that twitter was used through the Qld floods.

Facebook is now like having an email account it's nothing ground breaking,

2002 is when the serious emergence of networks that go beyond the niche groups, Friendster - my space - Facebook we are not doing an evolving timeline.

There are social networks that are popular in their own country and there is a similar sm medium to twitter and it has bigger users.  My space has gone from a generic network back to a niche, it was sold at its peak and dropped popularity.

boyd & Ellison
Be able to construct a Public / semi public profile within a bounded system. (can be shared)
Articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection (LinkedIn Tells you the missing steps between you and someone else) they do not have to be friendship, (connection) and
View and traverse their list of connections and those made by others, this is how they perpetuate themselves.  This is the key things of how social networks perpetuate itself.

This is how you distinguish a social network.  It is deliberated broad.

Reading 1. Journal of computer mediated communication

What makes SNS so unique is that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks.  It's not about meeting new people but socialising with people they already know.  The public display of connections is a crucial component of SNS's.  Most SNS's require a bi-directional confirmation if friendship but the fans/followers pages do not.  But there are sites that call these friends even though they are not, like how some business pages have friends and not fans.  The friends then can look at the links of the other friends of these networks, I.e. like FB, though My Space users have hacked theirs to hide friends display and LinkedIn can opt out of displaying on their network.

Facebook began in 2004 specialised in uni students with a harvard.edu email address, then in September 2005 it began to include its path to include everyone else after adopting more universities to its pool.  There are still closed networks though within Facebook which you have to know someone within to be invited by to be able to join.  It has different levels of privacy and it has a applications, games etc, it's like an insular community hence its power to be one of the largest SNS sites.  The rise of SNS sites indicates a shift in organisation of online communities, these are organised around people not interests, unlike websites.  SNS are structured as personal 'egocentric', with the individual at the centre of their own community.

Scholarship of SNS - (knowledge)
Focused on Impression management, friendship performance, networks and network structure, online and offline connections and privacy issues.

'public displays of connection' serve as important identity signals, in that it may extend to validate/identify info presented in profiles.  Though the authenticity or playful varies on sites, the phenomenon of Fakesters argue that the profile can never be real, boyd.  There is always a certain level also of effort that people put in, answer questions lightly instead of thoroughly in the setting up of that sites identity for themselves.  Though in the sending of messages and using real photos allows one to see the authenticity of the user depending on what they write and upload.

Networks and network structure provide naturalist behavioural data.  Passive users, invitees and linkers fully participate in the social evolution of the network.  Live journal has a friendship classification scheme.  Through anonymously observing friend interaction on FB found that profile fields that reduce transaction costs and are harder to falsify are most likely to be associated with a large number of friendship links. 

Bridging online/offline connections, although exceptions exist people mainly trawl FB to find old friends etc rather than to search for perfect strangers.  Through this these SNS become in ground into our everyday lives.


Reflection:
That our photos and details are stored online for marketing companies and fb to use for their benefit to make money.  We are giving them the tools to sell to us.  It is gathering artificial intelligence to be able to suggest to us things we may be interested in.  In some cases it may seem invasive but in other ways it could be saving us time.
Also understanding that Twitter has an open source API which is why when you go to other SNS they have a twitter and FB sign in option that means everytime to post on one platform / app it is easily transferable to the other.
 
boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1). Available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x/full

Reading 2; Serious Uses of Social Networks
Brisbane Floods Report
Observing how the use of @ for people’s names and # for specific events was very good to understand and to see how to use Twitter more effectively

Still 15 months later this still makes me feel very emotional, even though it was an amazing feeling of teamwork to see Brisbane get cleaned up so quickly.  I used Facebook and twitter with friends to see who needed what i had, we were able to get food to people who had run out of the basics and I baked pumpkin scones as a treat for people.  I spent days cleaning up a friends business while they remained operational, some of the team work happened by people just driving around and stopping to offer to help.

So I took what I could from it but it wasn’t a paper that I really wanted to read.

Bruns, A., Burgess, J., Crawford, K., & Shaw, F. (2012). #qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods (Media Ecologies Project) Queensland: ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & Innovation (CCI). Retrieved from http://www.mappingonlinepublics.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/qldfloods-and-@QPSMedia.pdf


Activity - Introducing Twitter

I had already been using my Twitter - micro blogging app, under windandwaterdes  I had linked with other students.  #web101 allowed me to see discussions by Sky and Tama and other students both current and old.  Also there were some people in there that were using this tag that had nothing to do with this unit of study.  When I do posts of updates of what I am doing with my web presence I have used the tag #web101 just to make it easier for fellow students to follow my activity.

I have since started a new Twitter account Irenesstylesessions.  I have followed design people that coincide with my web presence.