COM 459 = SNS research Summary

The study on Social Network Site conducted by Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison, was a very interesting document. It was interesting to really learn more about the nature of those SNS and there History. I don't know most of the SNS that are disussed in the text except for the most popular one's like facebook, Myspace and Twitter. SNS really grew up and devellop through the years, from the first SNS "six degrees" launched in 1997 till today's Facebook interface. Through its development SNS's had to face failures. Six degrees attracted millions of people in 1997 but soon closed out, the developpers of the SNS think that Six degrees was simply ahead of its time.

From 97 to 01 multiple other SNS started appearing, among them we could count : AsianAvenue, Black planet, Cyworld and Lunar storm. I did not know any of those website before, but what is interesting about them is that most of them failed to become popular at some places of the world but skyrocked in other locations. Some of those were at first instant messaging platforms that were then refashioned as SNS's. In 2002 SNS's took a step forward with Friendster, at first the SNS platform popularity surged but the site didn't handle the fast growth of users and pretty soon

Frienster was running towards a chaotic failure. Friendster was able to offer good privacy settings to its user and quickly Bosses, old classmate and close friend were all mixed together in the same network. Which eventually became problematic for users.

Just as Friendster was falling apart in the US, its popularity Skyrocked in some asian countries and Friendster stayed up in the rankings, untill Myspace came along.

What basically happened through the years is that SNS's developpers continually learned from the mistakes made in the previous SNS's to create better interfaces.

Myspace opened new Horizons after friendster, by allowing more freedom to the user in the design of there page. Instead of forbidding stuff Myspace modified there policies to innovate. For example they opened the door to a new public, highschool and college kids.

Developpers started to listen more to the User, and built upon there desires. SNS's started to look more and like websites where people could meet with there actual friends rather than meet new people.

In 2004 appeared Facebook, the original SNS was created in Harvard and was only accessible to people with Harvard logins. But soon Facebook opened its doors to other Universities and highschools untill Facebook finnally gave access to everyone. While alongside other SNS specialised themselves in certains areas or interests, or restricted there access to keep more privacy, like a Small World and Beautiful People.

Today Facebook dominates the Web pretty evidently and SNS's have become a very broad field of research, since everyone lifes in "stuck on the web". How much influence and effects will this new trend of communication have to our human lives, jobs relationships? that is the question.

Com 459 Reflective essay #1 By Jeremy Tweedt

CMC stands for computer mediated communication. It has become a very wide area of communication study today. Computer mediated communication, is communicating via computers, phones, networks of all kinds. It is the new trend of human communication, using technologies.
Computer mediated communication can be divided in two parts, synchroneous and asynchroneous, the two main CMC devices are E-mail and instant messaging. E -mail is an example of asynchroneous communication because the communicators may not be connected at the same time. On the other hand instant messaging like MSN, Facebook chat etc... is what we call synchroneous communication, because the interlocutors are both connected and chatting with each other at the same time. An other aspect that is important and separates those two types of CMC is recordability. As instant messaging is more sychroneous than email, it has much less recordability. By this I mean that when an e mail is sent it is saved for good on your computer, whereas instant messaging is most of the time lost once the discussion window is closed. Those aspects are important because they affect the way we communicate and with who. CMC represents today a huge part of Human communication since distance communication technologies have become essential in people's everyday life. This is important because, the fact that we communicate in a new way affects evidently our behaviors, our manners, our habits but more than everything our relationships with others. CMC is nothing like face to face communication, CMC offers possibilities that modify entirely the nature of communication, for example anonymity. In CMC you can chat with someone without having to reveal you identity, you can express yourself with complete dishinibition. This is extremely important because since we communicate through CMC all the time, we make choices and we discuss important issues through CMC, and we might not talk or answer the same way in a face to face context. I think that on the long run, CMC will affect human behavior in ways that we can't entirely concieve today.

Final proj

Animated Tennis Playa Serving

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIFY9h8DImg