Looking Back

Week 2 - Looking Back: A Bit of History                                                                                                                                                This week’s readings covered a variety of topics on social media and its history. One article by Jack M. Maness, "Library 2.0 Theory: Web 2.0 and Its Implications for Libraries," described Web 2.0 as being, "...essentially, not a web...but a web of multi-sensory communication." I really like this statement as I see the Social Network Sites as evolving, breathing, and dynamic as compared to Web 1.0 as have been static. Web 2.0 allows users to interact, collaborate, and interact with web-based multi-media technologies that simply were not available in Web 1.0.

I tried to read the articles in order of date to better get a sense of the progression of where we were versus where we are today in Web technologies and social networking. 2007,one year later, Boyd's article, "Social networking sites," stresses that his research led him to discover that most users of social networks, often have existing offline relationships. I found it somewhat interesting the behaviors of users and how users often compartmentalize their online profile for different needs. For example, it would not be unusual for a user of Facebook, to also have a LinkedIn profile for his/her business/professional compartment of his life. According to Boyd, the main differences on Social Networking Sites (SNS) are "structural variations around visibility."

Basically, this means that some SNS's have different types privacy security. Certain SNS's such as Friendster and Tribe.Net are visible to anyone, via computer crawlers (computer information gatherers). SNS's are basically used to connect socially or professionally. Some SNS's users find commonality in interests such as on sites Care2(for social activists,Care2.com, Couch Surfing for travelers, www.couchsurfing.org, MyChurch (religious/Christianity)MyChurch.org, Flicker for Photo Sharing, www.flickr.com, and Last.FM for music listening, www.last.fm/ to name a few.

It was also interesting to learn that some SNS sites that bombed in the U.S. became a hit in other countries, namely, Brazil with Google’s Orkut. Something else I found of particular interest was to learn that Facebook originally started out to support colleges, namely and originally, Harvard beginning in 2004. Moving up a bit in history, (2009), Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle's article,

 "Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On," offers a bit more understanding of how the "Web" evolves. According to them, the Web has a "collective intelligence." In essence, data that is created by repetition of users increases accuracy. I would liken this idea to how Google can anticipate what one types in the search page and provides lists of perceived searches. Reilly and Battelle state, "The net is getting smarter than you might think." And on that note, I will close this post.