Posts Tagged ‘web 2.0’

Recently, I stopped using Foursquare.

I really like the concept. Making every day life a little more fun. It’s good because it encourages you to go out and do new things – if only to get the Foursquare points, and anything that encourages people to go out and explore the big wide world is a positive.

However, I found it was just taking over a little too much. The first thing I would do when arriving at somewhere new to check in, and it was just taking too much time to log onto my phone all the time and check in somewhere. So I decided to go cold turkey and remove it from my phone.

This month at the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire, Simon Duncan presented a talk on social media – what it is and whether it is a good thing or not. Of course, the answer is yes.

Social media brings us huge benefits, at relatively little cost – and indeed almost no monetary cost, as sites like Facebook are all free. Unfortunately, it tends to take a bad wrap because of people not really thinking their arguments through. You can blame the media a little for this, but I don’t think they shoulder that much responsibility.

Take cyber bullying for example. It’s ace. Kids are going to bully other kids anyway, that is just part of society, at least at the moment. But with cyber bullying – you have a full paper trail of everything that has gone on! If social media has made the bullying situation worse for anyone, it’s the bullies! You can now just take your text messages straight to the school, or even the police. None of this complicated business of having to prove what they said with witnesses.

According to Simon, studies have also shown that using social media actually increases real world interaction. That’s certainly true of me – the main reason I use Facebook is to organise real world events with my friends. As well as plenty of other uses of course, such as keeping in touch with friends I otherwise couldn’t keep in touch with affectively because they’re in a different timezone in a different part of the world.

Other fears include issues like privacy and targetted advertising. Perhaps this has been a problem in the past, but with increased awareness of the situation, companies are now putting in place the tools to effectively manage your privacy and you can quickly and instantly lock down your profile, most of which is restricted to approved friends only anyway. This is arguably far more secure than the records the government has for example, which will probably end up on a USB stick left on a public train.

Targeting advertising is actually a massive benefit to us – because more effective advertising means less advertising. If companies can reach their target audience more effectively, they need to reach less people, so they spend less on blanket advertising. This is evident from the reduction of advertising – remember all the big flashing banners and pop-ups that plagued the internet – most of those have now given way to these small text links on Google and Facebook, and the web is much the better for it.

Recently, my good friend George, decided to part ways with his then girlfriend. Sad times. Unfortunately, when it became time to make it official, by severing the relationship on Facebook, the status change attracted very few comments.

Now this clearly isn’t because George is simply unpopular. Nothing could be further from the truth – George is a witty, charming and sexually attractive man. I would go on, but what happened in Munich, stays in Munich.

The reason that such a status updated attracted few comments was that Facebook has decided that George’s updates aren’t that important. It never appeared in my newsfeed, it simply slipped by without me ever reading it.

Back in June, I blogged about Eli Pariser’s talk on online filter bubbles and how Web 2.0’s attempt to personalise its content can lead to blinding us to what is going on in the rest of the world.

This is a good example of this – Facebook has decided that George’s Facebook updates aren’t that relevant to me, even though I would consider him one of my closest friends (as well as living with him!). So beware the online filter bubbles, Eli was right all along.

Eli Pariser recently gave an interesting talk at TED about the way the internet is becoming more and more personalised – filtering so we see more of the stuff we want to see, and less of the stuff we don’t. He argues this can be a bad thing as it means we don’t see the other side of the argument.

One of the most interesting statistics given in the talk is that Google use 57 different factors to personalise your results, including many used even when you’re not logged in. That really must make your job a whole lot more complex if you work in SEO ;).

Nick just pointed me towards a site named Ajaxload which is really useful for generating loading icons while waiting for things like AJAX content to load into a page. You select the type of spinning “loading” symbol you want and set the colours and it generates all the code for you. Have a play.