[Week 8-10] Social Media in Existing Applications - A Review

Social media has been widely utilised in recent years as a tool to aid communication. However, is that really a good thing. Here, we examine 3 different applications of social media in different contexts, and evaluate the extent to which the element of social media helps these applications in achieving their goals.

1. Second Life - Education

Second Life is a virtual world created by Linden Labs. It has a game-like interface, and users, called Residents, interact with each other through avatars. Residents can explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another, or even travel throughout the world virtually. Second Life's target age group is for people aged 18 and over, while Teen Second Life is for people aged 13 to 17.

Applications in education:

Several educational institutions have utilised Second Life as a tool for collaborative learning. An example is the National University of Singapore (NUS), which has a virtual university campus which is “co-created, co-owned and co-built” by students. Students can express their creative ideas and thoughts in a virtual setting, feedback, discuss and test out new ideas that would otherwise be impossible to carry out in real-life settings. Second Life is also used in some curriculum, e.g. Japanese Language courses, where students are encouraged to go on Second Life to interact with Japanese Residents to improve their language ability.

Advantages & Limitations:

As a collaborative tool, Second Life provides a novel way for students to interact with each other and generate new ideas. However, its usage is still rather limited as it incurs a steep learning curve and it may not be suitable for all kinds of educational purposes. As of now, most if its usage is limited to courses that require creative thinking, or as a side activity to mainstream curriculum.

2. Salesforce.com - Corporate (Internal Communications)

Salesforce.com is a company that focuses on produced software for Customer Relation Management (CRM) & cloud computing. One of its products, Chatter, utilises elements of Social Media to aid in internal communications between employees of a company. Unlike Facebook, it has a private cloud for each company to ensure security of information. It has an interface similar to many social media sites, comprising file sharing, real-time status updates, groups, recommendations and event invitations. The main difference here is that, this is solely used within the company and for corporate purposes only.

Advantages & Limitations:

This is an innovative way to facilitate communications within the company. Many benefits can be reaped from it, such as the decreased need for emails regarding trivial matters. Project progress within the company can also be tracked easily by any one in the company, thereby reducing the need for higher authorities in the company to arrange follow-up meetings with their subordinates regularly. While this may be a good way to encourage more efficiency within the company from the top-down, this kind of approach may eventually lead to increased stress from the employees, as people have different working styles, and such a transparent working environment might lead to unnecessary conflicts and disagreements over trivial matters.

3. Foursquare - Marketing

Foursquare is a popular location-based social networking site & game. It is a software for mainly for mobile devices, and users "check-in" at physical venues using their mobile device. They are then awarded points and sometimes "badges.” Users earn badges by “checking in” at tagged locations, for check-in frequency, time of check-in, etc. Foursquare is also open to business owners to create “Specials”, which are discounts and prizes for loyal customers, when they check in on foursquare at specified venues.

Advantages and Limitations:

Location-based media like Foursquare provides targeted marketing, one-to-one relationship marketing, and builds brand recognition and loyalty. It also increases impulse buying, leading to increased return on investment (ROI) when repeat or additional consumer purchases during a visit. Consumer purchasing history can also be examined, increasing companies' abilities to provide personalised service. However, as with many complaints regarding social media, there might be an issue of invasion of privacy here, with some customers feeling uncomfortable with their purchasing history being tracked. It also has a limited usage within avid smartphone users, and is still at its infancy.

[Week 8-10] Is It Good To Have Everything With Social Media?

For this week's assignment, unfortunately we started early on the "old" topic (there is actually a new topic we should follow on according to some admin issue), which is to choose a existing application and discuss how it will be empowered by the use of social media. The detailed procedure is: explain how would we (re)design such an application with mixed-in social media elements; and talk about the benefits, followed by a critical reflection on what will be needed for it to work.

Here we modify the approach a little bit: we will first explain the basic function of the application we chose, talk about the effects/drawbacks of adding social media elements to it (with different degrees of mergence/coupling); then in the conclusion, we will present a design that we think is the best to fit the previous discussion.

First thing first, we chose a e-learning system called PeerWise (abbreviated as "PW" in some parts of following text) for analysis. Screenshot as follows.

PeerWise (link), an e-learning system that allows users to create/answer/rate multiple-choice questions regarding a certain school subject.

It is an e-learning system that allows user to create, answer, and rate multiple-choice questions regarding a certain school subject. Normally it is a school course coordinator who will first create a "course" in the system, and then add students in.

In each multiple-choice question, a student can answer and view results. He/she may see the correct answer afterwards as well as the author's explanation.

In this example, the page shows that the answer selected does not match with the one provided by the author, which is at the same time the most popular answer.

Thereafter the participant can rate the question in terms of difficulty and satisfaction. It happens sometimes that the most popular answer chosen by participants does not match the one provided by the author. In such cases they may give the question a poor rating.

Users can make comments on a question and post it.

Now, we shall see how can this system be affected by social media, in both positive and negative ways. Here we chose Facebook (abbreviated as "FB" in some parts of following text) to act as a joint social media platform.

We add a Facebook "Like" button here.

... And something appears on Facebook Wall.

As shown in the two illustrations above, one most easy way is to add the magical Facebook "Like" (or "Share") button on each PeerWise page accordingly. Then as expected, a link with thumbnail will appear in that person's wall accordingly.

This is a rather simple resolution, in terms of that user may not need to worry about privacy settings. Since the link shared by user on Facebook is considered a external link, whoever click on it will be redirected by the web browser to the corresponding PeerWise page; And as long as he or she is not a registered user of PeerWise, the access obviously will be denied.

I call it a "discrete/scattered flow of updates" of PeerWise on Facebook wall because the former is considered nothing but a 3rd-party app or individual, separated external link; nothing is done to track the Facebook user's activity on PeerWise because of the poor coupling.

Now we are into the question "So why do we want to couple PeerWise with Facebook? To what extend shall they be coupled?"

To answer the first one, based on our understanding, we want to take into account that, a class is a small-sized social network group, in which ones exchange information/discussion using their real names. Thus planting PW on FB (or vice versa) will reduce the trouble of inputting new profiles to the user profile database (or whatever), by making use of the existing FB profile systems. A second concern is that, people are more active on Facebook, with more frequent checking of updates than PeerWise; thus such planting may in some words increase the participation of students on the course activities.

With the above discussion in mind, we can answer the second question as well as review on the rather simple implementation above: that simply adding a "Like" or "Share" button is not satisfying. We want a more highly coupled combination.

We took a extreme-to-the-other-end approach. This is for us to spot problems more quickly and thus find a feasible solution more easily.

So the extreme approach is, to synchronize everything. This is rather simple to implement at first. We add a pop-up dialogue at the first sign-in of PeerWise:

...And when user clicks "Allow", the entire world is flipped.

It will be like this now on a PW page. All PW participants reveal their real identity as synced to FB. (Before on PW the real identity of a user is not shown; Even if it is, no further hyperlink is provided to view profiles.)

And this, will generate some disaster on user privacy. This is illustrated in some scenario below.

A typical case is that, sometimes we want to maintain the connection with classmates only on a sit-in-class level; unless it is project-mate of close friends (who is already a friend on Facebook), we don't want to reveal much of our identity, and more important, our personal life. It is important to be aware that, sometimes "I make some comments on your opinions of certain topic does not mean I want to be a personal friend of you".

A second scenario is that, one would not be happy to mix his/her work with play. Put everything all-in-one is not always a good thing. What will you feel when you see a serious course subject posted on your wall, just after you finish watching a funny YouTube video shared by your friends? This is especially a bad idea for those with poor time-management skills. 

With all the concerns above, here comes our ultimate-best-solution: Facebook Groups!

Our re-design scheme is that, we'll keep the sync function, but at the same time create a CLOSED group for all PeerWise users under the same course. In other words, whoever is taking the same course can access the FB group page. Every time a question/answer/rating/comment is posted on PW will be automatically synced to FB, as shown above.

Another important thing is that we add this imperative setting to the group, that group members have no access to each other's full profile, and only after he/she sends out a friend request and is thus accepted by the other can he/she view a full-detailed profile. This effectively reduces unnecessary problems caused by crossing of networks.

At the same time, on the PW page, whoever click on a user's name will be redirected to the person's profile with very limited information like this. Nothing much more than a full name.

Thus concludes our assignment about social media. Hope you have enjoyed reading this article. Thanks.

(NOTICE: All Facebook names with display pictures shown as examples in this post are from members of this project group. We are happy to make new friends in the same field, but if you have other purposes which are not that welcomed, please mind your action and don't flood any one's wall, no matter you agree or disagree with the content in this post. Thanks!)