Some opinions about online social networking: some opinions about social networking

Some opinions about online social networking: some opinions about social networking: Hello everyone and welcome to my blog! This is the first post about our course, social networking, and I’d like to show some of   my ow...

some opinions about social networking

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog!

This is the first post about our course, social networking, and I’d like to show some of  my own opinions about social web .

Many years ago, people communicated only by face-to-face talking. They got information and learned things from people around them. Individuals in one area were separated to those living in others areas by factors on region and technology. As a result, their knowledge is limited. But humans are innate social creatures. If we weren’t social from the day we are born, then social software would be incongruous: it just wouldn’t make sense. With humans’ strong desire to gain knowledge or to share mood with others, things changed, which telephone , email, BBS, social web kinds of social networking related devices or methods appeared one after another.

Nowadays, social software is accelerating. Social webs such as Amazon, Ebay, MySpace, Facebook are widely used by people around the world. From this point, I was wondering how to make sure a social web being popular?

Maybe the following aspects are in need.

1.     Effective interface

The challenge of social web is to design interface that support the current and desired social behavior of the people who use them. If the interface is too confining, people won’t use it and if the interface is too flexible, people won’t know how to use it.

2.      Build a unique core feature set

People like things have unique characteristics. So if a social web is totally similar with the other one, there would be no market to promote.

3.     Mind The Usage Lifecycle

Someone has already put forward the definition of The Usage Lifecycle.

The picture shows a set of stages people go through when using software and there are different hurdles between each two stages. To overcome these hurdles we need to design sign-up area, sharing area and ect. carefully.

So. That’s all.

I would appreciate it if your make a comment or give me some suggestions. Thank you.