Sites such as Yahoo! and Google allow users to create and join online discussion groups. Discussion groups are also referred to as forums or bulletin boards. These function very much like mailing lists except they are easier to create and maintain. They are also less invasive than mailing lists since you go to a website to view and post messages. This reduces the strain on your e-mail inbox. Discussion groups work very well for communication among local interest groups and clubs. You should have already encountered a discussion group in this class! To start looking for other discussion groups, try Yahoo! Groups or .
Within a discussion group, a discussion on a particular topic is often called a “thread.” The following image is part of a list of discussion threads from the Apple Support website:
Clicking on the third thread, for example, would enable you to read the entire discussion on the topic of syncing an iPod classic to a MacBook Pro [see image below]. You could also, if you wished, participate in the discussion by adding comments of your own. Many discussion groups require you to create and log into an account in order to participate in a discussion and/or start a new thread.
Social Networking
As computers have advanced and broadband has expanded, new social networking sites have developed on the internet. Social networking sites allow users to share files, pictures, and music, communicate by email or instant message within the site, and develop networks of friends or associates. Popular social networking sites include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube. Increasingly, large corporations have become more attracted to social networking sites because of advertising revenue and the ease of marketing products and services.
Facebook, the world’s largest social network, provides a place for social connection via the sharing of photos, videos, and text updates. Users create personal profiles and establish relationships with other people and companies. Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates at Harvard University. The site’s membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and eventually to anyone over the age of 13. In April 2007, Facebook was the primary vehicle for communication during the Virginia Tech tragedy. The name of the service comes from paper “facebooks” that used to be distributed at some universities at the start of the academic year to help students get to know each other.
Twitter, which launched in 2006, is a “microblogging” platform that allows users to communicate through brief messages [known as “tweets”], which are limited to 140 characters. The original idea behind Twitter was for users to post messages in response to the question, “What are you doing?” The prompt has since been changed to the more generic “What’s happening?”, but users can post anything that’s on their minds, and often use Twitter as a way to share links to websites, photos, videos, and other web-based content. Users subscribe to [or “follow”] tweets posted by others with similar interests, and can, if desired, send and receive tweets through SMS text messaging. Because of the immediacy and brevity of Twitter, it has helped to shape events pertaining to social movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. In 2010, the Library of Congress announced its plan to create a digital archive of every tweet ever posted.
Twitter employs a convention called a “hashtag,” which is a word or phrase immediately preceded by a # symbol. By placing a # symbol in front of a word in a tweet, the word is automatically turned into a hotlink which, when clicked, will perform a search of recent tweets containing that word. The ability to group together tweets containing a particular word or phrase has contributed to a phenomenon known as the “internet meme.” A meme can be a word, phrase, idea, image, video, or anything that spreads very rapidly via Twitter or any other means of internet communication. Since memes spread across the internet in much the same way that diseases spread through a population, a meme is sometimes referred to as “viral” if it reaches an unusually large number of internet users. One example of a famous internet meme is LOLCats, humorous images of cats with semi-literate captions. A newer example is Doge, which are images of a Shibe Inu with comic sans writing added, like the one image below.
When a large number of people include the same word or hashtag in their tweets within a short period of time, the topic they’re tweeting about begins to “trend.” When pop star Michael Jackson passed away, for example, his name became a “trending topic” on Twitter. Trending topics usually pertain to current news events and come and go very quickly, while memes can remain popular for long periods of time. KnowYourMeme is a website that documents popular memes, viral videos, and other online phenomena.
Google+ [Google Plus] was launched by Google in 2011 as an attempt to compete with Facebook. Features of Google+ include “Circles” for sharing information with different groups of people [like Facebook Groups], and “Hangouts” for video chatting with a friend or groups of friends. Google Hangouts recently merged with Google’s Talk program, which created a single location for all text, video, and image sharing between a friend or a group of friends.
Tumblr, which launched in 2007, is another “microblogging” platform that gives users a quick way to post text, images, audio, video, links, and quotes in a community setting. Unlike regular blogs, Tumblr blogs [also called “Tumblogs” or “Tumblelogs”] are frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences while providing little or no commentary. Some have described Tumblr as a kind of online scrapbooking tool that allows users to curate web-based content they find interesting. Taking on the features of other social networking sites [most notably Twitter], Tumblr allows users with similar interests to “follow” each other, and offers the option of “liking” or “reblogging” other posts. David Karp, founder of Tumblr, explains what makes this platform different on CNN:
Foursquare is a location-based mobile application that combines aspects of social networking and gaming. Users “check in” at a venue [such as a store, restaurant, library, etc.] and can connect with friends in nearby locations. Users are encouraged to be hyper-local and hyper-specific with their check-ins – one can check into a certain floor/area of a building, make recommendations, or indicate a specific activity while at a venue. Users can choose to have their check-ins posted on their accounts on Twitter, Facebook, or both. Points and other distinctions are awarded for check-ins, and some businesses offer additional incentives, such as coupons, for checking in at their locations. A screenshot of what Foursquare looks like on a mobile device is shown below.
LinkedIn launched in 2003 as a social network for work professionals, and has become the standard for employers looking for new talent. Through LinkedIn, users can search for jobs, submit applications, and join work-related groups.
MySpace launched in 2003, and was, at one time, the most popular social networking site in the world. It has since been surpassed by Facebook, but continues to be used, most notably as a way for independent bands to share their music. In 2011, MySpace was sold to Specific Media and pop star Justin Timberlake for approximately 35 million dollars.
YouTube began in 2005 but has grown exponentially since then. It was purchased in November 2006, for $1.65 billion in Google stock. Users may register with YouTube to upload videos, rate them and participate in different user groups, but it is not necessary to register in order to view video clips, send them to others, or embed them in other websites. YouTube has quickly become the pre-eminent video-sharing site on the internet, though its success has created competitors. Increasingly, advocacy groups and political parties have also used YouTube to get their messages out. YouTube helped create the concept of viral video, in which videos may be easily shared with millions of people through other forms of internet communication.
SecondLife represents a new type of graphic-rich Internet experience known as a MMUVE, or Massive Multi-User Virtual Environment. The interface is very much like computer games, and users must download special software to participate. Users create avatars for themselves with unique user names, such as "Lefty Nicolaidis," to traverse the environment and encounter other users in real time. Users may purchase land, set up shop in a virtual environment, and provide unique products and services such as clothing, furniture, movies, and clubs. Increasingly, SecondLife has attracted the interest of large companies, such as IBM and Sony, as well as leading universities, who seek to make use of the 3-D video and audio interactive environment for collaborative projects and online classes.
Social Networks for Photo Sharing
Popular services for hosting and sharing images include Flickr, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Flickr is an image and video hosting website and online community launched in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to upload and share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images they embed in blogs and other forms of social media. Services similar to Flickr include Photobucket and Google’s Picasa.
Instagram is a photo sharing application launched in 2010 that allows users of mobile devices to take a photo, apply a digital filter to it, and then share it on a variety of social networks. A distinctive feature confines photos to a square shape, similar to old-fashioned Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid images. In 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock, with plans to keep it independently managed.
Launched in 2010, Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social networks on the web. Pinterest allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections by uploading their own photos, or by importing [also known as “pinning”] images from elsewhere on the web. Users can browse and/or “follow” other pinboards for inspiration, and can “like” and/or “re-pin” images to their own collections. Users can also share their “pins” on both Twitter and Facebook. A screenshot of Pinterest is shown below.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a method for internet users to organize, store, and share links to online resources. Prior to the proliferation of social bookmarking services, the only way for internet users to save [or “bookmark”] links to web content that interested them was to add them to a list of favorite links stored on their computers. If they typically used more than one computer [one at home and one at work, for example], they had go through the inconvenience of saving their favorite links on both machines. Social bookmarking sites now enable users to gain access to their favorite links from any device with an internet connection, and to share links with other users. Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social bookmarking" and "tagging." Tagging, which is the practice of assigning descriptive keywords to a bookmarked resource, is a significant feature of social bookmarking systems, enabling users to organize their bookmarks in flexible ways and develop shared vocabularies known as “folksonomies.” Other popular social bookmarking services include StumbleUpon, Diigo, and BuzzFeed. Social bookmarking services such as Reddit and Digg give users the ability to vote on bookmarks submitted by others by giving a virtual “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” Resources with the most “upvotes” are given prominence on the service’s website. Twitter and Pinterest are also considered social bookmarking services, because of the ease with which users can organize and share content found elsewhere on the web.