Basically use of web-based social media is central to teems life. 64% of teens (12-17) have experience with online content creation of certain type, be it blog, photos or video. 55% have set up profiles on social-networking website like Facebook. 28% of online teens write blogs and gender difference is salient in this respect. Girls tend to blog more than boys. However boys excel girls in uploading and producing videos. Those who use social networking websites are more likely to write blog, read and post comments on friends’ blogs. Posting images (still or video) is important part of their digital life and often engender online interaction. When it comes to online security, teens seem to be sensible than adults. Most teens restricted access to their online content.

Multi-channel teens layer each new communications opportunity on top of pre-existing channels. Communications patterns among teens are shifting as their array of options grows. These multi-channel teens are super communicators who will use any tool at their disposal, but cell phones, instant messaging applications, and social networking channels rank higher in the panoply of their communications choices when compared with landline and face-to-face communication outside of school.

Compared to other digital media, email is the least favorite one among teens for daily social interaction.

This is communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content.  Phatic communications doesn’t get much said, but it has social effects so powerful, it gets lots done.

In this sense, the emotional and social value of such tools are paramount. The informational value took the second place. We all have such experience ( maybe mostly women) when we vent just to get things out, not necessarily seek for advice or feedback.

This notion of “phatic communication” really resonates in me since I observed that the preservice teachers’ blogs in my study are mostly emotion-laden and social-oriented. In this respect, discussion forum is quite different. Surely there might be indicators of emotion and social interaction in discussion forum, but the level might vary drastically. This is associated with the sense of ownership.

Terry Anderson argues that

perhaps the best ESS (Educational social software) combines ego and object centric features allowing learners and teachers to build on both types through social exchange of their artifacts and their personalities.

Further, Terry adds on another category of social network sites specific to the educational context: adhoc transient communities, that is, communities with fluid memberships. For adult learners in the self-paced study, a stable community is very difficult to take shape due to their unsynchronized learning progress. In this circumstances, learners need to be in and out different sub-communities based on their needs.

Reflecting back on the blog community I intend to build in my study. I wonder what type it should belong to.  It’s a mixture of both ego and object-centric. Students had interact in the blogosphere because 1) they know and care about each other; 2) they are engaged in the same practice and the content of blog is close to their heart. But I don’t want this blog-supported community to be transient. The ideal situation might be that students cultivate the habit of blogging, sharing and reflecting through this project so that they can continue blogging even after the project ends.

The common-sense view, however, makes a big assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.

In the experimental study he conducted, the “social influence” group were exposed to various aggregate data such as total download times of songs. In the control group, participants made decisions independently. The results showed that in the social influence group, the most popular songs became much more popular. In accordance with cumulative advantage theory, the introduction of social elements not only made rich became richer, but also made the results more unpredictable.

Because the long-run success of a song depends so sensitively on the decisions of a few early-arriving individuals, whose choices are subsequently amplified and eventually locked in by the cumulative-advantage process, and because the particular individuals who play this important role are chosen randomly and may make different decisions from one moment to the next, the resulting unpredictability is inherent to the nature of the market.

Tagging grew out of a very personal need. “Tags let you remember things your way. “(p. 92. Then what is meaningful for one might not be meaningful for others. In addition,

As we pull the leaves from the trees and make a pile of the miscellaneous, we free the leaves from their implicit context. Compared to trees, piles of leaves are denuded of meaning. (p. 165)

The resolution of this dialectic between tagging for private use and for public good may come from the increasing power of computers to reconstruct the implicit on the basis of the explicit. (p. 166)

So tags’ social value may become more meaningful and clearer when their numbers increase.

The tool of Web 2.0 exist in this interplay between information we organize for ourselves and that which we share with others.

The social functions on delicious manifest in several ways: 1) other people might find useful and related information; 2) you can evaluate the popularity of the bookmarked site; 3) other people can have a better understanding of you as a person, e.g. your interest.

“Social software is based on supporting the desire of individuals to
affiliate, their desire to be pulled into groups to achieve their
personal goals. Contrast that with the groupware approach to things
where people are placed into groups defined organizationally or
functionally. “

I think the difference lies in the types or the nature of the group/community. Probably at core, blogs are personal networking tool. So it’s personal first, social functions second. Conversely, groupware put organization/group first, individuals second. However, since social software has been such an umbrella concept which encompass web-based technologies like wiki, blogs, social bookmarking, I don’t think they are all the same. Wiki, compared to blog, is more a groupware than personal tool. I do agree that social interaction enabled through blogs are drastically different from discussion forum.

This makes me to reflect on the enthusiastic embrace of social software. People are so into the “social” aspect, turning away from the personal and individual attributes.

In essense, social software is grass-root tool. Social feedback, rating scheme seem inherent in the social softwares.

• Identity – a way of uniquely identifying people in the system
• Presence – a way of knowing who is online, available or otherwise nearby
• Relationships – a way of describing how two users in the system are related (e.g. in Flickr, people can be contacts, friends of family)
• Conversations – a way of talking to other people through the system
• Groups – a way of forming communities of interest
• Reputation – a way of knowing the status of other people in the system (who’s a good citizen? who can be trusted?)
• Sharing – a way of sharing things that are meaningful to participants (like photos or videos)

Some people call it micro-blog. For me it’s like expanded version of the status message on my MSN. I think it should integrate with MSN, so whenever I log in to MSN, there is a link to the longer version of “what I am doing” is available.

OK, I have to admit that Twitter is not for me. Joshua Porter pointed out that the value of the social software is really person specific. He says:

… each person has their own social lives, their own social circle, and
thus their own social values. What is important to their social life
will almost certainly be unimportant to us because we have our own to
worry about.

Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, most social software is built around
providing personalized, socially-focused conversation. It’s
person-centered and as a result is difficult for anybody but that
person to really appreciate: the value becomes opaque in this way.

I think it’OK to say Twitter is not for me. I am not feeling ashamed to admit that. What we seeing now is more emergent technologies catering to specific needs of various users. Richard also argued that such social and presence tools as Twitter, Facebook might fit college students with active and dyanmic social life.

My entire Facebook presence stream consists of “at work”, “now at
home”, repeat, and my group of friends stays pretty much static
year-over-year. I think that’s a reality of the “over 30″ life.

For me, Twitter is just a tool to keep people updated of what happen to me. It probably a good way to keep the weak ties/ acquitances. I probably prefer the deeper conversation and interaction than that.