Social Software

1
Social Software

• John C. Tang
• September 6, 2007

2
Top 10 student needs

• Calendar management (assignments, events)
• Computer (power, carrying, features)
• Cellphone (texting, usability)
• Bathroom controls (temp, sensors)
• Transportation (bus schedules, parking)

3
Top 10 student needs

• Communicating with family
• Alarm clock waking up
• Finding people (teammates, carpool)
• Recommendations (dining, activities)
• Earphones design

4
Website updates

• Slides from lecture are posted later in the day
• Link posted for every assignment
• Discussion section topics for some weeks added to
  schedule (more coming)
• Revised office hours for me Tue,
  200-330

5
Assignment Map of Berkeley (Due Sept. 11)

• Draw conceptual map of Berkeley that conveys your
  experience of the area
• Introduce me to Berkeley!
• Express visually, not with words (like
  Pictionary)
• Create feature list
• Show map to one other person not in CS160
• Heres a map of Berkeley I drewtell me what you
  learn from it
• State relationship to person (e.g., friend,
  roommate)
• Record number of features they recognize
• Hand in 2 copies (black white copy OK)

6
Grading criteria

• How effectively the map communicates feature list
  to us (the teaching staff)
• How effectively the map communicates feature list
  to user study participant ( features recognized)
• Good design balance of how much information to
  include in the map
• Enough to be interesting
• Not too much to be cluttered
• Keep target user in mind (me!)
• Reflect on what you learned from user test

7
A word about grading

• Im going to be more explicit about assignments
• Please ask if you have any questions
• Consider this first assignment as part of a
  calibration process, clarify expectations

8
Last call, standby passengers

• Hung, Sherry
• Murphy, Gant
• Glickman, Robert
• Toraby, Farshad
• Vilepchiukor, Arthur

9
Social software

• Introduce basic types of social software
• Recognize important aspects of social design
• Applications we all use, but why are they
  compelling?

10
Not just single human-machine interface
11
But a socially interconnected network
12
Leveraging social behavior

• Others benefit from my work
• I benefit from others work
• The more people who participate, the more
  interesting it is (viral)
• Social side effects from individual work
• Linking social benefits with individual benefits
• Leveraging social work (Tom Sawyer)

13
Beyond mainstream social software

• Email
• IM
• Web pages
• Multi-player games

14
Work / benefit tradeoff

• Cardinal rule for why Computer-Supported
  Cooperative Work (CSCW) applications fail
• Disparity between who does the work and who gets
  the benefit
• Jonathan Grudin, Why CSCW applications fail
  Problems in the design and evaluation of
  organizational interfaces, CSCW 1988
• http//doi.acm.org/10.1145/62266.62273

15
Social recommending

• High data volume
• Side effect of purchase records
• Regionally customized
• Dealing with data pollution (gifts)

16
Del.icio.us

• a social bookmarking website designed to allow
  you to store and share bookmarks on the web,
  instead of inside your browser.
• Access your bookmarks from anywhere, no matter
  whether you're at home, at work, in a library, or
  on a friend's computer.
• Share your bookmarks publicly, so your friends,
  coworkers, and other people can view them for
  reference, amusement, collaboration, etc.
• Find other people on del.icio.us who have
  interesting bookmarks and add their links to your
  own collection.
• Joshua Schachter http//del.icio.us/doc/about

17
Del.icio.us bookmarking and tagging

• Lightweight widgets for
• Adding a bookmark
• Adding tags to index bookmarks
• Interface for seeing
• Tags applied to bookmarks
• Other bookmarks that others have related to a
  bookmark
• Social feedbackothers are copying my bookmarks!

18
Del.icio.us aggregations

• Popular
• Recent

19
Folksonomies

• Meta-data created by users
• Contrasts with expert indexing (e.g., Library of
  Congress)
• Contrasts with author indexing (e.g., keywords,
  book index)
• Whole society benefits from minority of
  fastidious organizers
• Helping improve search (dogear)

20
Wikipedia

• Peer-contributed content
• Community moderated (status)
• More diverse, popular slant on info
• Journal article in Nature that found accuracy of
  Wikipedia comparable to Encyclopedia Britannica
• http//www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/43890
  0a.html
• Can be dynamic at times

21
Temporal artifacts in Wikipedia

• History flow visualization of abortion

http//doi.acm.org/10.1145/985692.985765
22
Tagging

• Indexing for my use
• Shared with others
• Disambiguating
• Translation
• Convergence on labels
• Seeing others tags
• Auto-complete

23
Cambridge, MA and Cambridge, UK
24
Searching for azul
25
Tag clouds

• Usage, recency interesting
• Alphabetic for finding

26
Salience of usage, recency
27
Social reputations

• eBay
• Epinions
• genuine reviews
• Evolve over time

28
Viral adoption

• Exposure?quick install?usage?more exposure
• facebook applications

29
Leveraging physical traffic

• ZoneTags
• Exploiting location information on cameraphones
• Tag photos with location
• Suggest tags based on other photos from that
  location
• PhotoSynth
• Create 3-D model from photos taken from the same
  location

30
ZoneTag
http//zonetag.research.yahoo.com/
31
Photosynth
http//labs.live.com/photosynth/default.html
32
Social networking

• facebook
• MySpace
• LinkedIn

33
Your favorite example

• Yelp

34
Assignments Commercial for idea (Due Sept. 12)
and facebook application review (Sept. 18)

• Take an idea (from idea list), prepare a 2-minute
  commercial (Sept. 12)
• Presented live in Discussion Sections
• If you cant attend discussion section, you can
  submit a recording (narrated slideshow, video)
• Review a facebook application (Sept. 18)
• Try it yourself
• Observe TWO (2) other people using it
• Write review
• Explain what it does (screenshot)
• Explain what works well, what doesnt
• Include data from observing users

35
Criteria Commercial for idea (Due Sept. 12)

• Strict time-keepingmust stay within 2 minutes!
• Must email any projected material to
  btsao_at_berkeley.edu
• cs160 in Subject line
• by midnight, Tuesday, Sept. 11 (otherwise,
  present without projecting)
• Effectively communicate idea
• Whats the need?
• Approach for solving it?
• Is it a good idea?
• Opportunity to help form teams, convince others
  to work with you

36
Criteria Review facebook application (Due Sept.
18)

• Pick an interesting application
• Clearly explain to us what it does (illustrated)
• Observe at least 2 non CS160 people using
  application (give demographic info)
• Write review
• What works well
• What doesnt work well
• Support with evidence from observations
• Suggested improvements
• Shouldnt be more than around 5 pages

37
Next time

• Readings
• Task-centered user interface design, by Clayton
  Lewis and John Rieman
• Explore forming groups (looking for group
  formation by Sept. 13)
• In class teaming
• Discussion section commercials
• Mix of skills
• Ask us if you need help