A social network, in the context of Internet, is a network that you often use on a website, or on an app nowadays. It is very similar an IRL(in real life) social network, you interact with friends, making new contacts and so on. But there are some differences part from using Internet as medium.

Social networking services often have many users and information travel fast among them. It’s much easier to spread your message to a bigger crowd, even people you never met before. The increasing use of smartphones contributes even more to spread information. Many services also provide the ability to start groups that share the same interest or opinion. Those groups are like sub social networks. Similar to a book group IRL for example.

One disadvantage (or advantage in some cases) is that on the Internet it is much easier to act anonymous within a network.

The biggest social network service today are of course Facebook. But there others like Orkut, LinkedIn, MySpace etc. I have registered an account on both Facebook and Linkedin. But since im very used to Facebook i’ve chosen to be more active on LinkedIn for a couple of weeks. LinkedIn addresses to people looking for networking in terms of business. A place to find employers, employees, partners, business contacts etc. Since i graduate soon i though it would be a good idea to focus on that network.

Check back later for more updates on my LinkedIn experience.

Reflections associated to Assignment 1b;

A microblog, such as Twitter, is a good way to present your ideas to millions of people in just seconds. The posts are short and quick (only 140 characters on twitter), and hashtags are used to identify what cause or subject the post is about.

With an educational point of view this is good because you have to keep posts simple and be succinctly. You can’t afford to be too detailed. If you wan’t to learn something and search for information on that subject among microblogs, you will quickly get a good overview on that subject. And of course the big advantage with microblogs, the most recent view on that subject.

If you looking for more detailed information it is a better idea to look on wikipedia or among ordinary blogs.

Something I noticed when describing Web 2.0 terms in my tweets was that it is hard to describe something by summarize it in one tweet without knowing exactly what it is I am summarizing. I had to get the whole picture on every subject before I could write short concise desciptions.

/Ludvig

Hello!

I am now studying a course named “Social Software & Web 2.0” @ Umeå University in Sweden. The first assignment is to establish a blog where fellow students and teachers can follow my progress though the course. Since i registrered this Tumblr-blog a long time ago i thought i could start using and updating this again.

I will have to customize it to meet the requirements of the assignment first though. There must be possible to post comments and follow my posts by RSS. So I will start with that now!

Check back later!