POST1: To gain from social networking

Before taking this course, I've never thought about anything intensive in the field of social networking,though I have used various social network websites for several years. As representatives in this area，Facebook and Twitter are famous websites all over the world and millions of people get addicted to them.In China, social network websites, such as,renren and weibo are also welcomed by many people, especially teenagers. However, not long ago I just thought they are something for fun, just like some entertainment websites.This course have changed my point of view on these sites, and I have understood more about social networking gradually.

By learning lecture 1-3,I understand that online social networking is very complex, these social networking websites are not just platforms for peoples to communicate or share something interesting with others,neither they are simply for fun. Actually，social networking concerned with the conduction of various social behaviors over the internet, as well as the underlying technologies. It is an interdisciplinary subject involving multiple fields including computer networks and applications, psychology, as well as sociology. In the first 3 lectures, we defined social media,social computing,social networking, the relationships of them,as well as applications.From the lecture,I also obtained knowledge about social experience and its model, values/benefits in a social environment, and social nature of human activity, in which we learned human information processing and interesting things about our memory.Furthermore, I learned about how our mind is engaged in social networking environments,and how should we design social environments.

Up to now,the concept impressed me most is social computing.Because I've never known the technologies behind social networking before,and it is the area closely related to information engineering.I'll share something about social computing as follows.

Social computing is a general term for an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It has become an important concept for use in business. It is used in two ways as detailed below.

In the weaker sense of the term, social computing has to do with supporting any sort of social behavior in or through computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and technology. Thus, blogs, email, instant messaging,social network services, wikis, social bookmarking and other instances of what is often called social software illustrate ideas from social computing, but also other kinds of software applications where people interact socially.

In the stronger sense of the term, social computing has to do with supporting “computations” that are carried out by groups of people, an idea that has been popularized in James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds. Examples of social computing in this sense include collaborative filtering, online auctions, prediction markets, reputation systems, computational social choice, tagging, and verification games. The Social Information Processing page focuses on this sense of social computing.

Social computing has become more widely known because of its relationship to a number of recent trends. These include the growing popularity of social software and Web 2.0, increased academic interest in social network analysis, the rise of open source as a viable method of production, and a growing conviction that all of this can have a profound impact on daily life.