LIRNEasia » social networking

The newest norm: Social networking

Ranmalee Gamage — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 04:43:03 +0000

You meet new people. You add them in facebook. You chat with them, tag them in pictures, comment on their status updates and share information.

Some of us even have our twitter account in our business card. So people may follow you and you may follow anyone whom you think is interesting and/or is informative.

An article published by Reuters says

The social networking phenomenon has nowhere to go but up as computer use becomes more mobile, according to leading figures in the development of the popular sites Facebook and Twitter.

To read more on the Reuters article, click here

Electronic connectivity: A reason to keep on going

Rohan Samarajiva — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:00:54 +0000

The New York Times has a good piece on the use of Facebook by the elderly and isolated. LIRNEasia qualitative and quantitative research shows that plain old voice telephony and SMS keep people at the BOP connected and keeps them going on.

But Ms. Rice, 73, is far from lonely. Housebound after suffering a heart attack two years ago, she began visiting the social networking sites Eons.com, an online community for aging baby boomers, and PoliceLink.com (she is a former police dispatcher). Now she spends up to 14 hours a day in online conversations.

“I was dying of boredom,” she said. “Eons, all by its lonesome, gave me a reason to keep on going.”

An antidote to the scare stories

Rohan Samarajiva — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:00:39 +0000

The Internet is a public space, and like any public space it is not without danger. But the scare stories are overhyped as the NYT story based on a USD 50 million research project shows:

Good news for worried parents: All those hours their teenagers spend socializing on the Internet are not a bad thing, according to a new study by the MacArthur Foundation.

“It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media, whether it’s on MySpace or sending instant messages,” said Mizuko Ito, lead researcher on the study, “Living and Learning With New Media.” “But their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.”

Scarcity of time for webservices (or why I am not on linkedin)?

Rohan Samarajiva — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:27:36 +0000

I am guilty of not being on any of the social networking sites. All the invitations I receive, I designate as junkmail. It’s not luddism, nor incompetence, nor arrogance. Just simple lack of time. Just to deal with my email and tend to this website, I need 26 hours a day. Where am I going to find time for social networking? Knowing my obsessive self, I know that I will start spending more or more time making sure my entries are up to date and project the right message if I get in to this business. Best to stay away altogether.

Now this may seem some maudling trivia that does not belong in a serious website like LIRNEasia. But it is part of a larger and more important question, as shown by the NYT article from which the following excerpt is taken.

““Now, in order to even get the attention of the core group, you have to ask them to replace time or a behavior,” he said.

The future, they said, is in Web services that do not require users to change their behavior by, say, adopting a new service or transferring all their friends’ contacts from one service to another.

One example, said Mr. Kelton, is FriendFeed. It sucks in stuff your friends post on 43 sites, including Flickr, Picasa, Twitter, Digg and YouTube.”

LIRNEasia’s core constituency, the BOP, does not play a big role in webservices. But time and attention are limited irrespective of which SEC group one belongs to. The general question, therefore, is of broad interest.

Open platform for mobile Internet

Rohan Samarajiva — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 04:03:18 +0000

Given that Asian countries are taking the lead in mobile software applications (in Sri Lanka, already using open source), this is a very exciting development.

LANKA BUSINESS ONLINE – LBO

A Google-led international alliance announced Monday it is releasing open-source software that will free developers to bring the full power of desktop computing to mobile devices.

The Open Handset Alliance bills “Android” as the first comprehensive mobile operating platform that software developers are free to adapt in any ways they wish for video, audio, social networking and other features.

“We are developing a very open system and will distribute all the codes to allow people to innovate on mobile devices,” Google co-founder Serge Brin said in a conference call with the press and other alliance members.

“I’m really excited about this and I can’t wait to see what the next generation of innovators is able to do with these tools.”