Social Media Tools
Derek Hansen

A Look Ahead
Considerations
Mixing It Up
Sharing tools
Social Networks
Wikis
Blogs
Threaded
Conversation
Background

Historical Note

Reuse is Most Common Use

Social Media as Infrastructure

Threaded Conversation
 Email Lists
 Discussion Forums
 Usenet
Key Features
 Goal: Support communities of practice by enabling group
conversations that can be easily overheard
 Basic unit: short, permanent text message authored by a
single person
 Organized by: threads

Blogs
 Individual blog
 Organization blog
 Group blog (i.e., aggregated blog)
 Microblog (i.e., twitter)
Key Features
 Goal: Support posting of time-sensitive content and
solicit reactions by readers
 Basic unit: (1) permanent post with some basic
formatting, (2) brief comments by readers
 Organized by: time (show most recent posts first)

Wikis
 Wikipedia (a particularly popular wiki)
 Community wiki repositories
Key Features
 Goal: Support the creation of community-authored
content that can be constantly edited by many people
 Basic unit: An article (or single web page) that supports
rich formatting of content
 Organized by: articles (hyperlinks and categories)
 Note: Stores every edit and prior version of an article

Social Networking Sites
 Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn
 Specialized communities - e.g.,
tudiabetes
Key Features
 Goal: Help people find, maintain, and benefit from their
social relationships
 Basic unit: Profile page and “friends”
 Organized by: people & groups
 Note: Typically include many ways of communicating
with others

Social Sharing Tools
 Flickr (images)
 Del.icio.us, Digg (websites)
 YouTube (videos)
 CiteUlike, Connotea (journal articles)
Key Features
 Goal: Share items or information of interest
 Basic unit: Items or links to items
 Organized by: tags and votes

Mixing it up
 RSS Feeds
 Widgets, Gadgets, and Apps
 APIs and Interoperability
 Mashups

Rss Feed
Custom
Search
YouTube
video
Content from RSS feed

Considerations
 Understand your audience & their
needs
 Social challenges (e.g., motivating
people) trump technical challenges
 Build vs modify vs off-the-shelf?
 Host yourself or use third party hosting
solution?

A look ahead
 Continued rapid pace of innovation
 More than just conversations (e.g., health
information)
 Use of smart mobile devices for new forms of
social interaction
 More “off the shelf” tools

Credits
http://www.flickr.com/photos/oneeighteen/1690769913/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zhurnaly/87396143/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cupcakequeen/2447557364/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chasing_imperfection/269997777/
http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/02/social-media-starfish/

Derek L. Hansen
Assistant Professor
dlhansen@umd.edu