In this blog post I aim to analyze design patterns and structure of YouTube, in order to understand effects on the social behavior among its users. According to the statistics supplied by YouTube, “more than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month”. I believe this is evidence to well-designed network structure. Additionally, YouTube’s data…
Background: Pinterest has grown from zero page views a day to billions per month within three years. According to measurement site ComScore; Pinterest reached 25 million unique visitors in July 2013. Today, Pinterest is valued at $2.5 billion following a $200 million financing round earlier this year. So what make this social bookmarking site stands…
Photography, having started off as a hobby of a privileged group of people over a century ago, is now seen as an integral part of daily practices by millions of people worldwide. Mass-produced cameras and mobile phones made the process of taking photos a popular, cheap, and undeniably convenient activity. Consequently, the avalanche of photos…
How does one take an objective look at something they know and use everyday? In the last couple of years Facebook became so widespread that it seems almost everyone has a concept what the platform is all about. Through usage, we all develop our own understanding of what we are dealing with. Moving past those…
The influence of companies on society has shifted from the old “media giants” or media conglomerates such as Time Warner, which provides a wide media spectrum with TV, radio, newspapers, entertainment and online services, to new “giants” in digital media such as Google or Facebook. One particular and different example for this new media giant…
It is somewhat embarrassing for me, a master student who studies digital media, to admit that I have never used WordPress or any other blogging service before. If I write something, I tend to keep it in my journal rather than on the web. But since we are required to publish our blogs in this…
Foursquare, created in 2009 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, is a location-based social networking service for mobile device users. As of April 2012, the company reported it had 20 million registered users [1]. The website and the mobile application allow registered users to check in the places they visit and share to their Twitter…
Today, I would like to use the concept of design patterns to study the website, Wikipedia. What is Wikipedia? On Wikipedia, there is a general introduction about itself, “Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and based on an openly editable model…Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet…
When it was first released in October 2010, no one would be able to predict Instagram’s success and the impact it would make in the world of mobile application services. Today, with over 150 million users [1] and with a strong mission to capture and share the world’s moments [2], Instagram’s founder, Kevin Systrom and…
“[I]t’s only when you start enabling people to ‘do things’ together that the real power of online social networks kicks in” [1]. Wikis are an extremely powerful tool for allowing people to ‘do things together’, especially because of their flexibility in matter of interaction design. However, whereas such a flexibility represents an asset from a…
Understanding Social Media 