My first site is Poupee Girl, a Japan-based (but also mostly available in English) site where you upload pictures of your clothes and in return receive items that you can use to dress up a doll and ribbons that you can use to "buy" other items to dress up your doll. Other users can comment or give "cute points" to your items, friend you, or send you messages.
Social capital seems to come from two places:
1) Top Ten Cute Rankings
If you receive the highest number of cute points in a specific amount of time, you will be placed on this list. My guess is people who have high numbers of friends and are already trusted as fashion authorities make this list.
For someone to make this list, they also must be following the extensive Poupee Girl rules list, which declares among other rules that you are not allowed to post pictures that show your face, or pictures that you did not take yourself. Users trust that others will follow these rules and when they do not, they tend to get reported and banned.
2) Number of Friends
(Some parts of the site are yet untranslated from Japanese; the message title says "A message from a new Poupee fan.") I was friended by this user who simply said "Hi! Friends?" Your home page tracks the latest posted items of your friends and then you can easily click and give them cute points or comments, so those with more friends are likely to end up on the Top Ten Cute Rankings and gain even more friends and social capital.
The focus in the site is strongly on fashion. Ellison et al says that "Online SNSs support both the maintenance of existing social ties and the formation of new connections," but it seems that in Poupee Girl, like in my previous exploration of last.fm, there is a lot of random friending that goes on based on whether someone likes the contents of someone else's closet - even if one user is in Machida and the other is in the middle of the Midwest. When I posted pictures of items in my wardrobe many random users stopped by and left cute points, leading me to conclude from my small amount of time that many contacts in this social network are made only online.
Does Poupee Girl give the same sort of bridging social capital that Ellison et al discusses? Yes, to a small extent. Those who participate in the site may love fashion and have a career interest in it, and may make contacts and friends from various walks of life and in various places.
The second site I explored was StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has friending, private messaging, and groups, but the main idea of the site is to "stumble upon" sites on the web that you think are interesting and add them to the StumbleUpon database by pressing an "I like it" button. Then, others rate and review the site you just posted.
Users gain social capital by:
1) Stumbling upon and rating items that receive good reviews.
This is similar to the system for Slashdot that Massa discusses - recently popular Stumbles end up on the top of each category page.
2) Having other users subscribe to your favorites.
Users subscribing to your favorites indicate that they like and trust your taste in links. Here, for example, is someone else's subscriber information:
3) Having other users leave you a positive testimonial.
Testimonials are reviews of a user's stumbleupon choices - similar to having someone subscribe to your favorites, simply more qualitative.
Even though I reviewed a few items on StumbleUpon, I did not receive any feedback or friend requests. It seems this site requires more time to get "settled in" and earn social capital than Poupee Girl, where other users are quick to give you a few cute points.
Gleave et al's article about different social roles is difficult to apply to either of my chosen sites because both have a central authority. Poupee Girl's, the Japanese blog giant Ameba, seems to control most aspects of the site and there is little self-regulation (although you can report an illegal user). StumbleUpon seemed like it could have several roles, such as those who tend to rate and comment, and those who tend to subscribe to others' feeds. Both sites do have aspects of the decentralization that Allen discusses simply because there is user-generated content, but there is not quite the level of self-policing that goes on in, say, Wikipedia.
Erilymaz's article was even more difficult to apply since my sites dealt with fashion and cool things on the internet - not, say, an emergency response system for firefighters. Trust in an incident reporting system is way more important than trust in a fashion social networking site, and somewhere in the middle is trust for buyers and sellers in selling sites like eBay.
In terms of the final project, I am thinking of exploring the issue of fake
identity creation on the Internet, perhaps comparing the creation of fake identities on Facebook or Myspace versus in other venues where the focus is less on an individual and more on a hobby. All of our readings this week were about trust, and I started wondering about trust on social networking sites where you feel you are talking to a specific person, but it may not be who you think you are talking to at all.
Just a quick comment on your final project:
ReplyDeleteYou may want to explore the motivation for getting fake identities on question/answer sites. On experienceproject.com, there is an entire section for anonymous contributions to confess your secrets. This is a very popular aspect of the site, and encourages participation because users don't have to claim responsibility. Also, users on AnswerBag may prefer not to sign in while looking for sexy or embarrassing answers to questions because it tracks activity. Fake identities may contribute to comfortableness.
Hi, Manda. How would you gauge or define a "fake" identity creation? Would you look at their profiles or how they create their names? Just wondering because there are a lot of ways we can be fake online. For example, I lied about my age on MySpace to "hide" from my students. Crazy kids still managed to find me.
ReplyDeleteI think the two sites that you explored lend themselves less to bonding social capital than to bridging. They would be great places to begin extending one's network like you pointed out in the career field related to either fashion and even website reviewing.
As far as trust go, I also agree that sites like those you reviewed/analyzed do not require such extensive trust mechanisms because of what is at risk such as one's money in the case of eBay. I wonder then, if people are more free to be less serious about their business on those sites. For example, I tend to be a little more goofy in my interactions on sites that do not have direct implications to who I am in real life. I wonder if that can be something to consider for your final project as well. Do we tend to be "fake" online in order to be a little more liberated in our language and behavior?
Yes you are right. The two sites you choose are more "bonding" than "bridging". I feel for any sites it's very difficult to analysis its structure without surfing in it for a log time.
ReplyDeleteI like your fake identity project! From a browsing perspective, people have become more aware of privacy issues to the extent that browsers now have built in "private browsing" modes (e.g. Safari, Google Chrome). From the server side, I agree with Carrie in that there is strong motivation to prevent your activity from being tracked. But I wasn't sure if privacy was your motivation, or if you were more interested in other reasons for deception (like j_mastin's). You can go from very small details (height, weight, age, etc) all the way up to an entirely fake person. Regardless, I think it'd be interesting stuff to find out about.
ReplyDeleteAs for your sites, I was really impressed at the amount of interactions in Poupee Girl, considering you had just joined. I wonder if the user base just happens to have a lot of highly active individuals, or maybe I'm not giving your fashion sense enough credit :) But it having a focus on fashion, where diversity and creativity mean everything, it makes sense that users on the site would be more likely to be more active.
Interesting final project idea. I mentioned the case of the Myspace Hoax on song's blog, you might want to look into it for your project. In this situation someone that created a fake account was charged with fraud for violating the terms of service. Here's an brief article about it: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/11/lori-drew-verdict-in-no-felonies-but-tos-violations-are-a-federal-crime.ars It seems creating fake profiles can be a criminal activity! We've yet to see the full repercussions of the verdict but it has the potential to be huge.
ReplyDeleteKar-Hai ---> I think the user base on Poupee Girl is super active. The site also has a database that shows pictures of the x most recently uploaded photos so it encourages other user discovery. I am also ridiculous with clothes :)
ReplyDeleteTo everyone else ---> Thank you for your comments!
It's difficult to relate some of the material from the week's articles to the assessments of the websites. I think different levels of trust probably factor into a site like stumbleupon in that users will tend rank others in terms of how consistently interesting their reviews/links are. Based on those ranks, I think users will pay more or less attention to the content of those users.
ReplyDeleteGood project proposal. I was wondering how you would measure the impact of the fake identities? Is there a some assertion that you'd make about creating fake accounts? It sounds like a tough but fun proposal.