Chelsea - Stamford Bridge

Chelsea - Stamford Bridge

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

What is it about About.me?

After the experience with the first blog post (not an exercise related one), I have decided to write a second one and this time the trigger to the topic was another classmate’s post, Kimberly Fenton’s. As you might understand from the heading I’m writing about the About.me social network. I will be honest in saying that I have never even heard of it before I have been introduced in this module, #UOSM2008, and to be honest the first impression wasn't good. It has lots of similarities with other social networks, such as:
  • Similar to LinkedIn it sends everyday notifications of the people that have viewed your about.me page.
  • People can send each other notifications stating that they have “complimented” you and it is very similar to dating websites’ “Wink” button.
  • It also does provide a news feed and sends you a weekly updates and news.
  • Etc.
However, a question may arise in our heads, whether what does it differ About.me from others? What is special about it? There is one feature: it allows a user to connect all social networks related to a person, in one place. And I will be honest, this is quite an awesome idea (sorry my informal language). At times when we feel lost among this amount of social networks, at times when we even forget the usernames and passwords for every single one, and when we are struggling to keep the data up-to-date on all of them at the same time, this solution is just brilliant. However, for me personally, not the idea itself gives the interest in this social media, but the simplicity of presentation standing behind it. As you can see from the picture below, there are just a few lines of text summarizing yourself, basic contact information and self-explanatory icons that refer you to respective social network websites. Isn’t that simple?

And last but not least I want to mention one special icon that not everyone might be familiar with. It is the very last one in my list of social networks and I was quite surprised to see it there. It is the GitHub, and for those who don’t know it is a web-based hosting service for software development projects that uses the Git revision control system (https://github.com/). Basically, it is like a Dropbox, but for coding, and for me as an IT person it is everything. Just imagine that I can make my code public and share with anyone and everywhere.


After the actual creation of the About me page, a mutual feedback was given by two of our classmates, Kimberly Fenton and Francesca Gerard. Below you can see our conversion via Twitter:

Based on their feedback, following changes were implemented:The amount of text summarising my personality was reduced, in order to not to make it boring.
  • Telephone number as a contact details was removed, because of privacy concerns.
  • Words, such as “major” or “furthermore” were paraphrased to look more modern.
  • The font style for the heading (name and surname) was made a bit simpler and the content was proofread.
  • And finally, the background image was changed.
To view all the changes applied and the profile itself, please follow the link: http://about.me/eldar.alasgarov  






Sunday, April 13, 2014

"Sign Up or Connect with Facebook"

One of our classmates’, Tim Hodgkins’, comment on my first blog post have triggered me to write this post. In his comment, Tim has mentioned that by using one online profile you can not only use it within one social media, but also use it to sign up for different applications and software. I have agreed with his point, but by that time I wasn't quite focused on it. Recently, however, throughout my development in the area of social media, thanks to our module, I have realized the true power of any single social media. To make it completely clear for a reader, I’m speaking about the moment when you have accessed a website or an app and they ask you to Sign Up OR, which is more important, to Log In using your current social network details, e.g. Facebook, Google+, Twitter. Just for the sake of curiosity, I have decided to search for this kind of applications that allow Log In via social media profile and as my bases I have focused mostly on Facebook. My choice is not surprising as 51% of sites and apps prefer Facebook as a social login (Picture and Reference are provided below).


The results were just unbelievable as there were more than 2 million results for the search request “Sign Up or Login via Facebook”. After the fifth page of search results my tabs in the browser were full of examples and I've decided to stop as it started to get meaningless. Here are the most popular (in my opinion) examples of the websites and app that allow a Facebook Login as a Sign Up:
  1. Instagram (http://instagram.com/) – obviously, as it is part of the Facebook it is not a surprise that it allows Sign Up via Facebook.
  2. Netflix (https://www.netflix.com/Login?locale=en-GB) A huge American Internet on-demand provider with millions of subscribers.
  3. Prezi (https://prezi.com/) A very powerful online and desktop presentation creation tool. There is nothing to be compared with normal PowerPoint slides. This is just a whole new level.
  4. Spotify (https://www.spotify.com/uk/login/) a commercial music streaming service which has direct interaction with record labels, such as Sony.
  5. Yahoo(https://help.yahoo.com/kb/groups/sign-facebook-google-account-sln2077.html?impressions=true) Sounds weird, but yes, you can log in to Yahoo using your Facebook or Google account.
  6. About.me (https://about.me/login) Another social network which I have discovered. Gathers in itself all possible social networks related to one person.
  7. Stackoverflow (https://stackoverflow.com/users/signup) – Not everyone might know, but the StackOverFlow website is the second home for any kind of developer (programmer) in the world. Whenever a developer has an issue, he/she doesn't go to YouTube, Google or Books, they go to stackoverflow.com.
  8. Vimeo (https://vimeo.com/log_in) – Another quite famous video-sharing website, which has quite a lot of similarities with the YouTube.
  9. Slideshare (https://www.slideshare.net/login) As it can be understood from its name, it is a slide sharing website, which contains in itself public slides that are uploaded all around the world.
  10. Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/login/) is a visual discovery tool that people use to collect ideas for their different projects and interests” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinterest). Even Wikipedia gives a better explanation than I do.

And these are just a drop in the ocean of the websites and apps that allow this kind of Sign Ups. However, it is time to state that there are two sides of this kind of online facilities. On one side, you are saving tons of your personal time on everyday Sign Up pages, which are annoying. However, on the other side, you allow a complete access to your profile to the app. They have not only the access to your profile, but even the permission to post news on your behalf. The limit till which you consider to allow this kind of things is up to a user, and only he/she can decide on it. Every person has his/her level of privacy. Personally, I use my fake online Facebook profile, just in case J.