Web 2. 0 application namely YouTube Essay Example for Free

Web 2. 0 application namely YouTube Essay The second group had expressed interest in other social networking tools aside from facebook and myspace. The other respondents, particularly the Chinese people indicated that they are not familiar with facebook and myspace and only very people have heard about facebook and myspace. Very few if not all had used facebook and myspace. On the other hand, they had indicated that they used Xinlang blog and MSN Space. MSN Spaces is a social networking tool developed by Windows (O’Reilly, 2005). In addition to this, they utilize MSN messenger as the main tool for sending and receiving messages from their classmates or friends. They had indicated that they used Xinlang blog and MSN messengers as a tool for chatting online and having online group meetings. In addition to this, the good thing about using MSN Space is that they are able to stay in touch with friends and get in touch with new news. In addition to this, they are able to acquire the latest photos of interesting events very much the same as what the first group had encountered. In summary, both groups generally have the same uses for social networking tools but utilize very different social networking tools. Going into another part of the discussion, the study focused on flickr – another Web 2. 0 application being used by the group. In general, Flickr is a Web 2. 0 application that can provide a venue for photo sharing and is also a web services suite and is also a social networking community medium. In addition to this, Flickr has been known as a photo repository (Anderson, 2007). Students that would want to share academic related pictures opt to utilize flickr as a means of uploading pictures and sharing them to their classmates, at the same time classmates and other peers can comment on it. The popularity of flickr has been furthered because of the innovations posed by online community tools that allow photos to be tagged and be searched by â€Å"folksonomic† means. According to recent studies, flickr is quickly approaching almost one billion images. According to the first group, all members of the group weren’t really utilizing flickr as a means of sharing photos to and fro each other. With this, they could not provide any substantial comments particular to flickr. Some of the group shares their photos in facebook since it would be easier only to maintain a single account instead of having to maintain so many accounts. Students indicated that their current needs only require them to share a certain amount of pictures thus there is no need for a photo repository account as facebook and other social networking tasks responds to the task adequately. Group 2 had the same response as that of the first group when asked about photo sharing repositories such as flickr. They mainly utilize their social networking tools as a means of sharing information to and fro their partners as a means of being able to upload their photos, whether academic or non-academic related. One thing that was noted by the moderator is the sentiment of many of those use their social networking sites in sharing tools is the capacity of the site to upload and download pictures. Other than that, they indicated no intention of utilizing flickr in the near future, unless there may be academic related tasks that would create for the utilization of such a photo sharing repository in order to achieve the academic goals set. The next part of the focus group discussion focused on another Web 2. 0 application namely YouTube (Anderson, 2007). According to the discussion, most of participates in Group 1 are quite fond about this service, and they think that the benefit of Youtube is the venue it provides for people to share videos to a very diverse audience. Video learning such as the one in open universities can be thought of sharing this same kind of concept. A person in the group pointed out that the good thing about Youtube is that they contain a variety of videos that are categorized in genres and topics which can help while the user is searching for his/her desired video. On one note, it can be approximated as facebook as people can make an online video diary so that people can view what a person wants to be viewed and essentially it is quicker and is more interactive as videos can cover a considerable number of human senses. Similarly, educators can utilize this to present learnings that are otherwise very difficult to be explained by using only words and pictures. One person from the group prefers to get educational videos and documentaries from the network, instead of having to buy them. In focusing on the supposed future of Youtube as seen by the eyes of the respondents, she believes that the video sharing network would remain a very popular cultural tool in the future, especially if the internet connection becomes ever so faster and more efficient in order to upload, download and view videos (Anderson, 2007).