#structural affordances

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Background and History:

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his roommates and fellow Harvard University student Eduardo Saverin. The social network itself was really limited at first, then it was expanded to make it available for users.

Facebook predecessor is Facemash. It was created by Mark Zuckerberg and three of his classmates - Andrew McCollum, Christ Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz. It was just a type of “hot or not” game. 2004, Mark wrote the code for a new website ‘theFacebook’ as he realized "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available ... the benefits are many." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook)

           In February 2004, Zuckerberg launched ‘theFacebook’ and within 24 hours they had “somewhere between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred registrants”. Although he was accused by 3 Harvard University seniors, he continued to develop the site and dropped out the Harvard University during his sophomore year. June 2004, ‘theFacebook’ was renamed to ‘Facebook’ after purchasing the domain name facebook.com for $200,000.

From October 1st, 2005 the network then expanded to Ivy League Universities, then out of the U.S Universities, and eventually high schools and companies. In 2007, Facebook had 100,000 business pages. 2010, the network invited users to become beta testers. As February 2011, Facebook had become the largest online photo and expected to have 100 billion photos by summer 2011. By that time, over 350 million users accessed Facebook thru their mobile phones.

          On March 12th, 2012 Yahoo! filed a suit in a U.S. federal court against Facebook.

          On April 24th, 2014 Facebook and Storyful announced a new feature called FB Newswire.

          Facebook headquarters complex are located in Menlo Park, California and its former headquarters are in downtown Palo Alto California

Facebook income was first positive in 2009 as they hired Sheryl Sandberg as the Chief Operating Officer in March 2008. In 2014, Facebook revenue was 12,466 million U.S dollar and the net income was 2,940. (http://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-revenue-and-net-income/)

Note: all the information was collected and quoted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook)

Features of Facebook:

Facebook is social networking site that allows users to create their own individual profile and page.  A person can construct a profile for free on the facebook website by creating an account with a username and password. You can chose to make your Facebook account private or public.  If you set your profile to private then only people you are friends with on Facebook will be able to see your profile and comments.  Whereas if you leave your profile on public then anybody can see your page/profile.  A major concern to privacy advocates is the ability of third party app developers to access your friendlist and other private information in your profile without even knowing.  People on facebook are given the freedom to follow any profile or page.  When you follow someone their posts and updates will show up on your news feed.  If the person choses to follow you back then they will see your posts and updates on their feed.  Facebook allows users to communicate with friends through messaging, posting pictures, liking or commenting on other people's pictures and putting information on your profile that you want people to know about you.  News feed is composed of status updates, photos, links, and app activity from people you follow on Facebook.

Performative Infrastructure:

Algorithms are used in Facebook by displaying the best list of content to its users’ on their newsfeed page. To make the best list Facebook uses a few criteria like your activity and interest, or what your friends liked/commented on and their interests. It also takes into account who is your best friend and how popular is the content that is currently being liked and commented on the most. Some of the things that Facebook uses algorithms for are their news feed, top friends, friend suggestions, graph search, sponsored posts/advertising, and year in review. Facebook uses information from its users’ interests and the content that they and their friends liked and commented on to give users the best list of news feed and help them with suggestions for friends or while searching. 

https://www.facebook.com/help/327131014036297/

Structural Affordances:

Information on Facebook such as pictures, status updates and comments can stay up for a long time. This is affordance is known as persistence and means that information or things people say can stay around.  A person can remove pictures and other information in their profile they have posted but some things can be saved by others who have seen it. Information such as pictures can be easily duplicated on facebook.  This affordance is called replicability.  Users can repost these duplicates and people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from the original.  Scalability is very limited on facebook compared to other social networking sites because on facebook you must get approval to follow other users on Facebook.  Users can broadcast their content to other users to try attract more followers. Profiles can be searched through search engines such as google and yahoo.  On Facebook users can search for other people and follow them or check their page out if it’s a public page.  The use of search engines to find other people’s profiles could lead to privacy issues since some people have personal thing in their profiles.

Facebook does have all 3 dynamics Invisible audiences, Collapsed Contexts, The blurring of public and private (Danah Boyd (2010).”Social Networks sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics and Implications.”In Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites(ed. Zizi Papacharissi)

           Facebook can be used as an environment to meet new people, a place for individuals to express themselves to the others through means of communication; an advertise or commercial page, etc. it cannot be limited.

           This social network has changed users’ participation. People can now access to unlimited contents just by looking up specific matters or using hashtags. A lot of pages about specific matters are created which will benefit people interested in it. It also gives suggestions as the users update their profiles. The more details people put online about themselves the more accurately Facebook will give suggestions (and predictions). With its algorithms Facebook has succeeded in connecting people who have same taste, habit and so on. This success has attracted more and more users and continue to ‘shape’ their participation.

           Facebook makes itself a prime place for public communication because it allows users’ to freely message and view other peoples content. Facebook also has a feature to create specific pages which allows users’ to freely express their opinions with other people that share the same view or are able to comment on other pages that they disagree with. For more of a romantic type of communication facebook allows users’ to send private message to others.

Possibilities and functionality in a poly media environment, Facebook allow users to write posts, update status, upload videos and pictures, send messages with their customized privacy. Especially, their unique function is enable users to set up pages, groups to share ideas, communicate and to have their own community they want to build. Also, if some sources contain inappropriate information, media, they can be reported or banned.

The functionality of Facebook has unlimited possibilities that nowadays people can have multiple accounts, speak their own ideas, opinion anytime, discussing with the other about politics, society or privately discuss in closed group. Users can also commercially advertise or sell online products through facebook pages.

By: Kaela Fiesta and Larissa Reynoso

Brief Background/History

Yelp  was founded in 2004 to assist people to find local businesses like restaurants, doctors, and hair stylists and events in a specific area/vicinity. Besides searching for businesses, users are able to post reviews and photos of businesses, read and rate other users’ reviews, and follow and message other users.

Creating a Profile

To construct a profile on yelp the user would need to give their first/last name, email address, zip code, and a password of their choosing. The user can also sign up using their Facebook account or their Google Plus account. After creating a login the user can optionally add a photo, birthday, and gender. Name, photo, years of membership, gender, general location and posted content are public unless the user limits their information in the privacy settings (located in settings).

A Friends/Followers list can be created through commenting and liking similar businesses, logging in through Facebook or searching other users by name. All friends can see your recent activity or “feed” if you allow them to via privacy settings.

People on yelp interact by checking into the same businesses, reading each other’s comments on specific businesses (usually in the form of a review), messaging one another or liking the same businesses. Users generally create their own content by visiting, searching or giving feedback on specific businesses.

Stream based update/newsfeed display content in real time, meaning newer activity appears first and older activity follows in chronological order. Content can be anything from recent reviews, check-ins, comments and pictures posted (of businesses).  

‘Performative Infrastructures’

Algorithms are a sequence of codes that commands a computer or system what functions to perform. Yelp uses algorithms to find a specific type of business in a city or area given by the user. Yelp also offers a feature where users can filter their search. For example, they can search places that have a certain rating (1-5 stars), that are open at a certain time, that is within a certain distance, or that are within a certain price range. When a user looks at a selected business that Yelp suggests, recommended reviews are visible- usually those that are rated most helpful or have a high rating are shown. Yelp also records one’s recent views and suggests for places similar to what one searches.

Structural Affordances

Persistence: Everything that a user says about a business stays on the business yelp page in order to provide a well rounded review about the business. User content also stays on the user’s profile and feed. Anything can be deleted but if not it will remain within yelp’s pages.

Replicability: More than one user can produce the same ratings, experiences and reviews.

Scalability: Not all reviews or activity may be seen by a larger audience (outside your friend/followers list) but it is possible to achieve micro fame if the user’s activity continuously has a large following or interest (typically really helpful reviews tend to have a large following).

Searchability: Yelp provides users with information/helpful tips on any businesses prior to visiting them. Instead of going into a business blind users get an idea of what kind of experience they will have upon visiting the establishment.      

Emerging Dynamics and Social Practices

Yelp is a Participatory Media Site. Users shape the platform by reviewing local businesses. With more reviews, users are able to search places and read others’ experiences with a business that one could potentially go to. If a user finds another person in which they share similar opinions about a business, the user may follow the other person to view future reviews on other businesses.

Polymedia Environment

Yelp’s platform enables users to connect with other users who have similar interests in specific business or want to know more about a business.