week 2: communicating on the internet

I believe social media is nothing new to us com125 students, because we have grown up in a time where being part of a social networking site is akin to having a mobile phone or a television set at home, but there are some things I never learnt till this week in class.

First, social media statistics. Facebook reports that there are currently 350 active million users, and an article dated last year states that "Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February". The numbers are insane, but nothing beats hearing in class that universities are offering degrees in Social Media! What students will learn is "what people can do on Facebook and Twitter, and how they can be used for communication and marketing purposes". If you're unsure about how useful this degree is, there are in fact employers in the market looking for people with a background in social media, another example of how the rise of social media and the Internet affects our lives.

Thirdly, I learnt about Web 3.0, a semantic web which aims to understand the needs of its users. This is what Tim Berners-Lee dreamed of for Web 3.0, over ten years ago in 1999:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

Web 3.0 is not only able to predict your questions, but even give you answers based on what it knows you like. In some ways, it's like an online personal assistant, catering to your needs. Over time, people will develop individual online profiles based on their searches, and Web 3.0 is able to give personalised results for each individual. This means that, if two people type the exact same thing in the exact same search engine, the result that they get will be entirely different, each based on their individual profile/history.

Finally, RSS! I'd always seen it on websites and somehow never bothered to understand what exactly it was because it looked confusing. However, the commoncraft video managed to explain things really clearly to me, and I'm glad I finally know how it works. I think the technology behind it is similar to podcasting, because they both involve subscribing to a reader which will then provide a user with automatic updates to new content. Thinking of how the world is so advanced amazes me, and I'm looking forward to seeing what Web 3.0 can bring.