Dissertation and Honours Project

The End is where we Start From

When initially thinking about my Dissertation and Honours Project I didn’t have a clue what I could do or what to achieve. Thankfully after my first week it became clear, I should use what I know best and what I know best has became of recent, social networks. Having immersed myself in them completely the past six or seven months I have developed an interest about how people use them and also for what purpose do they use them. The two main social networks I user are of course the worlds most popular right now; ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook’. To begin with it was Twitter I used most but recently because of the power of one particular application called ‘TweetDeck’ I can access them both at the exact same time.

To explain what these social networks are would be a good place to start. Twitter at it’s core is simplistic and effective, you tell the world what you are doing in 140 characters or less. You may think these ‘tweets’ (a tweet is what an update is called) are trivial for you but people genially what to know what you are up to and will reply with witty comments, at least that is what one hopes for with Twitter. If people find you interesting they will follow your tweets and your social network grows, and you can follow them in return. Twitter has become highly successful recently because of the celebrity factor, and what this means is that celebrities have joined twitter and other users have been following their tweets in the thousands because it is an outlet for celebrities to give their personal views and just to basically let us know what they are doing in every day life without having an interview, Twitter makes them more human in basic terms. I personally joined because I heard Stephen Fry talk about and it sounded like a fantastic way to get my thoughts out there without writing blog articles and which may not even be seen by anyone. Facebook is much more involved because you can do much more with this social network, (which in some cases isn’t a good thing). Facebook is more established on the Internet because it has been around since 2004, if people aren’t on Twitter they are more than likely on Facebook. One could make the broad assumption that because Twitter is so new that only the more heavy users of the Internet use it, people who write blogs and like to get their views known are found on twitter that is for sure (myself included!).

Therefore knowing that the topic of my Project and Dissertation will be Social Networking how can I narrow this down to focus on just Twitter and Facebook? Well I have decided to look into mobile usage of these networks with phones and laptops. Personally I use my iPhone all the time, I hate it when I don’t have a good network connection because it basically means I can’t access my Twitter feed or Facebook updates quick or at all in some cases. Naturally using my interests I have decided to create an iPhone application that will allow a user to update not only Twitter but Facebook at the same time thus saving on time. iPhone development is a huge market right now and I shall be exploring this as well during the course of my Dissertation and Project because there are hundreds if not thousands of apps for social networks out there.

There are a few steps involved with this Project before I even begin to program the application, I shall list them now:

• The first thing I have to do of course is learn the basics of Objective-C the programming language of the iPhone. I shall do this by learning from a book and also by using for the first time iTunes U. iTunes U is a collection of academic podcasts containing lectures and other subject material from universities all over the world.
• I shall need to then do a lot of market research and find out what people need from an application like this one and how it should look.
• Then I have to design the interface using various techniques including paper-prototyping.

This project shall take all the knowledge I have learnt over the years in the computing field and I am really excited to begin.

If That is the Answer what is the Question?

Knowing the end game of my project is all well and good but I need to come up with my research question for my Dissertation. I have considered many aspects of Social networking so far and still feel that it will need to be refined into something more precise. My general thinking however is along the lines of the following:

• Has the advent of mobile computing changed the way we access the internet?
• Have Twitter and Facebook become such a success because we can access them on mobile applications with such devices as the iPhone and the Blackberry?

I have already began some simple research into these areas including checking the rankings of Twitter and Facebook with ‘Alexa.com’ which is a website which ranks the popularity of websites throughout the world. I will also be investigating reports of the use of  Twitter in different ways and the trends of use. An interesting one which I shall be going into more detail is that a rescue of a mountain side was made possible through the use of Twitter! I shall of course be exploring the technical reason for why these social networks have been successful especially on newer mobile devices such as the iPhones ease of use, market power and dominance.