"Keep in Touch"

I go to London for a week and what do I get? Yep, a mailbox full of spam. Funnily enough though, a received 3 separate emails, apparently from different friends of mine (automated emails showing as being from these people), inviting me to join their website, whereby everyone registers and they send invitations to everyone they know, who in turn do the same, and eventually you have an online community of everyone you ever knew, ever. Along the same line as Friends Reunited.

All good in theory, except I always find myself feeling cautions with these sites. Firstly, the age old question arises of What are they planning to do with my email address? It wouldn’t be the first time Ive been suckered into giving my email address to what sounds like a brilliant service, only to find myself receiving 10 more unsolicited emails per day.



http://www.sms.ac, http://www.wayn.com and http://www.bebo.com are the 3 I was invited to join. Bebo.com just gave me the impression of being a Friends Reunited clone. WAYN (Where Are You Now?) was one I’d heard a lot about from other people, so I was more inclined to check deeper – however, after giving my AOL mail address for registration, it asked for my AOL password – apparently so it can check my address book and see if any of my friends have already joined. SMS.ac offered a similar ‘service’ after giving them my Hotmail address…

What the..?! As a long term internet user, Im used to being constantly reminded not to give out my password to anyone, and suddenly Im being asked for it as part of a legitimate service. Firstly – mixed message. To someone less savy about internet security, they may not think twice about it. And maybe SMS.ac and WAYN.com are legitimate, but other wont be – is it a good idea to condition beginners or less knowledgeable users that its OK to do this? Another thing that got me is that my hotmail address is known only to a few friends – ie, I don’t get spam. Ive kept this account clean for 2 years. Suddenly its stored on a websites database – how long now before the spam starts coming?

Online Gaming

I read an article in a newspaper this week, referring online gamers as an ‘ever expanding community of gambling addicts’, going on to push the blame squarely on the explosion of poker and casino sites (just a search of “online poker” on Google brings back 8,490,000 results), as well as the recently publicized change in the law to make it easier for people to use register for and use casinos.

What I find interesting is the fact that they consider online gamers to be part of a community. I play a lot of poker online but never considered myself to be part of any sort of community when I’m playing poker, but it has provoked a few thoughts.



What makes a community a community? Initially, I would have thought that sustained contact between individual players would be necessary and even regular interaction between players, but that’s not the case. Most casino internet programs do not provide a chat function as most games, although being played alongside several people, are based on a 1 on 1 game with the dealer – such as roulette, blackjack and others. Poker games however do allow for chat, although this is not always utilized – I’ve sat through 2 hour games where not a single thing was said, but then others where certain people won’t keep quiet, although the latter is certainly rarer. But there is no facility to keep contact with people, such as ‘friends lists’ or anything similar – in fact, the poker room owners would prefer you didn’t socialize – gaining friends playing poker increases the risk of cheating.

So it seems as far as a community goes it appears to be doomed from the outset – lack of communication mediums, and where there is a means, it’s heavily governed and kept to a minimum. However, games such as poker do show some characteristics of a community. After playing the same poker rooms for over 2 years, I’ve noticed a fair few times that I’m playing games against people whose names I recognize, entirely by coincidence. In the same way that in a real life offline community, people may not recognize each other at first but go on to ‘bump into each other’ unexpectedly. Also, in the way that the same people may regularly flock to a particular message board or chat room, Poker room users will often be seen taking part in the same weekly competitions so they may see each other.

On the face of this evidence though, I wouldn’t change my mind – I still don’t consider my online poker playing as playing a part in a community, and definitely not in the casino rooms. There is not enough potential for players to sustain contact and interact in any way other than the predefined game structure.

Yafro

OK I’m thinking now I have to publish my Blog. I get the impression from the COOL forums that everyone is well underway, so here I go.

I’ve started by taking a close look into a picture community I’m a member of, based at http://www.yafro.com . The concept is simple – upload pictures, attach a description, people leave comments, essentially a blog system itself but with the emphasis on pictures rather than text content. Also known as a moblog, it was devised as a way of posting photos when mobile, or on the go (mobile-weblog). It allows pictures be uploaded from PC’s, camera phones via picture message, etc.

The amazing thing I find with this site is that unlike a conventional message board or chat room, whereby rooms or ‘meeting places’ were defined by the people that ran the website, people were able to create their own communities by simply posting their pictures to ‘friends only’, creating their own ‘yafro clubs’ with different levels of private and public membership. On surfing through different peoples sites, it also becomes obvious how fire with porn the site is… seriously, this is the place to go if you want to find pictures of average people naked!! Lots of people seem to have healthy accounts, but only one picture visible of them naked or something (when I say people I mainly mean girls), then it struck me – teasers!! Its funny to think, but these people seemed to be releasing one or two pictures into the publis domain, get a few new ‘followers’ so to speak, who would comments on their pictures, then revert back to posting privately! So another use for yafro seems to be to create communities with the single aim of massaging peoples egos!!! Allegedly….

But inevitably, a system like this that is relatively unmoderated breeds its own problems, such as the potential for child pornography, etc. This is partly highlighted in the fact that the most viewed club is ‘Report stalkers and perverts here’ (http://www.yafro.com/clubs/reportstalkersandpervertshere) where users ‘warn’ other users about people posting illegal pictures. However, even this seems to have corrupted, crossing the border of illegal pictures and objectionable pictures – some threads accuse users of posting child porn, but the girls clearly aren’t underage… So the fanatical moral users end up squaring up against the ‘free peace brigade’ and every post becomes a debate. In a sense, this has, in itself, created a community of people very different coming together towards a different goal. Worryingly though, within 5 minutes on the message board I found the name of a club (http://www.yafro.com/clubs/y0ungg1rlsnudeornot) showing mainly OK pictures, but some of some girls that looked worryingly young. Scary too that this site has 886 members.

The question arises, is it healthy to have such an easy medium for sharing photos available to all, for free, and unmoderated? For the majority of people the answer is yes, but to allow these people their freedom, the bad few will always get through. I dont like the idea of being watched, but Im even less happy about people posting pictures of girls I don’t consider to look any older than 12!!

The conclusion: Any medium of communication can breed its own problems, but largely the site just seems to be people of all ages interacting – nude or otherwise!! It’s a great concept, but not one that is any better than a conventional blog – just different. A picture can speak a thousand words, and Yafro tries to harness that.

#1

This blog is set up as part of my Communities Online module at Leeds Met University.

The aim of this blog is to record my thoughts on a number of issues, all relating around online communities and discussions from the lectures.

The format of this module surprised me at first, I think I must have misread the module guide - I was under the impression this module was coursework and exam based - though it turns out the marks come from this 12 week reflective blog, plus an analytical exercise. Not that I’m complaining, anything’s better than sitting through an exam...

I’ve taken a quick look at the WebCT discussion forums, and it looks pretty dull at the moment. A couple of people look like they’re trying to have their presence felt – even if it means posting a lot of unrelated comments. As I started on this course as a full time student a few years ago and dropped it to part time, I know a few people who have taken part in similar exercises and I’ve been told it will most likely get very cliquey… a few people who post like they have nothing better to do, with the majority of people steering well clear. It will be interesting to see which route these forums have head down in a few months…

To get some things clear, I don’t have a problem with online communities. I was an avid user of chat rooms ‘back in the day’ when I was 15 and using AOL. I’ve been a member of several forums for years, such as Tech help boards (to aid the web design work I do for a living), a picture blog, and other various forums. I HAVE found in the past few years that I’ve become detached to this method of communication, and am definitely losing interest. This isn’t due to the standards of the message boards, but more the fact that I have more important things to do with my time – Uni, paid work etc. I’m looking forward to this module as I’m doing something I’ve never done before, which is look at online communities in an objective sense and attempt to analyse their contribution to the feeling of ‘community’. Perhaps it may even get me back on track and turn me into an Internet Addict again ;)