Extra Credit-ICQ

 ICQ is an online media company providing communication tools, content and services to an online community of millions of users worldwide (www.icq.com). ICQ is a form of instant messaging just like gmail, yahoo and google. It was established in summer ’96 under the name Mirabilis. It was founded by four young males in their twenties. The reason for this creative website is because they knew that people were connected to the Internet but not interconnected. They wanted to build a community within this service so everyone can feel love and be one. This technology just helps bring people together in a world of information, fun and entertainment. Also it was about networking in a more effective way because to them Instant Messaging was the missing link. This technology made peer-to-peer communication possible! This company had fallen under the great AOL which made success in great ways. ICQ had built communities where people can socialize, communicate and simply hangout with everybody, everywhere. This new program wants to attract any crowd who uses this program but more to the young. Attracting the young is easy because each and every one is up to date on technology nowadays and what to do with it. ICQ gives you everything that you ever wanted because you can play games, share messages, videos, pictures, and more. You are able to download this on your mobile: iPhone, Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7, Java, Bada and Mobile-Web Chat. As it was said by Campbell & Park article that mobile devices or mobile communication plays a central role in mass communication and that social change in our society result in the rapid increase for the use of these mobile technologies. With this program at hand, change will come. But also you can have the opportunity to download it on your toolbar, skins, Mac and Linux. This is a free program that many users can get too. As statistics have shown that there are over 42 million active users, 425 million downloads, available in 16 languages, 47 percent female and 53 male users. This is a great program! Everyone should get on this and get out the comfort zone. You can have fun with this program in many ways and make the best out of it. It’s the future of tomorrow and so I would like you to be part of the future!

http://www.icq.com/en 

Wikispaces

The best thing about communication on the Internet is that is virtually fluid (pun intended) - especially today where the boundaries of being privileged to know and share content is no longer favored to a particular group of people. Today, people take pride in being the owners and controllers of the information available on the Internet - and applications and social networking websites encouraging those freedoms. Wikispaces, an open collaboration website tool similar to popular encyclopedia based website Wikipedia.

Wikispaces appeals mostly to those trying to build communities surrounding education, business, and social change platforms. In the interest of this blog, we will focus on how Wikispaces facilitates new ways to communicate for educational purposes. Many students, especially of higher education, are familiar in some capacity with a wiki and the Wikispaces website. My first introduction to the website was during my sophomore year, where a professor needed a trustable application to monitor the participation of users in assigned groups. My professor was particularly interested in the feature of the wiki that showed the procession of published pages; the timeframe of edits and who those authors were. If there was any way to monitor the participation of someone in team, especially online, would be through timestamps.

Another feature of Wikispaces that appealed to my professor was Wikispaces integration of other applications - like powerpoint slides, chat widgets, and other forms of multimedia. If you ever needed a centralized platform, to share special file types, that can be accessible to almost anyone then this computer medium would apply to you. While Wikispaces boosts all these great features, the core of it that is for everyone. Communication, no matter the medium that it transmitted through, depends on the development of interaction and relationships between people. Wikispaces understands this core concept, and provide tools for people, educators especially, to consume information in a unified way.

Dropbox: Community Building through File Syncing

Dropbox is the easiest way to sync your files over all of your devices. This includes your work computer, desktop, mobile phone, and any other computers you want to sync with. Devices always seem to break at the most inconvenient times, but with Dropbox, your files won’t be lost. The “cloud” is the future of Web 3.0 and beyond, where less and less is stored on your personal hardware. While cloud storage is not new, Dropbox offers one of the most developed, yet intuitively clean and simple cloud storage utilities. Once you install it on your computer, you simply drop your files into the new Dropbox folder found in the Favorites section of Windows Explorer, so you don’t have to go out of your way to open up any other program or log into an account.

File syncing can be used on a personal level, by having all of your files backed up and easily accessible on the cloud, but the possibilities for collaboration with friends, family, and coworkers make this software particularly exciting. In your Dropbox folder there is a Public subfolder. This makes it easy to share files with a broad group of people in one place, at the same time, instead of tediously sending out individual files to each person. This grants affordances of consolidation of information, as well as the affordance of easily broadcasting or disseminating your multimedia and documents. The Public subfolder allows for community building through providing a curated list of files which are as visible or invisible to others as the user wishes. In addition to the Public subfolder, you can create other folders and share these folders with specific people or groups of people. This allows the user to control the information that is available to any given person. Once a folder is shared, all files added to the folder are automatically synced with everyone connected.

Speaking of community building, Dropbox’s website fosters the development of the larger community of all Dropbox users. It does this in two major ways, one being the traditional method of hosting community forums. This allows for users to create and enter discussions with other users as well as receive feedback from forum moderators. It has a personable yet still comfortably anonymous method for posting, in that posters are labeled by their real first name and last initial. The second, more innovative method Dropbox uses to promote community building is their Votebox. Votebox allows users to raise issues about the current software or suggest new innovations for Dropbox. After an initial suggestion is posted, others can vote in support of these innovations.

So you can look at Dropbox as an intuitive, customizable file syncing and cloud storage tool. However you can also look at as a new way to easily communicate with individuals and groups through user-friendly sharing of files. Updating Public or shared folders are automatic and hassle-free, so you are keeping the people that matter to you in the loop just as easily as you would save a file to a folder.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a website and a short blog platform, which allows users to post text, audio, pictures, quotes and videos to their tumblelog. It is said that Tumblr is to other social media websites, as texting is to email, short and direct. Tumblr is one of the 10th largest social media websites, with much similarity to Twitter and Facebook. Tumblr combines Twitter and Facebook, in a sense that it is a blog site but also allows you to follow others such as celebrities and friends. By following others you can comment on there blogs and other posts much easier then on Twitter, and its not as personal as Facebook. One can completely customize their Tumblr blog with background pictures, their desired font, and much more. This makes self presentation and image management all up to the user. Tumblr is the new way to blog and is catching on quickly with users who originally used Twitter. Tumblr makes it easy for one to post blogs, pictures, and see the comments all one one page. Tumblr is an interactive for of communication by allowing users to comment on others blogs. The account holder can make their Tumblr as private as they would like making your blog free to the public or private to only other users one accepts. To sign up for Tumblr one must register with an email address and password, and once complete you can start blogging right away. Tumblre might be the next best thing, so get a jump start and sign up today.

Chatter

Chatter is a great tool that helps people conveniently collaborate at work. It is a tool made by Salesforce, one of the biggest names in enterprising communication webapps. At first glance Chatter looks similar to Twitter or Facebook with the profiles, status updates, and streaming in-line comments. However, what makes it different is it’s a private social network that is just for your business. What I mean by that is you connect with your co-workers and people within your organization and everything within that network is kept private from others. This helps with community building, by making your business or company more connected and accessible to each other. Only people with a verified company email address can join your company network. This can save businesses a lot of time by having little meetings on Chatter to prepare for presentations, or to discuss future ideas, especially since you can communicate while people are in different places geographically. Once you join on Chatter, you can make a profile which helps you get to know more about your colleagues and also have them learn more about you. You can also post and share large files for times where you need an employee’s opinion before a meeting or to proofread a presentation.

Recently they have added new features to Chatter to improve the convenience for connecting with important parts of your business. They made applications for your cell phones, iPad, and your desktop computer to conveniently preview files and share new updates. They have also added customer groups, to securely connect to customers and respond and obtain feedback. Salesforce has really created Chatter to make communicating throughout the business easier than ever. With being able to connect, message, and communicate from anywhere, anytime, while just being on the computer really transforms the way a company can work.

Second Life

Second life is a new place to connect with new people online. Second life is exactly what it sounds like, it is a second life for yourself. You create a virtual creation of yourself where you can be anything that you want to be. You can shop at stores, throw exotic parties, go scuba diving and a whole lot more. The homepage for second life is extremely interactive by showing quick videos of all of the amazing things that this site can do. There are labels at the top of the website and keywords at the bottom so it is very easy to find what you are looking for. The website is designed to make you interested at first glance by showing video clips of created avatars. You can then click on the label on the top called What is Second Life? and then there is a video of all the things that you can do on the site. You start up by creating an avatar and uploading your profile and then the whole world is in your hands. There is a help label at the top of the homepage that can easily assist you if you are having any issues. Second life is a way to get away from your boring everyday life, and it is a way to get out there and do what ever you want to do. It is a social website so while adventuring around the world you can meet new people and start up relationships. The homepage is designed to show you how quick and easy it is to sign up. You can connect your second life to your Facebook so you can easily see what your friends are doing. On the bottom of the homepage, you can like second life on Facebook and you can also follow it on twitter. Second life is a fun interactive virtual world where you can be whatever you want to be.