I joined vistaheads.com, a resource for Microsoft Vista where members have access to MS Vista (and other Windows platform) tips, tricks, and information, and babycenter.com, a community for pregnancy and parenting information.
The main social capital mechanisms implemented in the vistaheads.com community are the buddy list and group membership.
Members are able to add users to their buddy list where they are able to see when their buddies are online and can send them private messages. Members are able to send private messages to several people on their buddy list at the same time as with sending announcements. The page that allows members to add buddies, has a link to the vistaheads.com members list that contains all the members in the community. The members list allows you to view a user’s profile.
The second social capital mechanism is the group membership, which allows community members to identify their professional group membership. For instance members can join the “Microsoft Most Valuable Professional” group to let vistaheads.com users know that they are a “Microsoft Most Valuable Professional”. This mechanism not only brings Microsoft MVP’s together but also helps to connect other professionals with Microsoft MVP’s.
The main social capital mechanisms in the babycenter.com community are the “my friends” list, groups, photo clubs, and “people”. As with the vistaheads.com community, members are able to add other members to their friends list and view their friend’s activities such as comments made. Unlike the vistaheads.com community, members are not able to see when their friends are online. Joining a group allows members to add posts and comments to threads within the group. Joining a photo club allows members to upload photos to different topics such as “baby’s first photos” and “pregnant bellies”. The “people” mechanism allows members to see which members have something in common with you, who the new members are, and which members are online.
The main trust mechanism in both vistaheads.com and babyceter.com is the profile that allows users to upload a personal image and personal information like your email address, area where you live, and a brief description. The other trust mechanisms in the vistaheads.com is the user’s “reputation” rating based on how many useful contributions you have made to the site and your thread ratings. The higher a user’s reputation and thread ratings, the more trust you have for that user.
One interesting trust mechanism implemented in the babycenter.com community is the ability of members to view the journals of other members. In these journals, members write about their personal thought and feelings about pregnancy and parenting. From these journals we are able to get a better idea of the thoughts and ideas of other members.
I found it more difficult to acquire social capital with the vistaheads.com than the babycenter.com community. In the vistaheads.com community, I posted a thread on the “Introduce Yourself” forum and posted a few questions. However, they have not received any replies as of Sunday 3/1/2009. I did notice that my questions were already asked on earlier threads.
In the babycenter.com site, I received two welcome notes from two of the site monitors. After posting a thread to the “Meet and Greet” forum, I received one friend invitation. I posted two questions, and a day after my post they received several comments. I was able to gain helpful information and emotional support from my interactions in the babycenter.com community.
With improving the vistaheads.com role/capital/trust mechanisms, the only improvement that I could think of is with the “Group Memberships” mechanism. This mechanism is one that does not seem to have much importance. There is only one group listed and does not have many members. According to the Williams article, “bridging may broaden social horizons or world views, or open up opportunities for information or new resources.” By placing more emphasis on “Group Memberships”, vistaheads.com may see an increase in more useful posts and comments. By including other groups like “system administrators”, “IT professionals”, “windows home users”, “application development”, etc. the vistaheads.com community will incorporate a larger portions of members to join groups, possibly encouraging them to share more information with other users.
With improving the babycenter.com role/capital/trust mechanisms, I thought that it would be nice to have a few pediatricians or nurses as site monitors and to explicitly identify themselves as pediatricians or nurses. This is not identified in the reading, but would help to increase trust in the community itself. The Massa, Allen et al., and Erylimaz et al. articles investigated the trust among users, but trust in the site itself could possibly increase a site’s integrity.
Ideas for Final Project:
I would like to investigate how social norms are established and how they can help site monitors to identify trolls, trolling, and invalid information.
How are social norms established in social network sites?
How can social norms help to identify trolls, trolling, and invalid information?
