I chose to join the social networking service StumbleUpon. It does not cater to a specific community; it is a general interest site through which users can select their personal interests from a list and browse through pages which appeal to those interests. Users rate postings, write reviews, and may add postings to a favorites list. Communication between users may take the form of comments on a particular page, or occur privately through the site’s mail service. Social objects include “fave” (favorite), review, and “stumbler” (a user of the site). The main goal of a user is to build a collection of pages on topics which interest him/her, and to review and rate pages positively or negatively, which affects how many other users may visit a particular page. (User pages with more favorites will usually get more hits.) Likewise, social verbs include “to fave” (mark as a favorite), to view, and to review. The social goals attained by these have been adequately described above. There are no units of currency or social status on this site; social status is measured through the prominence of one’s user profile (i.e. the number of hits it receives). Profiles may be customized with user interests, political and social beliefs, relationship status, etc., etc., and users may subscribe to others’ profiles based on these expressed interests as well as “favorites” lists. When I joined the site, I filled out a simple one-page form with username, email, and other basic info. Then I was taken to a page with a long checklist on which I could check off my personal interests (Arts, Cats, Bizarre/Oddities, etc.) so that the site could immediately take me to pages which matched those interests. Since I joined, I have added a few pages to my favorites list and talked to one person on the site.
My profile page.
The "Discover" page, showing recent user posts and the number of views for each.
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