Tugging at the Seams: Understanding the Fabric of Social Sites

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Description/Abstract

Social networking websites are increasingly popular, yet it can be difficult to understand the way in which people use these spaces. This paper presents a systematic deconstruction method which grants insight into the nature of a given experience, and shows how this knowledge can be used to reconstruct experiences in new contexts. The authors apply the method to some facets of social sites, discussing how the functionality might be reconstructed in different contexts such as ubiquitous computing. We evaluate the method and discuss the findings, noting that if social material can be provided in new contexts, many more people can be included in interactions which are currently limited to the web.