Social Media Design 101

Assignment 1: Review of a Web 2.0 application / site. [10%]

Procedure: Select for review a Web 2.0 site, e.g. from listings at Web2List (http://web2list.com), Mashable (http://mashable.com), or Killer StartUps (http://killerstartups.com). Explore, describe, and assess the full functionality of the site. If registration is required, then create an account for yourself. Do NOT simply repeat what may be written on the ‘home’ or ‘about’ pages: you need to provide good evidence that you have USED the site and have in-depth understanding of what the site offers the user. My suggestion is that you structure your review as follows:

• Name of the site
• URL of the site
• A short description (e.g. one paragraph) of what specific service the site offers to its users
• An identification of the specific features of the site (e.g. by reference to Tim O’Reilly’s original article, follow-up article, or to the Wikipedia entry for Web 2.0) that indicate that it is ‘Web 2.0′
• A step-by-step walkthrough of using the site (including any registration process)
• An informal assessment of how well the site performs (e.g., if a site for displaying user photos, then how simple was the photo upload process? were you able to resize or crop photos online? could you tag photos? etc)

Rationale: [1] this is your opportunity to practice writing your first entry to your blog; [2] this first review will, coming as it does at the beginning of the module, reflect the experience of the (intelligent) naive user, and this is important: what you will be capturing in your review is the user experience as intended by the site creator.