We Heart Pictures
March 7, 2013 21 Comments
What does harnessing of collective intelligence in web2.0 means?
According to Tim O’Reilly’s article, harnessing collective intelligence is the act of connecting to each user to harness the power of themselves. It represents the interactions with users by embracing the power of the web and to play an active role to a place where it stores collective work from web users.
In relation to understanding deeper on how to motivate users to participate in collective undertakings varies alongside with what I will mention/introduce to you in the website. Eric Bonabeau states that incentives (rewards, free gifts, promotions) are widely used in web applications to simulate user participants/engagements.
WeHeartIt is a website that allow users to host their images and videos online. It is a popular site that is similar to Flickr. Their similarities are uploading, discovering and sharing of images. WeHeartIt was one of the web application that matches the habit of harnessing collective intelligence.
How does WeHeartIt contributes to the pattern: harnessing of collective intelligence?
According to Turkish Online Journal,
What are required in harnessing of collective intelligence are
- users adding value and
- network effects helps to magnify the value that the user adds.
WeHeartIt enables users to add value to the website by uploading pictures that they wish to share to other users through active participation. By active participation, it means being able to ‘like’, ‘comment’ and ‘share’ the picture.
Tagging is another form of term of using keywords that the users choose to classify their pictures. The picture below shows a form of different tags (Related Tags) or it can be called as folksonomy.
According to the website WeHeartIt, there are other social networking platforms within WeHeartIt. They are Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr shown in the picture above. Sharing of photos to these platforms increases participation, this leads to higher chances of other users finding their picture. How would I know that? There is a column in WeHeartIt which has active users displayed on the right. An example is provided below.
WeHeartIt explicitly involves users by allowing users to edit the photos they have uploaded by creating, modifying and deleting contents of the uploaded pictures.
This website also implicitly involves users by showcasing other users where he/she, who uploaded the photos, has been to. Different users have different kinds of creativity when it comes to uploading their talents online. WeHeartIt has a great base for all the talented as well as the inexperienced photographers to share their photos. It also acts as one of many online storage locations for users.
By allowing a free online storage location is a great way to provide incentive to users to continue utilizing the website.
There are two things I appreciate most about this website:
Firstly it is the innovative idea of ‘downloading the heart button’
It serves the purpose of allowing a fuss free photo saver. It states
‘When you’re visiting a website and see an image you like, click the heart button on your browser. This will scan the current page and look for images you can add’
Secondly, users can access WeHeartIt through their mobile apps. It helps create a large pool of network for users to share and interact.
Many other different types of plus points for this website can be found here. –>Click Here
The downside of WeHeartIt in terms of Harnessing collective intelligence?
The disadvantage of WeHeartIt when users contributes are photos are not being censored off when it comes to vulgarities. Children who come across this website might pick up on things that he/she should not be learning. There is a button “report this entry” where anyone could report this user on anything which concerns them. Nevertheless, it may not be sufficient to prevent vulgar pictures from being uploaded!
Please share your views on this post.
Other Links:
http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=1
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.133.772&rep=rep1&type=pdf
http://www.worldwideopen.org/uploads/groups_bull/files/30/decision%202.0.pdf
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