New Media M.A. Research Blog | Media Studies, University of Amsterdam

Blendr. It Won’t Work – How About “Straight” Grindr?

Blendr is a geosocial networking application allowing users to connect with nearby people based on common interests. Created by the same developers as the "hook-up" app Grindr, the focus Blendr has on meeting people through common interests and platonic...

By Autumn Hand on 10/10/11 Comments Off

Facebook, towards ubiquitous computing?

Last week an opinion piece by sociologist Ben Caudron was published in the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. In it, Caudron expressed his views on the latest announcements by Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg at F8. The most interesting new changes...

By Bree Tahapary on 10/10/11 Comments Off

App review: Roamler

On June the 10th of this year the Amsterdam startup Roamler launched their free iPhone-app bearing the same name. Roamler challenges its ‘Roamlers’, the name for the users of the app, to complete certain tasks on assigned locations using...

By Leander Roet on 10/09/11 4

App Review : Foodspotting

When you are in a unknown neighborhood and it is time to eat, it can be hard some times to find a good place to grab a bite. Thinking of that the developers of Foodspotting created an easy way...

By Mario Gesteira on 10/09/11 Comments Off

Open social networks and their role in society

Social media has grown to amazing heights the last couple of years. Some people say that these social media platforms help to activate citizens and to help answer social issues. Examples of the power of these platforms are abundant:...

By Wouter Timmermans on 10/09/11 Comments Off

You ‘like’, you pay! – Do Social Network Services Users Consciously and Willingly Give Up Their Right for Privacy?

Facebook faces more and more scrutiny over its user privacy issues, but do people willingly trade privacy as a commodity for using Social Network Services (SNSs)? Would they prefer to pay a certain fee in order to prevent surveillance...

By Andrei Florian on 10/08/11 Comments Off

SNS research proposal; Flickr

Now that the use of social networking sites has become pervasive in our daily lives, the deluge of images floating around in the cloud is growing larger then ever. The Internet has moved from a mostly text-based medium to...

By Martijn Dorresteijn on 10/06/11 Comments Off

Your Baby Will Google You

Whether by design or by default, the current generation whose lives are playing out in social networks, in the blogosphere and throughout the Internet are leaving traces of their lives online. Controversy was anticipated as guardians and future employers...

By Autumn Hand on 10/06/11 Comments Off

Tumblr: a social network by another name

There is no doubt about the impact of social media in the last years. More than a half of the total Internet users have active profiles in networks like Facebook, Google+ and Diaspora* in the near future, hopefully. What makes...

By Jacobo Corujeira on 10/05/11 2

Mobile Tweeting – recognising usage frequency, tendencies and social interaction differences

The Question Academic research on Twitter has been rife since it hit off in 2006, with significant focus on two topics in particular- that of privacy and identity. Much that has been written by scholars of Twitter has generally...

By Christopher Mead on 10/05/11 Comments Off

App Review: Waze, a social GPS

As the fever of Geolocation apps continues, Waze seems to stand out with integration in different media and personal communication among their users. Waze is a GPS application available for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Nokia and Windows Mobile that blended...

By Juliana Paiva on 10/04/11 1

Social Media: My concerns and why I quit Facebook

When I was just a little boy, there wasn’t yet a personal computer. Although we had a game computer (a Commodor 64), my brothers and I preferred to play with LEGO or Playmobile and we went very often outside...

By Maarten Jansen on 10/04/11 Comments Off

How Facebook made my Boyfriend Cry: About Social Networks and Worst-Case Scenarios

Last monday, just after the first lecture, I went home sick. Not that much of a problem, thank God, but I forgot to ask about the assignment at all. Luckily, Geert was so kind as to send me an...

By Roos van Tongerloo on 10/04/11 1

Free labor? An attempt to determine the value of user generated content – for the user

Writings on the value of user generated content tend to stress the (market) value users produce for companies such as Facebook by adding content, labeling these activities as "free labor". Assuming that there must also be something in it...

By Joep Hegger on 10/04/11 1

The Future of Social Networking Sites

First of all, let me warn you that this week's blog post is a bit more personal than my previous entries. Furthermore, I also fall victim to relating everything I write about social networking sites to Facebook, Twitter and...

By Jorrit Schaap on 10/04/11 1

Social Network Abstinence

In this postmodern age, McLuhan‘s thoughts about medium as an extension of ourselves seems more and more accurate. However, if the medium is us and we are the medium, how we can detach from it? Nowadays, social media is one...

By Juliana Paiva on 10/04/11 2

“Ask Me, Ask Me, Ask Me” – Formspring: Asking, Answering and Telling the Truth.

Social networking sites allow a user to have all the combined knowledge of their social groups at their fingertips. It is no wonder that the Facebook status tool, for example, has been re-appropriated for question asking purposes. Even outside...

By Liam Voice on 10/03/11 3

Social culture in the game industry

Video games have changed dramatically over the last decades. There is obviously a big gap between 1958’s Tennis For Two and the games we play now on our consoles or PC. Of course, the rapid evolution of new technology...

By Renoud Netjes on 10/03/11 Comments Off

Russian Classmates, politics and Georgia

Despite having over 100 friends and former classmates in my friends list on a popular Russian social networking site Odnoklassniki.ru, I left it following a brief Russian-Georgian war in August 2008 and joined an increasing number of people in...

By Mzia Kupunia on 10/03/11 6

Right man for the job: how LinkedIn is changing the way employees are recruited.

In today’s highly competitive market companies are increasingly turning to look at how to best attract one of their most valuable resources: people (Wilson and Sayers, 1997). Facing the troubles concerned with the phenomenon of ‘jobhopping’, the tendency of...

By Leander Roet on 10/03/11 4

Is it worthwhile to develop a Facebook application?

With more than 800 million users Facebook is currently the most widely used social network platform on the Internet. Facebook states that more than 50% of their users are active everyday and each of them has approximately 130 friends....

By Jesse Oyegbesan on 10/03/11 Comments Off

Social death of social networks

The question I was asking myself recently is what makes a social network cool or uncool? Why there are social networks in which having an account is considered embarressing? Why there are exsisting social networks to which some people...

By Urszula Jurgiel on 10/02/11 Comments Off

SNSs and national identity

Social network sites (SNSs) are more and more drawing the attention of academic researchers, fascinated by their affordances and influence. The most common methodology of researching SNSs, besides on the topic of privacy, is that of identity-management. “While websites...

By Annet Bos on 10/02/11 1

How Do Facebook and Technology Influence Child Behavior?

When I was growing up in the early 90s there was no such thing as social media. We had never heard of Facebook, Twitter, Hi5, Google+ or MySpace, reason for which we spent all of our free time interacting...

By Luana Pascu on 10/02/11 Comments Off