My Reflective Post

Social computing is an integral part of people’s live. Today's society to such an extent has become dependent on computers that cannot survive without them. There is a conflict of opinion whether this is good or not, my opinion is that all this is for good and computers helps people more than harm them. For example nowadays the technologies in the medicine have been highly developed and continue to do that for future and thereby they are saving million peoples live. Other example is communication between people who lives in a long distance, thanks to the computers they can see their families and friends and talk with them for hours and feel like they are in the same room.

This course reveals to me so many new things and I had the chance to develop my knowledge and gain new skills. To be more specific, I have learned how to use google fusion,also I have learned how to use crowd map, I have revealed whole new world with Open Street Map. It was really fun for me when I found the Popcorn Maker and I still experiment with it.

When we learned about Popcorn Maker I was really interested in it and I wanted to find more about it, so I started to experiment with it at home and it was actually a lot of fun. It is great how I can layer up my favorite web services together and how easily is to share my work with the world. In this way I can develop my creativity and at the same time learn what people like, what are their preferences and their needs. This will certainly help me at my future workplace, for example to easily communicate with the customers and satisfy their desires.

I found a bit challenging using google fusion as I haven’t used it before. I had to make a research what exactly it is, how to use it and what are its options. It is really interesting and complex application, which I think I still have much to learn about.

But the most interesting and useful of all I found the Open Street Map (OSM). I have heard of it before, but I have never made any researches about it or used it myself till now. I found that I am one of the people who actually prefer it more than Google Maps and I am sure that this will help me a lot in the future, to plan my trips better for example or help my friends with theirs. Also I think that OSM is a great alternative for people who cannot afford or just want to save money on GPS navigation system. OSM is free to use under an open license and it is created by ordinary people all around the world.

I work in a delivery company from a long time and I have always been using Google Maps if any of the delivery drivers need an exact location of a certain address as they are not provided with a GPS system. I saw that the design of OSM is more detailed and you can see more clearly each street and roadside, so I switched to OSM before a few weeks ago and I was asked by my manager a few days later to print out new maps for all our areas and give a copy to each driver. This made my work easier and quicker, and all this is thanks to OSM.

Everything that I have learned in this course will be definitely in my favor and need in the future. How I explained above, this knowledge has already started helping me in my personal and work life.
I am glad I had this course as a part of my first year as the main think I have developed is the way I express my thoughts and myself altogether and this is a great advantage for my future years as a student and not only. I feel more confident and It becomes more easily for me to explain my point of view on a subject.

YouTube Channel Cheats

Crowdmap and Ushahidi

Open Street Map vs Google Maps

Although that Google Maps is the most famous desktop and mobile web mapping service application it appears that nowadays  more and more people prefer using Open Street Map .

I made a small research to see what the differences between them are and why some people are finding OSM better and more useful than Google Maps.  Google Maps offers a lot more options like interactive maps, contact integration, business advertising, readily available overlays, dynamic search results based on dragging on the Map, keyboard shortcuts, reverse directions, multiple destinations, live traffic information, saving maps and etc. that are not available on OSM .You can also send Google Maps  to a device via email which cannot be done with OSM.

But what is the reason why people prefer using OSM then. I found that the main reason is that the design of OSM is much better than Google Maps. You can see roads and sideroads all in much better detail and for example plan your trip with much better information.

The newspaper and website of the year “The Guardian” has charted the rise of OpenStreetMap for some time and now we are really seeing impressive coverage that people can use to solve real problems.However, there are also instances where the opposite is true, where Google maps has better coverage.

The key benefit of OpenStreetMap is the offline use. People can load massive amounts of map data into their phones to take with them and use without needed an internet connection. In fact they can fit whole countries, or even the whole planet's worth of OSM data if their app uses a compact vector storage format.


So in the end is up to the preferences and needs of the people to choose which mapping to use. There will always be different opinions on which mapping service is better, so just check them up both and see which one will work best for you. 

Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap (OSM)

Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap (OSM) are two popular platforms that we know. For those who haven’t heard of them here is some brief information about them. Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001 and now it’s one of the most used and famous free internet encyclopaedias. OpenStreetMap (OSM) was created 3 years later in the UK and it was inspired by the success of Wikipedia and preponderance of proprietary map data in the UK and elsewhere. OSM is basically a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world.
There is some equalities, but there is also some inequalities between them. 

They both appear to be equally open any easy to use to the users.But there are some differences. Wikipedia contains a bigger amount of information than OSM. Also as Wikipedia is so popular everywhere and it is offering all kind of information in various fields, it is visited by million people every day , of any gender and age. On the other hand some people are not familiar or even haven't heard of OSM , like for example Google Maps and that is actually the main reason why they are avoiding using it.In my opinion OSM is really good and better than Google Maps. It is a wiki-like map that anyone in the world can edit. If a store is missing from the map, it can be added in by a store owner or even a customer ,also with OSM data a user is free to download some, or all of the map offline and this means that it's possible to use it to navigate without giving his location away to anyone at all.

Ways for finding and removing ”Super cookies”

Internet web sites often attach ‘cookies’ to your computer’s browser to help them keep track of you and your preferences when you visit their websites. ‘Cookies’  are basically messages given to your  Web browser by the Web server , the browser stores them in a text file and then send them  back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. In theory this is a useful connection between you and the web sites you visit. For example, the website Amazon stores your customer preferences information and history of your orders to better help you find what you want and make it easier to make your purchases.

More than half of the internet’s top web sites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plug-in to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies a.k.a ”Super cookies”  in their privacy policies.

Super cookies are similar to the standard browser cookies most people are familiar with, but are stored in different locations on a user’s machine, for example, in a file used by a plug-in (Flash is the most common). This makes them harder to find and delete, especially since a browser’s built-in cookie detection process won’t remove them either. Furthermore, some super cookies have additional capabilities like regenerating regular cookies to prevent their removal by the user.

To make matters worse, removing master super cookies is much more difficult. It requires the user to dig through the file system and delete them manually an inconvenient task even for advanced users. The novice users, on the other hand, likely won’t even realize super cookies exist, let alone be able to find them.

To delete manually a super cookie, you need to navigate to the “Flash Player” directory on your computer. Use the search tool on your PC and look for the *.sol file extension.

If your default browser is Firefox you can add the Better Privacy plugin to your install and let the add-on work its magic on your LSOs (Local Shared Object, a.k.a  “Flash cookie”).

Not a fan of Flash in the first place? Don’t care about certain videos or online games? If so, just disable or full-on remove the Flash player from your computer. If it works for iPhone users, it might work for you, too.

Adobe has a tool that you can use to update your settings quickly and easily by going to http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager03.html and setting the “Global Storage Settings” to “Zero”. This will prevent new flash cookies from being put on your computer, but if you have any right now you’ll still have to remove them as described in the first two steps.

 

 

Sources:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy/

 

Global Phenomenon called Twitter

Nowadays everyone have heard of Twitter. This social media platform was launched July 2006 and has come a long way since then.Now it has more than 500 million monthly active users worldwide and 50 percent of them log in every day!

Okay,but what exactly is Twitter and why it is so popular?

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables users to send and read "tweets",which are text messages limited to 140 characters.Registered users can read and post tweets, but unregistered users can only read them.The creators have made it very simple to use,but at the same time very provocative. This size cap promotes focused and clever use of language,which makes tweets very easy to scan and also very challenging to write.The size restriction has really made Twitter a popular social tool.

It is not only attractive for the young people,but for the elderly as well.Statistics show that 15 percent  of adult internet users use Twitter. Even that 40 percent of Twitter users don’t actually tweet they instead, read news, click links and follow accounts.

But people are not only using it for entertainment and fun, they also use it as a Marketing Tool!Yes, absolutely! In October 2009, Google and Microsoft began integrating tweets into their search products and now thousands of people advertise their recruiting services, their consulting businesses and their retail stores.And it works! This is ideal for our modern and busy world.

11 twitter accounts are created every second the interest in it grows every single day!Twitter is basically the best way to discover new content and keep up with your favourite topics of interest and people. Twitter lets you exchange ideas and information instantaneously bringing folks together from all across the globe unlike ever before. Some of us use Twitter just to listen, others to keep in touch with friends.All this information leads to the conclusion what a big part it has become of the life of our society! But how long this will last, only time can show...





Sources:

http://www.slideshare.net/KennethBradleyEnlow/20-awesome-facts-about-twitter