Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The use of this service was evaluated over a six month period. During
this time the number of users, across the two instances, grew to 220, of
which ~20 per cent were adding new bookmarks on a regular basis. After
six months a total of ~5500 bookmarks had been added, although this
did include bookmarks imported from users' Delicious accounts.
Although these metrics indicate that users were obtaining value from this
service, more detailed feedback was sought via an online questionnaire
and user interviews. The key message that came through from these
results was that a majority considered they were obtaining value from
this service and would recommend tags.pfi zer.com to their colleagues.
However, it was also felt that tags.pfi zer.com would benefi t from increased
scale; the more people who used it the more valuable it would become.
This issue of scale has been highlighted by Thomas Vander Wal [17]
where he points out that as a social bookmarking service grows (both in
the number of users and the number of bookmarks), the value and use of
the system changes. This can be broken down into four phases. In the
fi rst phase the use is personal, a user saves, tags and re-fi nds bookmarks.
As the community of users grows we move into the second phase,
serendipity. Here the user can start to explore other users' bookmarks
but the searching is hit or miss. In addition groups/project teams will
start to coordinate and use common tags to highlight items of interest to
the rest of the group/team. The next phase is social tagging maturity, in
this phase users can regularly search and fi nd new and related bookmarks.
We would also expect to see the bookmarking service start to support
social networking as users also begin to identify colleagues with similar
interests based on their tag and/or bookmark fi ngerprints. In essense the
service has evolved from purely a bookmarking service and has become a
key tool in social networking that supports/enables complex social
networks.
At this point tags.pfi zer.com was in the fi rst phase. As such most users
were getting value from the service based on the improvement in ability
to store and search their bookmarks over that offered via their 'favourites'
folder in their browser. Although the benefi ts of this were evident, the
greater value from being able to search/explore other people's bookmarks
and identify kindred colleagues was generally not being realised. However,
despite this a number of 'islands' of specialty began to build, each starting
to exhibit the behaviours/functionality associated with the more mature
phases of a social bookmarking service.
In terms of overall functionality, Scuttle provided the core capabilities
and successfully enabled social bookmarking within the company. However,
to achieve wider adoption some key issues still need to be resolved. First
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