facebook:

iam in love with the design(layout) of facebook. it is like an entertainment tv channel with unique features of internet,

lots of applications keeps the users engaged and providing a backdrop for the people to have conversations.

some of the applications on facebook which are similar to those applications offline:

date of day/todays cookie…etc: are like   the weighing machine at railway stations.

fishtank, farmville…. : are like tamagochi ( a japanese virtual pet).

orkut:

unlike in facebook, orkut has a scrapbook where users talk one to one. orkut is not as dynamic as facebook. may be thats the reason its not a big success in US and a success in India where people are not much familiar with net in the initial days and now that they are familiar they started moving to facebook.

twitter:

i felt it some thing like gtalk status msg sharing with all the followers

indian social networking sites:

recently i opened accounts in bigadda.com, bharathstudents.com, indyarocks.com.. these are really a poor imitations of western networking sites and lots of spam in bharathstudents.com (some erotic mails).

1^st: info&services

Some sites are the extension of their operations in other fields.

Like news sites, which has reporters, journalists, editors etc which are only an extension into new medium(internet) to withhold their audience.

Ex: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ , Some sites like www.idlebrain.com for the regional (crazy) issues to reach globally dispersed audience. For these technical team is secondary.

information (products, appliances reviews etc) sites also fall in this category.

2^nd:techie

Other classification is technically driven stream like google, yahoo, facebook, etc. for these technical team is primary. These use the extensive, unique features of internet to gain the consumers by services like Mail, blogs, social networkings etc. These companies are responsible for many major break through in the internet medium

And are dominating the web world

3^rd:gen

sites not with primary aim to increase net traffic but to promote their product, access to customers, improve the customer relations through new medium.  These mostly spend money only on developing their sites and advertising their products (many schools n colleges having a web portal can be categorized under this & most of the websites u developed so far too)

not that every site perfectly falls into a category. some are combination of two or more classes, like amazon.com is 30% of class techie n 70% class  n our alumni-networking thing is 60% techie n 30% info&services n 10% gen)

and now we also need some units to measure the standards too based on a site`s market, traffic etc. for example in the stream of social networking,  i would rate facebook 9/10, orkut 5.5/10

What does any one do in the name of work (in any field)?

They try to understand what has been done so far in that field and formulate an idea, predict so&so is a better idea, so&so is better thing to do based on their knowledge.

i would say that this  understanding, knowledge, formulation, prediction gets better if longer time period of broader cases is taken into consideration. And hence a little insight into different mediums.

To understand the broader aspects of communication, information flow, entertainment studying the different mediums and technologies.

postal services-letters

printing machine- news papers, magazines

radio:

camera: movies-

television: channels, news, daily serials, advertisements, movies, soaps etc..

computer: internet- search engines, mails, news, websites, social networking sites, youtube, porn

Printing :

Just as writing did not replace speaking, printing did not achieve a position of total dominance. Handwritten manuscripts continued to be produced, and the different graphic modes of communication continued to influence each other.

The printing press was also a factor in the establishment of a community of scientists who could easily communicate their discoveries through the establishment of widely disseminated scholarly journals, helping to bring on the scientific revolution. Because of the printing press, authorship became more meaningful and profitable. It was suddenly important who had said or written what, and what the precise formulation and time of composition was. This allowed the exact citing of references, producing the rule, “One Author, one work (title), one piece of information” (Giesecke, 1989; 325). Before, the author was less important, since a copy of Aristotle made in Paris would not be exactly identical to one made in Bologna. For many works prior to the printing press, the name of the author was entirely lost.

Because the printing process ensured that the same information fell on the same pages, page numbering, tables of contents, and indices became common, though they previously had not been unknown. The process of reading was also changed, gradually changing over several centuries from oral readings to silent, private reading. The wider availability of printed materials also led to a drastic rise in the adult literacy rate throughout Europe.

The printing press was an important step towards the democratization of knowledge. Within fifty or sixty years of the invention of the printing press, the entire classical canon had been reprinted and widely promulgated throughout Europe (Eisenstein, 1969; 52). Now that more people had access to knowledge both new and old, more people could discuss these works. Furthermore, now that book production was a more commercial enterprise, the first copyright laws were passed to protect what we now would call intellectual property rights. A second outgrowth of this popularization of knowledge was the decline of Latin as the language of most published works, to be replaced by the vernacular language of each area, increasing the variety of published works. Paradoxically, the printed word also helped to unify and standardize the spelling and syntax of these vernaculars, in effect ‘decreasing’ their variability. This rise in importance of national languages as opposed to pan-European Latin is cited as one of the causes of the rise of nationalism in Europe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_machine

Newspapers:

By the late 1990s the availability of news via 24-hour television channels and then the Internet posed an ongoing challenge to the business model of most newspapers in developed countries. Paid circulation has declined, while advertising revenue — which makes up the bulk of most newspapers’ income — has been shifting from print to the new media, resulting in a general decline in profits. Many newspapers around the world launched online editions in an attempt to follow or stay ahead of their audience.

However, in the rest of the world, cheaper printing and distribution, increased literacy, the growing middle class and other factors have more than compensated for the emergence of electronic media and newspapers continue to grow

Cinema :

Just imagine the ambience of the cinema hall.. closed room, big screen, high volume, dark room-no lights(except on the screen) to distract the attention of the viewer. Definitely cinema is the most intensive medium.

Television:

Live shows- parallely telecasting an event.

I find some similarity in the way televevision n interenet medium operates.

On tv audience is not charged for watching a programme, revenue is generated from advertisements like in social networking sites.

Internet:

This is our domain.

To be edited/added