Domain Analysis

General Information About the Domain

Social networks have been on the rise since the creation of Web and they have become a huge part of people's lives. It is only natural when we consider the social nature of human beings, we need to interact with others on a daily basis to lead psychologically healthy lives. Since one can't always have the time/energy/resources to go out and meet people, we've had to create substitutes for our social needs. The web allowed people to get together without having to physically be near each other.

Social network applications provide us with a way to interact with other users via instant messaging or e-mail, to share content that we like such as photos, videos, to organize events and activities with friends and many more services. Among the most famous and well known applications are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Vine, each of which have a different niche. For instance Vine lets people share 6-second videos they have created, whereas LinkedIn is a business network where professionals meet and create new connections, people can share photos and videos via Instagram, etc. There are many different services these applications provide and each one of them focuses on a different aspect of people's social lives. Most of these applications started out as web-based services and with the advent of mobile devices, these services were made available on these devices as well such as the iPhone and Android based cell phones. The customers of these services are generally all civilized societies, basically anyone with access to the Internet.

If we compare our web application with other websites in some particular points such as event sharing, interest pages and specifying thoughts, we can come across with facebook.com and meetup.com and others. Our application have common features with these popular websites as well as providing surplus value.

Customers and Users

Initially, users will be Computer Engineering Department students, assistants, faculty, staff, any people at Computer Engineering department. In this sense, unlike other social media platforms range of the user type is narrow. While the people stereotype will not diverse much from the norm, this specific group are expected to have similar interests.

Comparison with similar software

This project is based on the idea that people should be able to reach other users contents by using interest tags. Nearly all social media platforms have tagging system but it's not oriented in a way that people use these tags to reach a user whom he or she has mutual interests with.

• Meetup

First we take meetup.com into account. Basically, this web application enables us to make people around us know what we are going to do. Organizing events in particular time and spending time in the society of one’s friends are really easy with this website. However, it provides us in only event range. We also want to share something ant talk about our interests. So, meetup.com can be considered as a good example of event sharing. Additionally they have a good domain that makes us know what the website is about. It is clear and short!

• Facebook

Secondly, as millions of people know, facebook.com provides us almost everthing concerning people’s connections to others. Events, thoughts, pictures, emotions, addvertising are the examples of its features. Huge data and huge amount of people is what we are talking about. Nevertheless we want to have a closed application that only our department members can use. Facebook provides us creating closed group but that is just a group in comparison to a whole parts of an application. So, we may get inspired by facebook.com’s pages which are about people’s common interests in our application. When we look at its name, it is catchy and we can say that the name is pretty cool for a website that is to look for friends at the beginning.

• Pinterest

Pinterest is currently one of the most popular social network applications. Upon registration users can choose which topics they are interested in (the categories are predefined by Pinterest) and they can view images related to these topics that other users have shared. Users can pin the images they like and these pinned images will be displayed in the related boards. Boards are collections of theme speficic images pinned by a group of users. In a way people can make their own personal scrapbook (or a collective scrapbook) from the content shared on Pinterest. All users are allowed to post new content on Pinterest and it need not be images only, the posts can include links to articles,images,videos and any other content on other websites. Interaction between users resembles Twitter, users can follow other users, but there is no mechanism for conversation between users, so there is no instant messaging or and people can't comment on shared content. However the system is able to recommend content and other users with similar interests. There are some similarities between our project and Pinterest. The most important similarity is that the content on both sites is interest based, but we have a couple of distinct advantages. Our users will be able to create pages dedicated to a certain topic/theme and will be able to communicate with people with similar interests via comments. Also users will be able to create events and invite other users to these events.

Environments : Web, Android, iOS

• Circleme

Circleme is a combination of Google+ and Pinterest. Users can like certain categories and they will be presented with content uploaded by other users related to the chosen categories in their news feed. Users can like these posts or comment on them. Users can "trust" other users to get updates on other users' activities and tastes. Users can also create to-do's, which denotes activities that users would like to do at some point in the future. They resemble the event concept in our project but people need not be together to complete to-do's so that's a big difference. The system also recommends users stuff they could be interested in or people with similar interests. Circleme is a lot like our project, it pretty much covers all the features our system is going to have. It has additional features as well, such as offering users content specific to their location. It is free to register on Circleme and is open to everyone.

Environments : Web, Android, iOS

Conclusion

Though it seems there are lots of social media platforms designed for different purposes, there is not much platform which you can reach to a person with common interests in a closed specific community.