Deliverable-2

Experiments On Different Web Applications Groups Feature:

The main goal of this deliverable is to conduct experiments on different social networking websites that explore access control to different groups and also different users within a group. The deliverable also compares the accessibility of using a Create Group feature between different web applications and social networking sites. The Create Group feature as implemented by Skype, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo were compared. Table 1, illustrates the comparison of accessibility of the Groups feature between each web application: Comparison of accessibility of the Groups feature in different web applications.

I created groups in each of these web applications and tested the accessibility of creating these groups. To analyze how easy it is to create a group, I took several activities into consideration. I checked the availability of a create group option on the home page of the web application, the number of clicks required to create a group and the number of clicks required to delete a group. I also analyzed the group privacy settings and I analyzed how hard is it to change group privacy settings once a group is created. I experimented with the group chat facility and the transfer of the admin property within a group. I then compared the accessibility of these activities together. Figure 1 shows a window used to create a group in Facebook and another window that allows users to change the Group settings:

Activity windows to create a group and to edit the group privacy settings.

Out of all the web applications, the Group feature on Facebook site is the most accessible to a user because the interface includes almost all the activities that a user likes to have and it also shows a detailed categorization scheme in which all the recent updates are displayed on the top of the page followed by less important updates. After conducting the experiments, I felt that implementing activities like changing the group privacy options and transferring the admin property to a different user within a group might be interesting and challenging to accomplish. These activities play a very important role when a feature like grouping friends is being implemented.