Week #3 - Hardware and Computer Forensics

During last week's lectures, Professor Rubin spoke about the intricacies of computer hardware and the shocking but fascinating truth about computer forensics. In relation to my Entrepreneurship Project Idea, hardware plays an important factor into the "musical tweeting" application while computer forensics reminded me of important precautions to take with the "add resume" option.

In order to have an input and output of sound coming from a computer, a sound card must be bought and installed. Having a sound card allows you to plug in headphones or a microphone to produce or receive sound. Therefore when using the musical tweeting option on Twitter, one could listen to the music they find on other's twitter accounts either through the speakers of there computer or headphones which they would plug into the jack of the sound card. Whether your using the musical tweeting option or not, having a sound card is vital for computer users who listen to a lot of music. It also gives people the ability to plug in speakers so they can amplify the sound there computer produces.

On Wednesday when our class learned about computer forensics, the information was exciting to learn about yet at the same time terrifying. I had no idea how easy it was for private information to surface on technology. Therefore going along with my resume option on Twitter, I would make sure this document stayed a secure file and did not ask for personal identification information like one's social security number. Allowing others to see private yet valuable information like a resume would have to be a security matter that Twitter would not take lightly.

Week #2 - Privacy and Excel

After last weeks lectures on Privacy on the Web and the use of Excel, I considered my own Entrepreneurship Project Idea further by relating it to our discussions. In terms of privacy, Twitter has made it an option for its users to protect their profiles from non-followers. Since I personally make my tweets private for my own protection, I would hate to have the unique ability to tweet my music selections and have it be inaccessible to non-followers. Therefore, along with my original Entrepreneurship Project Idea of creating a function to tweet a song that produces a link with an audio clip on Twitter, I would also add the ability to personalize whether these tweets were private or of access to the public.

An important part of creating the Musical Tweeting idea for me was that potential followers could be found based on overlapping interest in favorite music styles or artists. With the privacy function, I think this inhibits the purpose of the Musical Tweeting option. The current Twitter privacy option cannot hide specific tweets but only your entire page. Therefore I would create an option on Twitter specifically for the public view of the Musical Tweeting. If people still felt the need to keep their musical tastes private, this could be an option too. Ultimately, I think it would be important to allow people who want their Twitters to remain private (like myself) but allow others to see solely their music posts, to have this option.

In terms of the lecture on Excel, I see no way spreadsheets can be helpfully integrated into my project although it gave me a good addition to my idea. It relates back to Rubin's previous lecture on Twitter and how it is becoming more of a place for searching for job opportunities and internships. I made this connection when Professor Rubin mentioned that Excel tasks like Pivot Tables, Charts/Graphs, and Cell Functions are all valuable things to put on your resume. Therefore I could see it being quite helpful for Twitter to make a function of adding your resume onto your Twitter profile (possibly in the biography section) for potential employees to market themselves better. This could also be something customizable in terms of privacy since your resume is a personal document. Ultimately I see my idea to advance Twitter with a Musical Tweeting option and a Resume Upload option as only a few ways to improve one of the fastest growing Social Media sites out there today. It's capabilities are endless and I believe they should be further developed like so!

Week #1 - My Project Idea and Social Media

For my Entrepreneurship Project, I have decided pursue the area of social media. Seeing as it something that plays a large part in my life, I believe I have a decent amount of experience with its functions and abilities. In my opinion, Twitter is a fairly basic social media site. You log on, tweet your current feelings or what you might do later, maybe post a TwitPic, try to catch up on your friends tweets, and then log off. But what if there was a way to integrate more than just current moods and little blurps of information? Seeing as Twitter has made it already possible to tweet pictures, why not be able to tweet your favorite song or what your currently listening to? My Entrepreneurial Idea is for Twitter to create a new type of trending for sharing music. Being a person who can't go a day without listening to my favorite song, it is something I would enjoy sharing with my friends while I tweet. After one would normally post on twitter, the user would type a "hashtag" and the current song they are listening to. After the tweet is posted, the song would appear with a link to audio clip on iTunes or YouTube along with the artist and song name. Being able to share your music with your followers would not only individualize tweeting more but could help with the promotion of artists on Twitter. Twitter could be the starting location for the newest artist tracks for people to preview and tweet about. This could not only spike interest in upcoming artists but help people find new Twitter followers through commonality in their music taste through trending.

My Entrepreneurship Project Idea relates back well to the content Professor Rubin covered in our previous lectures of class on Social Media as well as the Twitter Lab we just recently submitted (Lab #2). In the beginning of class, we discussed why people have started using Twitter. Some join to find and connect with people who have similar interests, others join to look for jobs, while even some people turn to Twitter before they turn on the news to find out breaking information about our country. For whatever reason people use Twitter, it has become more popular in the past few years and it continues to grow.

I believe Twitter has great potential and has done extremely well for the time it has been alive but in order for the hype to stay, something new and exciting must happen. We also spoke in lecture about how competing social media sites like Facebook and the latest Google Plus are constantly upgrading their sites to attract more users as well.  This is why I believe my idea of music trending would be so effective in terms of getting the social media world even more excited about Twitter than they already are. In order to compete with these sites, something new and innovative must be brought to the table.