Social Media : One click share

“Whilst they were busy doing all the work, she made her name by talking about her work.”

With the increasing captivation towards social media, sharing has become the godfather of all actions. Back in the era of connecting virtually with podcast news, a one way stream was flowing which was educational but still had certain limitations. It lacked a two-way communication. To overcome the same, social media was introduced into our lives as a virtual mediator connecting thoughts and actions across miles of distances.

Evolution and necessity of social media, if it is a need at all?

Social media goes long back in 70’s when Bulletin board system was introduced to cater the need of sharing games/files/messages at one common destination via coding. These days technology is easy; WhatsApp wants to add a calling feature to it? Few things here and there and BAM! It’s possible. Coding was not so flexible back in 70’s, it has only evolved from what it was due to the increasing market demand over the years. November 1996 saw the beginning of ICQ, a multi user messaging platform with emoticons, which intrigued people to optimize this platform for connecting with each other in a rather more interesting way. It was only after that in 2004, Facebook and Orkut came into action. Although Facebook back then was only accessible to Harvard students but it was still an initiative to connect and share. Over the last one decade, we have only come up with better methodologies of connecting easier and better for the most complicated scenarios.

The need? It’s simple. You can be everywhere, with everyone and communicate immediately and easy, all with just one click. The hype of social media is driven by how easy it makes our life along with the personalization it has to offer. According to the report “Worldwide Social Network Users: 2013 Forecast and Comparative Estimates,” it was estimated that there will be a rise in social media users from 1.47 billion to 1.73 billion in 2013. It has only risen ever since.

Social via mobile, are they sure?

Do you scroll through your mobile every hour even if there are no notifications? Do you spend quite some time everyday on Facebook or Instagram feeds? A study says most of us spend about 2.5 hours of our daily routine on mobile, where 80% of online users have a smartphone and 80% of the time spent on mobile usage is in-apps. Being such a significant part of our daily lives, apps play a crucial role in how have begun to communicate and share. Be it Siri, giving a personalised assistance to all her iPhone users or Twitter, connecting people cross-borders over the same issues through a single tweet of 140 characters. Its funny how people mould their activities according to these apps because they want to be a part of them instead of it being the other way around. Why? The reach. The convenience. The Acknowledgement. The fun.

This morning when I was busy Googling all those social apps out there, I couldn’t ignore but notice every app has an integrated social factor added to it. Be it Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, every app integrates a sharing or redirecting feature because they understand social media has now become the first marketing step to every business ladder. For example, when posting on Quora a dialog box appears which notifies the platforms your answer has been shared on. This is quora, smartly building their own brand name along with disseminating your content to wider masses with your prior permission.

Behind the scenes?

What we see as social app is a trailer while the movie runs behind the scenes. Social media may look easy from the movie it portrays but at the backend, it’s a different genre altogether. Our app developers have to be very careful while structuring the scalability of the social app. Why? An app may expect to hit 1000 downloads but end up in 10000 which becomes a problem, problem of scalability. Scalability can become a problem at the server end if and when the user’s increase in an unexpected pattern. Our servers replicate themselves to adjust more users to our app and rely on load balancers which apparently accepts exponential new users with no impact on the app itself. This ultimately triggers the n number of users in an app and accepts them without a default at the technical end. We also need to put our focus to how we are protective of the information our users share on such platforms. Social apps provide two such platforms which are networking and communicating. Within these platforms, the information shared is enormous but the very social media has been existing since 70’s which gives us certain comfort that user privacy has been taken care of. Our users are ensured that their data is safe through data encryptions. These encryptions save user’s data from getting circulated in wrong hands and keeps the values of user privacy intact. What is rather interesting these encryptions are structured in a certain manner where they prioritize more sensitive information(such as Passwords) into a different category and encrypt them with a differentiation of higher difficulty to crack. Social media also suffers through a problem of media transfer which users may not always realise but is a major drawback for app developers. For the same high compression formats are used which compresses the files and makes data sharing easier. Now you know why Whatsapp compresses its images and audios, it’s for the user value addition itself.

What are we doing about it?

The growing use and integration of social media into our lives has initiated a never ending market demand where growth and improvement is exponential. In the series of racing with one another for the very exponential growth, apps are losing quality over competition.

Social media apps are consistently trending and Affle Appstudioz has been trying to add value through distinction. Use of social media in every app has integrated sharing into our every action but the efforts put in by Affle AppStudioz are directed towards improvisation through differentiation, differentiation of cracking difficulty. Be it “Speaking Tree” connecting spiritual thoughts, “Archoreo” connecting a community of dancers, be it “Unity” an effort to form a rehabilitation community or be it “Lets” connecting social platforms for better networking within the networks, all at one place, we have kept quality and differentiation above all needs. We believe in giving a different experience which not only connects our users and their thoughts but also serves the challenges they face and provides the solution through this integration of sharing. Our servers use Firewall and Antivirus to prevent hacking and abuse of media and content among our user base. We use 256 bit encryptions for web services to resolve and provide for similar issues.

Working with Affle mTraction Enterprise has given its clients a better competitive front along with a strong research of your domain, diverse platforms (iphone/windows/android/blackberry) expertise, global reach and strong analytics which has contributed to various success stories. We work with Opus and AAC coding to compress audio transfers which make it easier for our users to download. Text being the most compressed content in today’s era is also managed with technologies like socket.io and node.js. What they have learnt over time is that they not only want to serve their clients, what is more important is that they know their audience, they know their data and they drive analysis.