[UgaBYTES] THE NEW TELECENTRE.ORG WEBSITE: TAKING CONTENT SHARING WITHIN THE TELECENTRE MOVEMENT TO THE NEXT LEVEL

[Mwathi Francis]

Last week I took time out to explore the new Telecentre.org website.
Being a registered member of Facebook, Hi5 and My Space I knew it
would not take me long to find my way round it. Indeed in a couple of
hours I had a photo album up as well as blogs. I also could comprehend
some of the features it had.
The new Telecentre.org website is a social networking website launched
recently. It is a free-access website privately owned and operated by
Telecentre.org. Users (read telecentre practitioners) can join any of
the networks organized groups or create their own to connect and
interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them
messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about
themselves.
Now if you have not used a social networking website before, this new
website will make you sweat. These websites are completely different
from what we have come to know of websites and have many features that
make them a lot more interactive. You will need some time to
completely understand it and make effective use of it. But the wait is
worthwhile as this platform is surely the next big thing in telecentre
community content sharing.
These websites allow anyone with an internet connection to upload
photos, videos and an almost limitless amount of information about to
a profile which they can then share with their friends and other site
users.
As I had mentioned earlier the media can be compared to Facebook or
MySpace (which have been around for some time now). Actually it
resembles face book which unlike MySpace only allows plain text in
decorating your profile.  MySpace allows users to decorate their
profiles using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) which can be
taxing.
This new Telentre Platform has a number of features for users to
interact with. They include a space on every user's profile page that
allows friends to post messages for the user to see, Photos, where
users can upload albums and photos, and Status, which allows users to
inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions. All these are
visible to anyone who is able to see that user's profile, which
depends on their privacy settings.
Another application is the News Feed  which appears on every user's
homepage and highlights information including profile changes,
upcoming events related to the user's friends. Users have been able to
control what types of information are shared automatically with
friends. The control is divided to Anyone, Just my friends and Just
Me.
One popular application on this website is the Photos application,
where users can upload albums and photos. It allows users to upload an
unlimited number of photos, compared with other image hosting services
such as Flickr, which apply limits to the number of photos that a user
is allowed to upload. Privacy settings can be set for individual
albums, limiting the groups of users that can see an album. For
example, the privacy of an album can be set so that only the user's
friends can see the album, while the privacy of another album can be
set so that all users (Anyone) can see it. Another feature of the
Photos applications is the ability to "tag", or label users in a
photo. For instance, if a photo contains a user's friend, then the
user can tag the friend in the photo. This sends a notification to the
friend that they have been tagged, and provides them a link to see the
photo.
Joining is as easy as logging into www.telecentre.org and filling in a
simple online form to register. In common with other social networks,
then users have the opportunity to create their own profile page
complete with profile pictures.
One of the problems with a social networking sites is that one is
inclined to reveal far more of him/herself online than we would in our
day to day lives and this new telecentre .org website is no exception.
Although there is provision for privacy settings to reduce
accessibility to their profiles most neglect to do so. Privacy
settings allow users to screen the viewers of their personal
information should be clearly available and easy to manage. I would
advice one takes extra caution when editing your privacy settings so
you do not reveal more than you are comfortable with.
Though the new website is still in its early days it already has over
262 members, 10 groups and many discussions and blogs, photos and
albums.
If you are an active member of the Telecentre Movement and you are yet
to join , then it is highly recommended to join this social networking
website.
Regards,




-- 
Francis Mwathi
Assistant Technical Officer
UgaBYTES Initiatives
Tel: +256414370163
Mob: +256752995063
Mob: +25472362187
Skype: francis.mwathi
G-Mail:  MwathiFrancis at gmail.com
Yahoo: compyworthy at yahoo.com
UgaBYTES E-Mail: mfrancis at ugabytes.org