THE END, AND THE BEGINNING!

Finally, after a long week of studying, no social life, and not a lot of sleep, the exams of the Social Aspects of New Media and Communication Theory are finished for now. Moreover, the summer holiday is coming closer and closer. However, there is only one thing left to do for this semester; finishing my blogging assignment!

During the time I was writing my first blog, I was very skeptic about all those popular Social Media networking websites like Facebook, Hyves, and Twitter. However, after this semester I learned a lot of new things about the up and down sides of Social Media. In addition to the knowledge gained during the different courses this semester, I learned the most about Social Media by just diving into it and experience the positive and negatives aspects by actively use it.  In the end I must say that I need to adjust my earlier opinion about Social Media. During the 14 weeks of blogging and experiencing Twitter, Facebook, and other new technologies more intensively, I also experienced the advantages of it. Although, my opinion is still skeptic, because a lot people indeed use Social Media very wrong (see my blogs about Privacy issues concerning Facebook, and the rumors spread around via Twitter), there are some real advantages of using Social Media and new technologies. 

The last mentioned one, new technologies is the topic with which I want to close off this final blog. During the course User Interface Design, as a group we needed to develop, design and evaluate a user interface.

As most of you will experience from time to time, while travelling with public transportation services, waiting on a bus or train to come is very irritating. Moreover, waiting is annoying, time consuming, and boring. However, we have found the solution for waiting; an interactive puzzle game called ‘Buzzle’.  This interactive game can be played, together or alone, on a billboard at a bus stop. It is the perfect solution for you to make waiting more fun. The game is very simple; try to complete a puzzle by moving the puzzle pieces to their right place with your hands. Moreover, the game has also a competition element it in.  Different cities in the Netherlands compete against each other by solving the most puzzles in a certain period of time. Special about this interactive game is that you can join the ‘Buzzle’ Facebook network to add your contribution of playing, see the statistics of other cities, other friends who also played, and many more.

Look at this video to get a good impression about ‘Buzzle’:

This was my last blog which I had to write for the course Business Information Technology. At first I did not like the assignment because I was unfamiliar with writing blogs and did not know a lot about Social Media, but in the end I think most blogs turned out quit well. I even enjoyed writing them. Therefore, I hope you also enjoyed some of my blog posts and for now I wish you all a very nice summer holiday and for the ones having exams; good luck.  

And maybe you never know I start writing blogs again.

THE END…