Human motivation principles and human factors for virtual communities

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to investigate, from a theoretical point of view, virtual universities in comparison with Social Networking Services (SNS). The theoretical framework constitutes of the Human Motivation Theory (HMT) and the Human Factors (HF) in which Facebook as the most popular SNS is compared with virtual university in general. The main features of these technologies were compared in order to consider whether they comply with mentioned theories. Using an exploratory research methodology, this study concludes that SNSs are more adopted with HMT than virtual university. In the other word, Facebook applications as the most popular virtual community with over 500,000,000 users worldwide, is more compliant with HMT to gratify users' needs. Also, from the perspective of human factors, it is more successful than the virtual university.