Research findings on how participation in social networking sites (SNSs) affects users’ subjective well-being are equivocal. Some studies suggest a positive impact of SNSs on users’ life satisfaction and mood, whereas others report undesirable consequences such as depressive symptoms and anxiety. However, whereas the factors behind the positive effects have received significant scholarly attention, little is known about the mechanisms that underlie the unfavorable consequences. To fill this gap, this study uses social comparison theory and the responses of 1,193 college-age Facebook users to investigate the role of envy in the SNS context as a potential contributor to those undesirable outcomes. Arising in response to social information consumption, envy is shown to be associated with reduced cognitive and affective well-being as well as increased reactive self-enhancement. These preliminary findings contribute to the growing body of information systems research investigating the dysfunctional consequences of information technology adoption in general and social media participation in particular.

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This article presents descriptive empirical results on the value potentials and challenges of service-oriented architectures (SOA). 33 of the 250 largest German enterprises were interviewed to derive the presented results. Currently only a small share of the IT landscape of these companies is covered by services. The judgment on the overall benefit/cost ratio of SOA usage is slightly negative at the moment; however, a positive trend is expected for the upcoming years. Among the 21 discussed value potentials, especially business process optimization, agility, and reduction of development cost by parallel re-use of services are confirmed by the majority of users. In addition to the issues regarding operations (security and performance), the main challenges of SOA are seen in the management of the resulting architecture.

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