Even though the study
participants were very
curious about who
they were sharing
music with, they never
crossed over from the
technologically mediated
communication into
actual conversation.
This showed that
the barriers between
electronic and real
connections are harder
to cross than many
seem to think.

[ 3] Bassoli, A., J. Moore, and S. Agamanolis. “tunA: Socialising Music Sharing on the Move.” In Consuming Music Together: Social and Collaborative Aspects of Music Consumption Technologies, edited by Kenton O’Hara and Barry Brown. New York: Springer, 2006

[ 4] Kortuem, G.,
Z. Segall, and T.
Thompson. “Close
Encounters: Supporting
Mobile Collaboration
through Interchange of
User Profiles.” In the
Proceedings of HUC 99.
Karlsruhe, Germany,
1999.

my commute!” Never mind that the person whose taste in music most matches my own might not be the cute girl sitting in the opposite aisle, but the slightly scary middle-aged divorced guy who can’t keep upright because he already had a few before breakfast. Fortunately, no mobile social networking app has reached enough users to let us find out… yet.

This is not for lack of trying. There have already been several attempts at social networking software for standard mobile phones, such as Germany’s aka-

aki (www.aka- aki.com) and U.S.-based Loopt ( www.loopt.com). But they all struggle with the same two basic problems: battery life and critical mass.

The first may seem trivial, and more than one startup seems to simply shake it off— isn’t everything in electronics getting better all the time anyway, according to Moore’s law?

No, this is actually a real killer. A device that pings its surroundings wirelessly with regular intervals, using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, will drain any sensibly sized battery in a few hours at most. Continuously pulling up and reporting a GPS location can be even worse. It is highly unlikely that users will stand for carrying half a dozen replacement batteries, and barring an unprecedented breakthrough in battery technology, the only fix on the horizon is some kind of push solution based on network cell location. Unfortunately, to be useful this requires a degree of cooperation between network service providers that is still a long way off.

The second issue stems less from a lack of user interest and has more to do with the extremely fragmented mobile device market. Whereas signing up for a Facebook account can be done in a matter of minutes, downloading and installing a mobile application has been lots of hard work and beyond the reach of most normal users. This might change very fast, however. With Apple’s iPhone 3G and the accompanying Appstore, there is now for the first time an attractive platform and sales channel for mobile software. In response the rest of the market is likely to finally

consolidate around a small number of standard operating systems (including Android, Symbian, and Windows Mobile). This means that quite soon, we will see people downloading and using social software on their phones—and those that hook into existing networks will have a head start. Already, iPhone versions of AIM and Facebook are among the Appstore’s top downloads, with others such as Twitteriffic and MySpace also gaining headway.

This is an exciting time: Suddenly, all those research prototypes we have dreamed up over the past decade will have a chance to become real products. All previous deployments of mobile social applications have been limited by access to hardware—research labs like mine typically have only a few dozen terminals at most to give out, and this makes gaining critical mass impossible. Soon it will be possible to distribute mobile software freely just like for desktop computers. Then we will finally see if people really want to strike up conversations about music on the subway, or perhaps even start swapping household tasks with each other [ 4]. So what can researchers add to the big corporations and startups in the imminent mobile social software feeding frenzy? A sense of perspective, perhaps.

In my own projects, I have tried to approach the problem in an open-ended and explorative, rather than dogmatic, way. By building working prototypes and putting them to real-world use, it is possible to go beyond the idealized cases and get some real knowledge on mobile social software, even with a fairly