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