Michael Voong HCI Researcher @ Birmingham University

Followup Post on MobiSites

As promised, here’s a followup post. For your convenience, here’s the scenarios I laid out in the previous post:

1. I haven’t seen my friend for a while. I used to live near to this friend, so I always knew how they were doing. Now, they’ve moved to another Country, so it’s more difficult. I want a spontaneous view of how they are doing, and their general emotional state, without having to ask them explicitly.
2. What are my friends doing right now? How can I receive an overview without asking them one at a time? I want to do something fun spontaneously, like organise a last minute party.
3. I’m in a weird mood today… I want to make a new friend. Who else is feeling the same as me? How can I find them? I don’t want to spend ages introducing myself to them, but I want to share my thoughts with them.
4. I went on holiday with some friends. How do we share our thoughts without resorting to setting up a central repository, eg. website? I want to subscribe to notifications of updates from my friends.
5. How do I advertise myself so that I can find like-minded people?

“I Haven’t Seen My Friend for a While” (1)

Suggested in Nokia’s research papers was that we can imagine a web user clicking a link which causes a pop-up message to display on the MobiSite’s host device, asking for the user to provide some spontaneous media. An example of this would be a request for a picture or movie to be taken using a the mobile device, which would give an idea of how your friend is doing. It’s kinda like Voicemail, but the other way round - you’re requesting a message, which may be interesting. This is what makes it different from Nokia’s LifeBlog software for mobiles, where content is generated in plain and traditional way. The only difference is that you have the opportunity to record your thoughts and share it with the community wherever you are, given you have connectivity.

So, MobiSites enable spontaneous interaction with the administrator of the website, generating up-to-date data.

“I Want to Do Something Fun; Where Are My Friends?” (2)

The information stored on the MobiSite’s device may include schedules in the calendar, the user’s current mood, to-do lists, call registers, notes, blog posts, etc. For this scenario, calendar information and the user’s current mood would be most useful. Want to check if your friends are up for a game of snooker? Check a website that stores a list of your friend’s MobiSites, which queries the list to see if they’re free and open for new plans for the evening. Mobile phones make it easy and convenient for us to update our status. Arguably, it should be even more convenient, so devices with WiFi should be able to give a rough estimate of its location. This helps solve the problem of updating your status when you’ve obviously busy; you can be set as busy when you’re within range of the WiFi network of your office block during office hours, for example. Work in context sensing, which may or may not use GPS technology would make this problem a breeze.

“Find Me a Friend” (3)

This may sound a bit silly, but it would be interesting to study if anyone ever feels this. Actually I haven’t searched the Web to see if there are sites to meet other lonely people, but I’m sure they exist. MobiSites can access up-to-date information about a person’s mood and context. Yes, websites would be able to do it, but it would be more inconvenient to keep up-to-date. Presumably, loneliness is not persistent, so users wouldn’t want to sign up to a site especially to say that they’re lonely. So, why not integrate the data in a MobiSite’s RSS feed, which can be queried by RSS indexers like Technorati.com and paired up with services which crawl them? The websites would see the “moodscape” of subscribers, and searching them would be a breeze from any internet-connected terminal.

This idea needs to be built on, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

“I Want All the Media From My Holiday in One Place” (4)

Assuming each holiday goer has a MobiSite, they could point it to all the media related to the holiday. This could be journals, notes, photos, videos, etc. These photos have metadata about them, but most interesting of the defaults is the time taken field. We can enrich this metadata with data about who was present in the photos, using Bluetooth ID scanning at the time of content generation. This would make it easier to search for the media, as psychological research has shown that contextual information is important for memory recall. The important thing is, MobiSites enable users to store their media in one place that is kept close to them. This means that there is no tedious organisation task of having to upload to a website, add the notes one by one, etc. Again, its a convenience advantage.

Similarly, this idea can be adapted to not just a holiday, but any other event; be it a social event, a music concert, or whatever. Communities would be easier to generate because there would be no central location where the content is stored, meaning that the information landscape changes dynamically! I have a nice quote which sums up programs that do that, but I’m gonna search for it later.

“I Want to Social Network” (5)

There is a rapidly increasing number of people that sign up to multiple social networking websites. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, FriendsReunited, Orkut, Hi5 are just a handful of the popular ones. Each one claims to serve a slightly different purpose. We have Facebook, which with its profiles invisible by non-members, creates a sense of containment. This was stronger in the past, before they opened the signups to non-academic users. We have MySpace, which is used by millions of people who reveal all of their inner secrets, catering for even the craziest of audiences. You get the idea. Sites like Claim ID make it easier for us to manage all of these identities by having a links page where you can link to all of your individual profiles (see mine here). But with the rise in popularity of web science and the semantic web, pioneered by Tim Berners-Lee, we see that duplicating our personal profiles across multiple sites creates problems with services that try to extract meaningful data from them. Storing your profile on your MobiSite solves these problems by only storing the information on one site.

How is this different from FOAF, which is used by sites like LiveJournal, which means 15 million FOAF files are ready to be processed by an intelligent agent or person crawler. Well, it doesn’t have to be different. FOAF files could be stored on a user’s mobile phone, which means that updating it becomes easier. Change telephone number? Easy, just modify the entry on your phone. (Even if you get a new mobile phone just import your file from the one cached on your gateway, and away you go.) Always up-to-date information. It helps you manage your identity, therefore self-advertising is easier as web services are developed to make use of it!