Mobile Social Computing

Terry Winograd organizes a lecture series on Human Computer Interaction. This week Younghee Jung and Per Persson from Nokia presented a talk called Mobile Social Computing - From Research to Products.

This research project considered how a mobile phone could be used to augment face-to-face conversation. How can one express some public information about yourself to others? What if you could retrieve some information about your shared social network?

DigiDress was one of the projects which lead to the forthcoming product called Nokia Senor. The website will be www.nokia.com/sensor. This project focuses on how to express yourself to other phone users in the same proximity. The hope is people will use this to find others with similar interests. Also, it may help them to form more interesting ways initiate a conversation.

Another project called Scent augments face-to-face interaction via social networking. Allowing people to find out about people they both know.

Some of the barriers to adoption they encountered were:

• If this program is only installed on one phone, it is useless. To use this software, you need a target rich environment. How do you reach a critical mass of users?
• At this point, the phone is viewed as a personal communication device. This application shares some information with others. Some users felt this was a violation of their privacy. Since there is a clear analogy with webpages, I think this is not show stopper.
• While using this program, the phone needs to ON to scan for bluetooth connects. This is a serious drain on the battery and CPU.

-jk

Comments for Per Person:


Let me comment some of the barriers of use mentioned by John.

Critical mass of users. This is probably the most crucial parameter if Sensor is to really fly and Nokia has been working hard on the device compatibility. For a start, over 10 Nokia phone models will be compatible and we hope to expand the park of compatible devices.

Violation of privacy: in DigiDress study some of the users made these remarks, but none of them had any serious objections to the concept as a whole since the user is in total control of what information to put onto the folio. When that content is created he or she knows that it will be read by non-acquainted people, just like a personal home-page and the user will adapt the content accordingly.

However, I do think that Nokia Sensor application will change the ways in which people feel about their mobile phones. Up to know, the phone has been a personal thing and the data stored on it has only been accessible to others if users hand physically over the phone to another person. With Sensor, users will make some information accessible to anyone nearby (serendipitously), turning the phone into a more public object (in similar ways as P2P systems opened up the content of PCs to the rest of the world).

Finally I would like to point out that Nokia Sensor application will NOT drain your battery in any substantial way. I have been using Sensor intensely every day now on my Nokia 6670 – in addition to calling and other usage of the phone – and I have had no problems with power that I did not have before starting using Sensor.

Happy Sensoring!


/Per Persson
Product Manager of S60 Sensor application