musings of a social architect

Social Trends in Mobile Useage

I just posted over at Many2Many about a fascinating study of mobile useage patterns worldwide. Here's a brief PDF summary of the research -- check out my post for a summary of the core ideas from this study. And if you know of further resources on this topic - please post a link! Thanks.

Taking it to the Streets: Location-based cellphone games

One fascinating development in multiplayer gaming has been the emergence of location-based cellphone games like BotFighters (the grandaddy of the genre, launched in 2001) and Undercover (launched in 2003). In these games, cellphone-toting urban warriors take to the streets of their city to search for clues, complete missions, and engage in battle (and conversation) with their fellow players. Each game overlays a virtual 'gaming grid' onto the physical layout of the city, and tracks the players' location within that grid using the built-in GPS of their cellphones.

This genre is starting to mature -- as evidenced by hybrid lifeforms that are emerging. My current favorite is Mogi, Item Hunt, a Tokyo-based game where the core game mechanic is collecting and trading (rather than fighting). Using a live map (shown at right) as a guide, players move through the streets and 'pick up' virtual items with their cellphone interface. The goal is to amass points by completing collections -- and in addition to collecting items on the streets, players can trade items amongst themselves to complete their collections. Mogi also includes a buddy-based messaging service, and a mechanism for messaging any player who's online using the gaming grid. For a user-centric glimpse into what makes this game so compelling, check out this blog post from a Mogi player.

Mogi also includes a full-featured Web-based game interface (shown at left) -- which means that logged-in players can communicate and trade objects seemlessly, regardless of whether they're using a cellphone or computer. THIS ROCKS -- I'm thrilled to see smart, creative developers experimenting with trans-device gaming experiences, which I think will be huge. If you know of other entertainment experiences that offer cellphone & web-based interfaces to the same data set, I'd love to hear about 'em.

(psst -- here's a little secret I discovered: if you want to check out Mogi's web-based interface, type in 'test' for your username & password and have at it :-)

Social Networks as MMP entertainment

I had a great conversation today with Hunter Walk (formerly @ Linden Labs, currently @ Google) about where social software is headed. It turns out that we both view social networks as a type of massively multiplayer gaming experience, and we speculated about what next-gen social networking apps might look like. We also talked about the 'walled garden' vs. 'permeable-membrane' approach to personal profiles, which is a hot topic these days -- both in social networking and mobile services. If we believe the rhetoric at the 3GSM conference this week, the mobile industry seems to be getting a clue. Exciting stuff for us networked systems geeks :-)

This reminds me: -- as a background task, I've been putting together a list of game mechanics and game-like elements that are appearing in networked people-centric services. I'll pull together my notes and post something later this week - I'd love to have a productive dialogue with y'all around this topic.

Yahoo! Search (with MyYahoo integration) is DA BOMB

I have a new favorite search engine -- Yahoo! Search -- and it's due to this incredibly useful bit of integration in the search results [outlined in red below]:

I hope to see more of this from Yahoo! -- smart, personalized integration across services could be a strong differentiator for them in the search wars.

Guest-Blogging at Many-to-Many Next Week

I'm honored to say that I'll be guest-blogging for the next two weeks at one of my favorite blogs, Many-to-Many. Come on by and join the conversation -- I'll be linking to some fun stuff :-)

Playing Games with your Friends & FOAFS

Xfire -- a buddy-based social networking service for playing games with your friends and FOAFS -- looks way-cool. Really smart and useful idea. I'm downloading it now, I'll report back when I've actually tried it.

Context-Aware Mobile Phones

Today, while researching my upcoming talk at GDC, I ran across another research project on context-aware mobile phones. Very cool stuff -- I wonder how quickly this kind of tech will find it's way into the marketplace?

GPS-enabled, Net-connected cameraphones are driving some fascinating social dynamics. Where's the game that'll become a breakthrough, massively popular hit on these devices? I don't have an answer to that (yet) - but my gut feeling is that it'll be a communications-based, highly social collecting game (which is basically how I view Orkut, Friendster, etc.)

If you know of such a game - or if you have a different guess for what's gonna be the breakthrough hit game on smartphones - I'd love to hear from you.

Context-Sensitive Cellphones?

This morning, I read a fascinating article called Mobile Phones with Manners. A few choice quotes:

One of the research group's approaches is to enable mobile phones to ask each other what the best behavior may be for a given situation. That way, even if you forget to switch off your ringer when you sit down in a theater, your phone would wirelessly query the settings of the other handsets in the vicinity. "If the phones around you are all in silent mode, maybe your phone will take the hint and choose to alert you in a way other than ringing," Schmandt says.

I love this idea the idea of harnessing collective behavior to determine localized social norms. The potential for griefing and abuse in real working systems is ripe, of course -- but it's an exciting, timely idea that dovetails with the overall trend of building bottom-up networked systems that "harness the collective" -- e.g. Slashdot, eBay, Amazon, Google, Friendster.

It's a simple concept, but potentially very useful. For instance, you could program your phone to be on the lookout for your supervisor's phone. Then, if you're chatting with the boss and someone happens to dial your number, the call would automatically be routed to voicemail.

The researchers are also exploring ways to instrument mobile phones with tiny sensors to detect motion and sound, factors that could help inform a device's behavior. This kind of context-aware phone could tease out patterns in its owner's daily routine and then ask the user how it should respond to incoming calls during those regularly-occurring events.

Say you walk to the bus stop each morning. A context-aware phone would notice that at around the same time every day you move slowly and steadily for a while, stop completely, and then dramatically speed up. After noticing this pattern, you phone might ask you if you'd like to tie specific preferences to this particular activity. At that point, you could then set the device to ring while you're walking but switch to silent once you board the bus.

It's exciting to think about building context-sensitive, socially-aware systems into our personal media that pay attention to what we do and learn from it. I'd love to hear about other projects -- both commercial and academic -- that are exploring this theme.

Going to ETECH

I'll be down at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference all day Tuesday and part of Wednesday. Over the next few days I'll be blogging about themes that capture my interest, particularly social patterns in mobile gaming & services. Should be fun! I hope to see some of you there.

People-centric data sets

With so many people Net-connected so much of the time these days, we now have (potential) access to an really interesting collection of people-centric data sets -- e.g. buddy lists, social networks, blog content & links, and also geographic vicinity (via ad-hoc local networking like Apple's Rendevous & many cellphone services).

I'm starting to see some exciting networked apps that integrate these services, and I'll be writing about these more in the coming weeks. If you know of a people-centric networked service that integrates buddy lists/social networks/blogs/geographic info in a dynamic, compelling way, please let me know about it -- I'm collecting examples.

I have a strong gut feeling that dynamism is key for creating an addictive, compelling networked service. More on that later.