Project Proposal

Idea

The existing social networking systems (SNS) are successful at present time; however, they lack interactions between people and the world around them. Facebook, for example, is a pure online application in which people interact with each other only on the Internet. Social interactions in reality are virtually separate from the online experiences. By utilizing the locating function in a mobile system (e.g. GPS, Bluetooth), we can let SNSs more integrated into the reality.

Analysis of Problems

The mobile social networking system should provide these functionalities:

  1. Tell user where his friends are, what they are doing
  2. Tell user who are around him (extremely useful in a party or in a large class)
  3. Users can tag the current location and give comments to it (e.g. review a restaurant)

The current SNSs implement none of the functions above, but they have some of the features that are excellent tools to help implement these functions. For instance, Facebook users can upload pictures and tag people in the pictures. With the help of mobile technology, this process can be done at where the pictures are taken, and the users can tag the current location as well, and they can give comments to this event. Moreover, users can view the list of people that participate in a certain event, and view the profile of each of them so that they could know new people that share their interests. If two people just met each other, their can exchange their profiles through the mobile device just as exchanging business cards.

Suggested Solutions

In order to implement the functionalities above, the application should be aware of where the user is located and how the user defines the privacy setting. There are two ways to locate users. First, the easiest way, is to use the locating function in the mobile device (e.g. GPS), but the mobile device must have this capability and allow the application have access to it; Second, the user can tell the application where he is, and use relatively mature technologies (e.g. Bluetooth), to tell who are around him. For example, the user can predefine a list of places he usually goes, and set the current location whenever he moves. There are two disadvantages of this implementation. First, the user cannot set the location where he does not know well; second, the user can easily cheat on where he is. Privacy setting is also a very important issue on this application. People don't want their whereabouts be exposed to the public. Therefore, this application should be very precise about privacy settings. This setting could be very specific, for example, user can share their religious views only with people have the same views.

Online experiment

Independent variables:

  1. The background of the participants:
    The background of the participants should vary in terms of age, gender, location, and occupation.
  2. The devices participants use:
    Some of the mobile devices do not have a locating function or do not grant permissions to application to get access to the locating function. The participants should hold different types of devices.
  3. The occasion that participants use the application
    Not all people use this application all the time. Most people don't use it during work.

Dependent variables:

The dependent variable should be the participants' response to how each feature of the application helps them and how easy to use them. The questionnaire should contain a scale of 1 ~ 10 for how each feature helped them where 1 means very negative and 10 means extremely helpful. Participants should also mention how they like each feature in different situations.

Participants:

Randomly distribute the application to a large group of people of different age, gender, where they live, and occupations. The participants should have experience with SNSs and utilize them in daily life. Some of the participants should know each other, but none of them should know that the others are in this experiment.

Method:

Assign the participants a series of tasks. For example, look at the application to see who are around; examine the friends' statuses; read and write reviews for a public place (e.g. a restaurant); attend an event where many other participants attend. Record the how the participant interacts with other participants and how themselves react to the application.

Results and discussion:

Some of the features may have high ratings (e.g. reviews for restaurants) and some of them may not (e.g. being exposed where they are when they are not willing to). Analysis the data and see which part of the application should be improved and which part are good. Particularly, the privacy control may have bad ratings because many people will complain that their privacy being exposed. Thus, this portion should be very carefully designed and implemented.