ItchyFeet: motivations for urban geospatial tagging

Mobile social computing services are a new breed of application that require new design paradigms to establish themselves in our complex urban environment. This paper introduces 'ItchyFeet', a mobile social awareness service for GPS-enabled mobile handsets, which enables a user and their online social peers to collaboratively author a shared collection of geospatial tags. The application encourages users to place tags at socially important locations; such tags are used as indicators of a user's current and past context on their Facebook profile. We report on findings from a four week user trial of the application, which investigated the factors that motivated users to leave tags. Our results identify some of these factors and highlight the complexity of the dynamic relationship between users, their environment and mobile social services.

[1]  Jaakko Lehikoinen,et al.  PePe field study: constructing meanings for locations in the context of mobile presence , 2006, Mobile HCI.

[2]  Gregory D. Abowd,et al.  Social Disclosure of Place: From Location Technology to Communication Practices , 2005, Pervasive.

[3]  Steve Benford,et al.  Supporting ethnographic studies of ubiquitous computing in the wild , 2006, DIS '06.

[4]  Mark Bilandzic,et al.  CityFlocks: designing social navigation for urban mobile information systems , 2008, DIS '08.

[5]  Eric Paulos,et al.  The familiar stranger: anxiety, comfort, and play in public places , 2004, CHI.

[6]  Paul Dourish,et al.  Underground Aesthetics: Rethinking Urban Computing , 2007, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[7]  Jakob E. Bardram,et al.  The AWARE architecture: supporting context-mediated social awareness in mobile cooperation , 2004, CSCW.

[8]  I. Smith,et al.  Social-Mobile Applications , 2005, Computer.

[9]  Paul Dourish,et al.  Re-place-ing space: the roles of place and space in collaborative systems , 1996, CSCW '96.

[10]  Alexandra Weilenmann,et al.  Negotiating Use: Making Sense of Mobile Technology , 2001, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[11]  Tara Matthews,et al.  Location disclosure to social relations: why, when, & what people want to share , 2005, CHI.

[12]  Matthew Chalmers,et al.  From awareness to repartee: sharing location within social groups , 2008, CHI.

[13]  W. Keith Edwards,et al.  Intelligibility and Accountability: Human Considerations in Context-Aware Systems , 2001, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[14]  Alex Pentland,et al.  Social serendipity: mobilizing social software , 2005, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[15]  Antti Oulasvirta.  The fragmentation of attention in mobile interaction, and what to do with it , 2005, INTR.

[16]  Mor Naaman,et al.  HT06, tagging paper, taxonomy, Flickr, academic article, to read , 2006, HYPERTEXT '06.