Exploring serendipitous social networks: sharing immediate situations among unacquainted individuals

In this article, we present a serendipitous social network that makes use of individuals' contextual information to connect people in shared immediate situations. We build a prototype microblogging service that uses a serendipitous social network as a substrate. We performed an initial user study and found that users engaged in shared immediate situations are likely to exchange posts relevant to their situation that provide useful information or reflect emotional understanding.