ItchyFeet: motivations for urban geospatial tagging

ABSTRACT

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.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Collaborative computing

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Evaluation/methodology

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
GPS cell phones, MoSoSo, context acquisition, mobile and locative systems, social networking, urban computing, user-generated content