Abstract

Mobile social software tools have great potential in transforming the way users communicate
on the move, by augmenting their everyday environment with pertinent information from
their online social networks. A fundamental aspect to the success of these tools is in
developing an understanding of their emergent real-world use and also the aspirations of
users; this thesis focuses on investigating one facet of this: the exchange of social media. To
facilitate this investigation, three mobile social tools have been developed for use on locationaware
smartphone handsets. The first is an exploratory social game, 'Gophers' that utilises
task oriented gameplay, social agents and GSM cell positioning to create an engaging
ecosystem in which users create and exchange geotagged social media. Supplementing this is
a pair of social awareness and tagging services that integrate with a user's existing online
social network; the 'ItchyFeet' service uses GPS positioning to allow the user and their social
network peers to collaboratively build a landscape of socially important geotagged locations,
which are used as indicators of a user's context on their Facebook profile; likewise
'MobiClouds' revisits this concept by exploring the novel concept of Bluetooth 'people
tagging' to facilitate the creation of tags that are more indicative of users' social surroundings.
The thesis reports on findings from formal trials of these technologies, using groups of
volunteer social network users based around the city of Lincoln, UK, where the incorporation
of daily diaries, interviews and automated logging precisely monitored application use.
Through analysis of trial data, a guide for designers of future mobile social tools has been
devised and the factors that typically influence users when creating tags are identified. The
thesis makes a number of further contributions to the area. Firstly, it identifies the natural
desire of users to update their status whilst mobile; a practice recently popularised by
commercial 'check in' services. It also explores the overarching narratives that developed over
time, which formed an integral part of the tagging process and augmented social media with a
higher level meaning. Finally, it reveals how social media is affected by the tag positioning
method selected and also by personal circumstances, such as the proximity of social peers.