Thanks for the Add ... er I mean the Delete

Ever wonder what someone thinks when you add them as a friend on Facebook but you met them a long time ago. Or more to the point if you delete someone that you have not talked to in a long time? What's the protocol for that?

Apparently someone in Britain has come out with a list of etiquette rules for social networking. They are in response to a survey done by Orange Telecom showed that almost two thirds of social networkers are frustrated and confused by on-line etiquette.

News Story

In terms of User Experience (and software product design in general) social networking is one of the hottest topics around. On mobile applications like MySpace and Facebook are among the top applications on networks like AT&T. And with good reason, humans are fundamentally social and the most compelling applications on computers or on mobile phones are about communication. Indeed talking on your mobile to someone else may always be more popular than any software application that happens to run on there.

I think that it is also interesting to note this is not the first time that etiquette has suddenly become of interest to people using social- and communication-oriented technology. When eMail first started to become popular users loved the service, but became concerned about how long one could wait to respond to a message before the sender would become upset and not having received a response.

Here's some specific thoughts on the User Experience design aspects of etiquette and social networking:

• In time people work out the etiquette on their own. As social networking (and specifically social networking on mobile devices) matures the users of these services will understand on their own what is ok and what is not.
• I think it's interesting to think about letting users display their emotional state in social networking applications. On MySpace today people can say, in general, how their mood is. For example "I'm feeling happy today!" However this idea could be extended to allow users to show their emotional state in regards to specific events. For example, what if I could show that I was unhappy that I had bee Deleted as a friend by someone else on Facebook? That sort of thing could provide interesting feedback that helps people realize the need for etiquette.
• I think it's useful for a user of social networking to show if actions they have taken were from a mobile device. People may not be able to make the same sort or response that they would if they were sitting in front of a computer with a full keyboard and spell check, etc. You already see something like this today when you receive an email from someone and it was composed on a Blackberry or an iPhone. At the end of the message you may see a line in the signature that says "This message was composed on the Blackberry."
  

Do people want to do social networking with complete stangers?

A company called Screenvision (who provides pre-movie advertising to theaters) is planning to offer SMS based polling. The idea is that the audience can participate in polls while they are waiting for a movie to start. They text their answers to a phone number that is shown on the screen. The results of the polls are shown to the whole audience before the movie starts.

Full Story

This got me wondering about mobile social networking. Is participating in a poll using your cell phone but in a public place a form of social networking. Well most polls are anonymous, so I don't think they qualify as social networking.

But let's work with this concept for a minute. What if users could tag their votes either with their real identities, or with pseudo identities (like some people have on MySpace and Yahoo Answers)? That, in effect, would be using your mobile phone to participate in a group activity and pseudo identities would allow people to do things commonly associated with social networking. Like connecting as friends, sending private messages etc. AND! Since you would all be located in one place you can actually meet in real life if you so chose. Could be cool. :-) Will have to think about this on some more.

We should all be scared

I don't understand this exactly, but check out this video. Apparently you can pop pop corn using a few cell phones.

I use vibrate mode all the time on my cell phone and now I'm wondering, is it dangerous in some way?

Don't forget your phone!

IDC just conducted a survey that asked people if they could only have one thing out of their Keys, Wallet, Cell Phone, Laptop, or Digital Music Player for 24 hours, which would they choose.

The answer for 38% was Cell Phones. That was the most popular answer. The second most popular answer was wallet at 30%.

Reuters Article

This got me thinking that the cell phone can and should be a replacement for those other things anyway. In Japan you can already use your cell phone to buy train tickets and other things. And we all know phones can be digital music players.

Can the idea of the phone replacing your laptop and keys be that far behind?

You have a Text from the Pope

No Joke, the Pope plans to use text messaging to reach young catholics.

News Story from Reuters

In case you don't know the Catholic Church does not exactly embrace change. So that makes this an interesting, if not significant, event. Text messaging as a communication channel is a big deal. An undeniablly big deal. I'll stop short of saying it is as significant as the telephone, but it's close and has uniquely interesting aspects to it.

An awful lot of UE design goes into products that are oriented towards communication, and many of them have been so called "Killer Apps." [A Killer App is something that is so popular that it drives the adoption of your platform, for example Email and the Web Browser driving adoption of the internet]

From the User Experience point of view, here's a list of things that are interesting about Text Messaging

1. Texting can not be overheard by people around you, unlike a phone call. It's worth noting that texting first became popular Japan and Europe, where people can live in high density cities and the average person spends a lot of time in public places. Texting was an amazing way to have semi-private interaction.
   
2. It is really oriented toward short interactions, unlike Email and most phone conversations. People text one another one-liner jokes. Or they tell someone something that does not require a response, for example "I'll be late."
   
3. You can communicate without having to actually engage in a phone conversation. I was surprised to discover this, but I think it is true. Sometimes a phone conversation is too intrusive in one's life. And once someone has you on the phone you can't be sure how long they'll keep you. I went to an on-line forum frequented by young people and posed this question "What do you like most about text messaging?" The most popular answer given was "You don't actually have to talk to the person."
4. At any time you can receive a message from a friend or loved one. You can't always answer a phone call. But whether you are in a business meeting or a college class room you can usually read a text without interrupting anyone else. Most people I think would say this provides a lift in your day to know someone was thinking of you. You can probably reply surreptitiously as well.
   
5. Texting is very popular among young people. Among people that are 25 and younger texting is very popular and there's little doubt that it is a channel that can be used to reach young people. The Pope's decision to use it shows that, but so does voting for American Idol via text. Future generations are literally growing up with it as part of their lives.
6. A text-based conversation is limited by the keyboard and character limit per message. In general texting conversations are made up of short messages because entering text is cumbersome on a phone keypad. Smartphones with full QWERTY keyboards may be changing that. Also note that text messages are NOT guaranteed to be delivered by most carriers, AND a message that is longer than 160 characters is split up into multiple texts that are delivered separately. These two together really cut down on the length of each message that is sent back and forth.

Cellular Data Plans: A billion here and there is starting to add up

At the end of April cellular carriers in the US announced quarterly results, and wow both AT&T and Verizon had growth in data services.

• AT&T data revenues grew to $2.3 billion for the quarter. That 57.3% growth over the same quarter last year. Data now represents an amazing 21.5% of total wireless revenue
  Source: http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/att-adds-1.3-mil-subscribers-in-1q/2008-04-22
  
• Verizon also made 2.3 billion this quarter off data services. Per user that's $11.94 and it represents 23% of total service revenue.
  Source: http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/verizon-wireless-adds-1.5m-customers/2008-04-28
  

So what do these figure mean for mobile user experience? Well for one thing it means that people are using their phones for more than just talking. Use of texting, email, and even the hopelessly broken mobile web are all going up.

Mobile devices have long made voice calls the most easy to find and prominent features. Where as data services are typically buried inside WAP decks and the phone's web browser. Many phones do place text messaging in an easy to find place. And of course phones like the Blackberry place a high importance on making email easily seen.

So all of this brings up an interesting Mobile UE question. How can device designers place messaging and other data services in easier places for users to find, while not making voice calling any more difficult? After all, on most phones a phone call can be dialed from the main screen (aka the idle screen or the home screen). True there are some short cuts to other applications, but the main screen of most phones doesn't offer any data services on it's own. In the coming years I think we will see more phones place some kind of data service on their main screens.

Hey baby, what's your sign?

Apparently Virgin Mobile has a large budget for doing user research. How else to make sense of the fact that they did a study of users by their astrological sign to see if people of the same sign had similar habits of communication.

http://about.virginmobile.com/aboutus/media/news/2006/2006-11-09/

I mean come on! Most UE professionals would love to have more money for user research. Maybe I'm just jealous, but how'd you like to have such a large budget for research that you'd choose to do that study?