Types of Mobile Media

I've blogged previously about my defintion of mobile devices. Suprisingly, there is little consensus in industry and academia on exactly what is a mobile device, so I hope my definition will be of some use in this regard.

While research the usage and potential of mobile devices, I have found a tendency to view mobile devices as the first form of mobile media. And thus, many writers further the sense that what we are experiencing with mobile device usage is an entirely new phenomenon. Humans have a long history of mobile media, pretty much as soon as written language was invented, texts were carried around whether in clay, vellum, or papyrus.

So since I love lists and typologies, I thought I'd offer a list of other forms of mobile media.

I think it is important to distinguish between portable and mobile. Portable means that a medium is capable of being moved, while mobile means easily moved (see Dictionary. com).

So although a television set can be moved around (hence portable) it isn't easily mobile.

Ghetto blasters, for example, blur this distinction - as this picture from Wikimedia, circa 1987 demonstrates.  Carrier pigeons while helping extend communication over large distances at least since 2000 years ago are not that easy to carry with one so were probably one of the first portable communication mediums were not quite mobile.






Mobile mass media:

• books (paperback more so than hardcover)
• newspapers
• maps
• magazines
• transistor radios (e.g. to beach)
• print-outs & photocopies
• wristwatch televisions (launched in 1982) and possibly smartwatches soon
• Walkmans & MP3 players
• game consoles
• GPS devices
• e-readers
• tablets
• netbooks

Mobile communication media:

• personal digital assistants
• walkie-talkies
• CB radios
• pagers
• car phones (they had them on Charlie's Angels, remember?)
• cell phones

Let me know if I missed any...

My Fondness and Frustration with foursquare

I've been using the mobile location and geosocial app foursquare soon after it was available in Canada. Having used it for a couple years now, I'm intimately familiar with it.

I love it - but it also pisses me off regularly!

They are just some inexcusable problems and limitations that should have been fixed by now. To be fair, foursquare does continue to offer product updates and their user base is growing despite challenges (see my prior post on this Have Check-ins Checked Out? ). Also, I use foursquare on an old device, so some of the problems could be the result of the limits of my device. I'll be upgrading to an Android device in September when my 3-year contract ends (no more contracts for me).

Still, I believe some of the problems I have are consistent across platforms and regardless they are so damn annoying they should be fixed!

I've been a loyal foursquare user, but if something that comes along to address the problems and/or satisfy my needs better, I'll be eager to leave and have less frustration in my life. Still, my beefs below can be taken as key areas for foursquare developers to improve to make me (and millions of others) even likelier to be a loyal user.

Before complaining, I'll offer what I think they do currently do right, so they can extend the positive.

Likes:

• Friends' recent check-ins at a glance on homepage
• Venue tips from friends and others (particularly when they are specific)
• Genuine rewards from businesses
• Self check-in (versus automated, uncontrolled by user check-ins as some apps offer)
• Ability to find cool new business
• Personalized recommendations of sites and businesses
• Badges (dorky, but surprisingly fun)
• Personal history list (it's like a handy travelogue)
• Curated, individual lists of recommended places to share
• Finding out a friend is at the same place as you at the same time (or at any time for unusual places)
• Only locative app that achieved a viable critical mass

 Dislikes:

• Too many clicks to check-in, they could easily eliminate one step to make the process faster
• Once check-in can't go back and edit - e.g. to add comment or post to Facebook
• Doesn't remember very well the places I frequent (to make repeat check-ins easy)
• Their "deals" feature while promising in theory has been completely useless for two years - first what they consider to be a "nearby deal" is often vast distances from where the user has check-in (really 10+ kilometers often - this in a major metropolitan area) and then the deals are often bogus, either a deal that everyone gets (e.g. a normal sale or something that is otherwise free or just incredibly crappy - they need quality control for this to have any value)
• Often doesn't pull up places actually closest to user (it seems that a simple sort of results by proximity should be easy, but it often doesn't work)
• Result often don't pull up popular venues, but even worse...
• When searching for a venue by typing it in, it will frequently says there is no place, but then once  I go to add it, the app then finds it in their database. So if it is there,why doesn't it come up at the first request or at least when searched?
• When adding a venue, the app stalls or often fails completely when trying to designate the venue's category (a required field)
• Search for venues must be incredible precise to work (does not allow short forms, synonyms, common misspellings, etc. - basis search features)
• Often says there are no places nearby and have to refresh 3-4 times for it to work (if this is a network access issue then the error message should be worded as such)
• Shows friends check-ins on homepage even if they haven't used the app in over a year - set a cut-off of a few weeks
• Brands (for example TV channels, celebrities, etc.) can be added as "friends", but they all appear to be doing a really boring and pointless job at using it
• "Mayorships" (i.e. title given to the person with the most check-ins at a place) are a neat idea but with so many users now they are essentially unattainable to the vast, vast majority of users and are thus pointless and frustrating - they need some other titles (Council member?) or method to determine mayors
• Should have a ratings button for venues rather than just comments as ratings features are more apt to be used and thus more reliable and useful

Problems that aren't foursquare's fault, but are still damn annoying:

• No indoor positioning
• No cell coverage in basements or urban canyons
• Most of my friends (and me) mostly check into really boring places (e.g. work) and don't add interesting commentary often enough
• Insanely-high roaming fees (on my trip last month to Hawaii, I paid over $40 recently to read a few emails and for several foursquare check-ins)

I think overall foursquare has been a compelling, fun, and useful product, so I'd like to see it improve and expand.  

Lexicon of Place Studies and Locative Media

I'm in the process of preparing for my PhD comprehensive exams (or rather my faculty's equivalent). So I'm currently enmeshed in the literature related to my topic - how people use location-based services to make sense of their places.

The only thing academics love more than using big words is coining a new term.  As such the literature becomes baffling with jargon.  However, this problematic jargon belies what are often fascinating and useful concepts. So I started keeping track of the jargon as I think it offers brief snapshots into how location-based services function and their possible role in shaping sense of place.

I have already blogged on terminology related to mobiles and locative technology. This blog post will focus on how such technology might affect our relationship and meanings of our world, with some background terms added.

Below, I offer my simplified definitions, with a key theorist in parenthesis.

• authenticity - how "real" a place is, offers genuine experiences, popular turn with humanistic geographers (per Relph and Tuan)
• autobiographical insideness - high degree of integration of one's lifestory with specific places (per Rowles)
• chora - early notion of existential space (per Plato)
• cyburg - technology enmeshed with urbanity (per Cuff)
• deep map - mapping a place through through thick, multifaceted description
• dérive - unplanned, open-minded exploration (per Debord)
• détournement - creating new meanings & representations of places to counter dominant representations (per Debord)
• digital cities - visionary concept of technology embedded and aiding city life
• dwelling - existential and contextual engagement and living with place (per Heidegger)
• ecotopes - distinct landscape
• Everyware - similar to ubiquitous computing
• field of care - feeling of protection for specific place (per Tuan)
• flâneur - person who wanders to city to experience and appraise it (per Baudelaire)
• gazetteer - geographic directory
• genius loci (also spirit of place) - a sense that a place that has a distinct identity
• geographic behaviour - how humans behave in and in relation to space
• geographic experience - event in space/place significant to an individual
• geosymbol - a structure(s) or area that represents a larger, meaningful concept (per Bonnemaison)
• humanistic geography - branch of human geography that place individual experience at the centre of meaningful engagement in the world (per Relph and Tuan), similar to existential geography
• hybrid space - the enmeshing and inter-dependence of space/place, people, and technology (per Gordon, de Silve e Souza, Kitchen & Dodge)
• insideness - personal connection with a place, being an insider (per Relph)
• landscape - physical features of an area
• lifeworld - the world we live in, experience, and create meaning (per Husserl)
• lived space - similar to the lifeworld but also the space where social meanings take form (per Lefebvre)
• local knowledge - body of knowledge that a specific, co-located people have particularly regarding their places and landscape (per Geertz)
• locale - the natural and human form of a distinct space (per Cresswell)
• location - a specific point in space
• motility - ability to move, free and by one's own efforts (in contrast to mobility, which implies only geographic movement)
• mobilities - field of study looking at how and why humans move through the world and the resulting meanings, including the tools they use (such as mobile devices)
• neogeography - movement using new digital, often collaborative, tools, methods, and artistic forms to map and understand our world
• network locality - hybrid space meets place (per Gordon)
• non-place (also placelessness) - a space, often a building or area, that lacks "authentic qualities" that is it is bland, generic, derivative of other places, examples include malls, airports, and suburbs (per Relph, Augé)
• non-representational theory - belief that meaning in our world is constantly in flux, our social world is a process and thus best conceived through performance rather than as a representation (per Thrift)
• personal geographies - individual sense of their places and areas, including individual or friend-based playful interaction with places and mapping
• place - space made meaningful
• place attachment - emotional attachment to a specific place
• place dependence - usually reliance on a specific place (either based on its utility or proximity), can also mean such a high degree of connection that one is emotionally dependent on a place
• place identity - the role places having in shaping and projecting human identity (but can also include the belief that places have an identity, see genuis loci) if this identity is shared it is known as "collective identity"
• place loss - feeling of loss when removed from a meaningful place (e.g. refugees)
• place-making - efforts to make a space/place more pleasing, harmonious, meaningful or memorable either through physical efforts (e.g. landscaping, architecture) or marketing  
• placemarker - a distinct physical structure that aids one's memory of a space, essentially a bookmark for a place
• psychogeography - creating new awareness of our places and foster new experiences  (per Chtcheglov and Debord)
• rootedness - feeling of connection and a historic link to a place (per Hay)
• sense of community - feeling of familiarity and attachment with the people of a given area
• sense of place - meanings and feelings related to a place
• sites of memory - physical features that are created or given meaning to represent and honour collective history (per Nora)
• social objects - objects (but could be places, e.g. restaurants, monuments) that spur conversation and socializing (popular in social media theory)
• social production of space - theory that our world is constructed by social processes (per Lefebvre)
• space - the physical world (often used as free of human meaning)
• spatial cognition - human ability to comprehend and visualize euclidean relationships between spaces
• Third space - a physical site or forum for free public discourse (per Oldenburg), similar to the public sphere (per Habermas)
• toponym - a place name
• topophilia - love of a place (per Tuan)
• topophobia - fear or negative feelings towards a place (per Tuan)
• topos - the physical features of the world

I would love to hear from others on their take on these terms or terms I should add to this list.

Have Check-ins Checked Out?

This week the leading location-based service foursquare announced it had achieved 20 million users. Despite the milestone, critics were quick to point out that check-in services were dead.  Over the past few months other major check-in based services such as Loopt, Gowalla, BrightKite, and Facebook places have shut down or been acquired and closed.

This announcement spurred good commentary on whether foursquare in specific and location-based check-in services can survive. I've also found other good, older articles that address the topic:

• Just Checking...How Many of Foursquare's Reported 20 Million Users Are Active? - ReadWriteWeb
• Addressing Foursquare’s Engagement Problem - Street Fighter
• Foursquare May Not Be Toast Yet, But It's Browning At The Edges - Business Insider
• Is Foursquare's growth boxed in? - CNET
• Only 5% of Adults Use Location-Based Checkin Apps - Mashable
• Are Location-Based Services All Hype? - Mashable
• Foursquare Check-In Service Hits Big But Faces Challenges - ABC

(Between my post and these articles, we really exhausted the puns in the titles, eh?)

A main point from these articles is that the current usage of applications of foursquare aren't compelling or useful enough to either become mainstream or enduring.  There is no doubt that novelty usage of foursquare has been waning, as all novelty usage inevitably does. Also, the promotions offerred (at least in Canada) have not been compelling enough to encourage people to check-in regularly. So the most check-ins I notice from the bulk of usage is when someone is at a particularly high-status or unusual place.

But are check-ins dead as some have proclaimed?

The "death" of one thing or another makes great headlines, but of course it greatly over exaggerates. It's amazing what things continue long after they've been proclaimed death (for example, vinyl records). Even if the Chicken Littles mean only the mainstream use is dead, they still oversimplify. Often things evolve and metamorphosize, but don't really die per se. Also niche usages can remain strong and lucrative, if not particularly trendy or visible.

The recent launch of always-on location based social apps, such as Glancee and Highlight, provide an alternative to check-ins. But I'm not convinced that automated location identification services will be any more mainstream than self-based check-ins.

Check-ins are a compelling experience - particularly as I mentioned when at a cool place. I don't think they are sufficient to base long-term usage of an application. I think check-ins will survive as a cornerstone of social networking, but as part of other online services. Facebook, Google, and Twitter have experimented with this and eventually they'll get it right. Other check-in based location services will need to evolve - likely into greater social navigation, business directories, loyalty programs, games, and information discovery.

Antithesis of My Research

The video of the texting guy and his unexpected wildlife encounter has gone viral. It's short, but funny - P.S.A - this could happen to you!



I particularly like this video as it's the antithesis of my research - i.e. oblivious to environment, no preemptive mobile alerts, lack of spatial awareness... (If the video doesn't load, here's the link.)

Help Making Location Based Services Relevant

I've been reviewing the recent literature related to location based services and locative media and came across an incredibly useful article for those building or refining such apps. The article, Criteria of geographic relevance: An experimental study, will be published soon in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science (but is freely available in a pre-print version). The authors, Stefano De Sabbata and Tumasch Reichenbacher are experts in geographic relevance, mobile information retrieval, and location based services.

It's worth reading their entire article, but they include a summary table that lists all the types of information relevance and ones specifically applicable to mobile, geolocative functionality. Relevance, in this sense, refers to the degree to which information returned by a digital service satisfies various user needs and desires. (Read more about information relevance on Wikipedia).

In my efforts to keep updated on location based services, I've noticed that many apps focus on the relevance criterion of proximity to the neglect of all other (possibly more pertinent) factors. De Sabbata and Reichenbacher offer an invaluable list of other factors that developers should consider for more effective and engaging user experiences. Even better, their work is based on actual user studies.

Here is their table of relevance criteria, based on the classes of: properties (of the object), geography, information, and presentation (of the end result, to the user).

Properties	Geography	Information	Presentation
topicality	spatial proximity	specificity	accessibility
appropriateness	temporal proximity	availability	clarity
coverage	spatio-temporal    proximity	accuracy	tangibility
novelty	directionality	currency	dynamism
	visibility	reliability	presentation quality
	anchor-point   proximity	verification
	hierarchy	affectiveness
	cluster	curiosity
	co-location	familiarity
	association rules	variety

For details on a particular concept, the article has useful explanations.

Although location based services are, by definition, preoccupied with location (i.e. spatial proximity) this list offers guidance on other criteria to add that would greatly improve current locative apps.

This list seems definitive to me, but if anyone has a criteria to add or refine, I'd love to hear it below.

Canada's Walk of Fame - Needs Digital Footprints

Since Canada's Walk of Fame started in Toronto's entertainment district in 1998, I thought it was a great way to recognize the accomplishments of notable Canadians. Canadians don't often value their history and culture and the Walk brings prominence to these contributions.

As a physical manifestation of Canadian culture, Canada's Walk of Fame is definitely lacking in digital footprints. There are no people from the Canada's digital media section (i.e. this includes gaming, the Web, mobility, etc). I think this is the year that someone from digital media be inducted!

Suitable category are "Science and Innovation" (Alexander Graham Bell is the only inductee in this category) and  "Visual Arts" category (only Lynn Johnston and Jean-Paul Riopelle).

Only a handful of people are inducted every year and one has to be born in Canada or spent their formative years here and been working in the field for at least 10 years to qualify.

The Walk of Fame encourages submissions and it's really quick and easy (you also get a chance to win a trip to Toronto and tickets to the gala induction ceremony). So I'm starting a campaign to get a Canadian in digital media inducted this year.

A lot of people from my Who's Who in Canadian Digital Media and Technology don't qualify as they haven't met the 10-year career mark. But here are some people that I think would be great nominees:

• Lorne Abony - Petopia, Fun Technologies, Mood Media
• Tim Bray - XML, Open Text
• Garrett Camp - StumbleUpon
• Michael Cowpland - Corel
• William Gibson - scifi author and cyber-visionary
• Murray Goldberg - WebCT (first e-learning platform)
• Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk - founders of gaming studio BioWare

There are lots more. I'd love to hear here if anyone has any specific suggestions - or would like to start a group effort to get one person in particular nominated.

Nominations close April 30, 2012 - so nominate someone today.