“In your pocket you have something that's broadband and connected all the time. It’s personal: It knows who you are and where you are. That’s a big deal.”
- John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins Claufield & Byers, Apples iPhone SDK keynote
100% mobile friend feeds
It would be nice if your mobile phone could provide you with subtle information about what your friends were doing instead of spending most of it’s time on a dull home screen not caring that it’s connected. Luckily, there is already a fairly good concept that solves this; friend feeds - first popularised by Facebook.
These are basically a system of peripheral knowledge of the given context – of your friends updates in that specific social network/context. The usual representation is a list view of stories about friend activities - we can call them parcels. A story/parcel might contain just one or several pieces of content combined into one.
I wanted to adapt the concept to be 100% mobile phone based. That is, not pushing PC based content such as Flickr, Facebook or YouTube to your phone – but to look at creation and consumption in the phone by the phone.
The final suggestion realizes that a system of parcels of content pushed to friends home screens needs to take in account the following:
Friends feeds are often passive consumption. That is, you don’t interact much with them except for maybe leaving a comment. The home screen on the mobile phone is the perfect place for the feed to live. This is a passive surface, and interaction should thus be minimized. No “pop-up” open, no new windows. At most, expanding and contracting stories should be allowed.
There is a need to avoid technical labels such as ”a video”, ”an image”, ”text”, SMS, etc. But there is no way to know what the user will want to share with her friends. Thus, the system will have to allow for free labelling since parcels might actually be ”café tips”, ”latest purchase” etc.
It is of interest to note that Facebook has since changed the functionality of their status updates to reflect the same principle by turning it into a "sharer": write any piece of descriptive text and add a piece of media, then publish it as a story.
A deeper look at the core issues; What content, How to publish, How to filter and How to view are available in the condensed project description (PDF).