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Longing for latitude

One of the interesting features of technologies is how it can bring people close together, in real life as well as in perception. Google has an interesting new feature called Google Latitude. Through this service you can show your location to your friends and of course see the location that your friends are sharing with you. Interesting feature is that the application has a fine grained way of setting your privacy in relation to the various friends that you have. This I think is a general direction you see in web 2.0 that more and more people are becoming concerned about privacy and about who really are your friends you are willing to share all. In the past I used an application called IYOUIT that was also capable of showing this like this. To me it was surprising how much feeling is involved in knowing precisely where your friends are.
2009 02 05 Martijn Kriens Social Software
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MobileHCI

Last days I was present at the MobileHCI conference. I was involved in this conference as sponsor chair. This conference deals with how to design and use mobile devices and experiences. There have been two issues that I found remarkable. The first is the fact that two research projects dealing with the design of user interfaces showed that people preferred to use the slower interface. In one example they had developed an interface with special icons to use in the address book of the phone, targeted at illiterate people. Research showed that although people were faster through the visual interface they still preferred the alphanumerical one. Maybe they just did not want to be branded illiterate? The second project dealt with research on the amount of air pollution children are exposed to by their route to school. This Lancaster project gave GPS equipped phones to 12 year old children and had them make pictures and blog their route to school, through all seasons. These routes were compared to the known air pollution throughout the city. Also the children got asked questions on how they felt and on their health. Through this research they could show the children that they would ...
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2008 09 06 Martijn Kriens Living LabTags: , , Comments (0)