Web on the move: Landscapes of mobile social media

Abstract

Social media is at its finest in the middle of the first decade of the third millennium. In particular, a steadily increasing amount of social media content is created with mobile devices such as digital cameras and camcorders. More and more content captured with these mobile devices is being uploaded on the Web, and the uploaded content receives ever more people downloading it in return, as well as tagging it, recommending it to friends, refining it for own purposes, and so on. Killer applications such as MySpace, and especially the likes of YouTube and Flickr, enjoy and benefit from content created by mobile devices. It is crucial to note, however, that for the vast majority, the advantages of mobility have only been utilized in the content creation part, rather than the content consumption part. Mobile content consumption has until now been neglected in social media application design and provisioning. This report aims at providing a glance on how mobility, and along with it the important notion of context-awareness, has impact on social media. Moreover, the report seeks to analyze the potential business opportunities for mobile social media. The research was conducted in the form of expert interviews. Copyright © VTT 2007.