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January 21, 2006
FoundCity
I've been emailing back and forth with John Geraci who runs FoundCity. Last night I ran my idea of 'path sharing' by Matt and we brain stormed about how this thing could work and how it would be implemented. In creating a session over SMS a number of concerns need to be balanced including user overhead. If a user has to declare when a session starts and ends they may be discouraged from using the application. As we worked through what this thing does, we slowly realized that we could play fast and loose with the idea of a session. A session is just any new path and sessions never expire. You can always add to them and then use a web interface to clean them up later. For example, if you are backpacking across europe, it may take you months to finish your path. At the same time, you may want to create daily paths for the individual cities you visit.
I also figured out why FoundCity has distinct email addresses for different cities. I think it's because translating an address to a geocode (lat/long) is a real pain because people enter their city/state combos differently. If you just accept an email address and the email address distinguishes the city, things are much easier. I think that may be too limiting for what I am trying to accomplish.
I had a great time with Matt, i'm really into this idea. We also need to come up with some sort of name for the site.
Here is also something I posted to the ubicommobile wiki:
I played around with FoundCity, an ITP thesis project which leverages geocoding and tagging.
FoundCity allows users to tag 'finds', things they deem of value, in their city and then share these finds with other users. A photo of the find is displayed on a map along with del.icio.us style end user tags of the find.
My interest in FoundCity is as a spring board for a geopsychology project. Mobile use is running parallel to the early days of the web. We started with individual transactions, "give me this web page" and slowly moved into the concept of sessions and batches of transactions that relate to each other over time and by order. For example, "you must login to post a message" involves multiple transactions that need to occur in a certain order.
I want to consider what would it mean to create sessions on a mobile phone using a lowest common denominator platform such as SMS. Foundcity shows me discreet finds related to an individual user and their tags but I am more interested in the path that was created between the finds. Paths must have a start, an order and an end. I'm thinking of building a SMS grammar which will allow users to record and potentially share their paths.
Posted by mb2811 at January 21, 2006 11:00 PM