Molly Steenson, Interaction Design Institute Ivrea
Michael Kieslinger
Track: Social Software
Date: Tuesday, February 10
Time: 11:45am - 12:30pm
Location: California Ballroom B
TrackBack
With the proliferation of mobile phones, people now manage time differently, planning activities and events on the fly. The mobile phone is becoming the primary tool people use for coordinating events, interactions, and activities. It replaces the clock and breaks the fixed-calendar paradigm. Mobile phones transform time from a fixed series of moments into a flow of negotiations and adjustments.
This freeform scheduling works well within a small group of people. But when the group's size increases, so does the complexity, which in turn limits the mobile phone's capabilities as a flexible time-management tool. This complexity points to an opportunity for new social software that supports the time negotiation process in bigger social networks.
With these considerations in mind, we present Fluidtime www.fluidtime.net, a working service prototype that allows people to synchronize their timing with different service organizations or with each other. It connects people to the timings of groups of people or to real-time data about tasks and events.
Fluidtime offers a new path within the social software arena. When social software considers issues of time and coordination, it is mostly through blogs or other web-based, asynchronous communication media. These solutions tend not to enable mobile, elastic time management. Fluidtime's synchronous model helps people to find the right moment to connect on the go, whether with the bus, their groups of friends, or their other tasks.
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