Developing Local Social Applications on Mobile Devices

Recently online social services have began to utilize the location of a mobile device to find more relevant information for the user. Mobile devices have had capacity for inexpensive wireless communication between neighbor devices, but the technology has not been popular among users due to technical problems and missing applications. This thesis studies possibilities of using direct communication for local social networking. First, the requirements and use cases are derived for local social applications, and an application design is presented which fulfills the requirements. Secondly, a simulation model is described for testing applications that utilize direct communication. The simulation models the movement of a large population in an urban area. The design was evaluated in a user trial with 250 participants, and the trial participants named local conversations as the most important feature. The simulation model was compared to the user trial and it was found to match the behaviour of the people