The influence of locative media on social information sharing: a review

Mobile phones and social media enable people to share information with others whenever they want, wherever they want. More recent developments allow people to augment their sharing experience by geo-tagging their information through GPS enabled phones. These 'locative media' can be used to facilitate navigation, way finding or to obtain information about a physical place or object. Other services let the users tag, rate public spaces and recommend them to other people. Furthermore, people can tell their stories by attaching their own context to a physical location. This report is a literature review in the field of locative media. In order to get a complete overview of the research that is done on location-based social networking, the most recent developments in the field are investigated. We also look at research methods used to test the user experience of this type of social media systems. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of location based media on the sharing habits and social practices of the users of these systems. The conclusions of this exploration in the field of locative media research lead to design guidelines and research methods that will be used in a user evaluation of a system for location based smart photo sharing

Geo-locked photo sharing on mobile devices

We introduce the idea of geo-locking through a mobile phone based photo sharing application called Picalilly. Using its geo-locking feature, Picalilly allows its users to manually define geographical boundaries for sharing photos – limiting sharing within user-defined boundaries as well as facilitating open sharing between strangers within such boundaries. To explore the potential of geo-locking, we carried out a small scale field trial of Picalilly involving two groups of students, who were part of a two-week long introduction program at a university. Our preliminary results show that Picalilly facilitated 1) sharing of ‘places’ and 2) localized explorations