Article Preview
TopPlayahead
Playahead was an online community with mostly teenagers as users. The community was available as a regular web page and as a small Java application for cell phones. We chose Playahead for this study since its mobile solution supported most phone models available at the time of the data collection and thus made it available for its whole user population. The other large online community for Swedish teenagers at the time, Lunarstorm, had less support for the variety of phones and was therefore not included in the study. Facebook was not considered for this study since it was a small community in Sweden 2008, when the data collection started.
The regular web site provided standard functionality such as personal presentation, guestbook, buddy list, search functions, discussion forums, blogs, and chat rooms (Figure 1). Users could upload photos and videos to their profile and even add background music. They could also post short messages that were displayed to all logged in users as small banners at the top of the site. Awareness support was provided such as lists of logged in users that could be filtered, highlighting of logged in friends in the buddy list, and indications on users that were logged in from cell phones. It was even possible to see what other logged in members were doing. By putting the mouse over their user name a pop up message would reveal what they were doing, for example “xyz is reading her guest book.”
Figure 1. Screenshot of a personal profile for the desktop web page of Playahead
The mobile application provided a subset of the web site functionality: a personal presentation, guestbook, messaging, buddy list, and a search function (Figure 2). Users could read and post to guest books, chat, and look at profiles but not edit their own profile from the cell phone. Data intensive features such as photo albums and video clips were not available through the phone client. The phone application provided audio notification when messages arrived if users were logged in.
Figure 2. Screen shots of a Playahead guest book (left) and a chat room for a phone (right)