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Mobile devices are increasingly used for mobile social networking. One explanation for this development is that mobile devices are almost always with their users, have continuous wireless connectivity, and feature increasingly capable user interfaces. They can thus serve as ubiquitous input devices and sensors for user reactions, emotional responses, and opinions around large public events (Diakopolous & Shamma, 2010).
The goal of the work presented here is to investigate mobile social software as a tool for research on opinion sharing in large user communities. We picked the soccer World Cup 2010 as a use case for this research because it is an event with extremely high public attention in many parts of the world and many people have a high emotional involvement to (at least some of) the matches. The matches are also synchronized in time with many simultaneous viewers and thus many potential users. We focus on exchanging spontaneous emotional feedback between users who are part of a virtual fan block.
The particular test application, World Cupinion, is an Android application that lets soccer fans express their opinions about events and moments in soccer matches while watching them. Through this application users can support their favorite teams and share their opinions with other fans. As we expected that users’ focus of attention is mainly on the match itself and short bursts of usage occur when interesting events happen, the design focus was on simplicity and quick usage. When not actively used, the app mostly served as an ambient display that conveyed the aggregated opinions of the active users.
This work addresses the following aspects and research questions:
• How to share experiences and opinions effectively in real-time across a large number of mobile devices?
• How to design for awareness of group opinion in a loosely coupled ad-hoc group? How to visualize information related to shared experiences?
• How to distribute and maintain a free Android app for ambient mobile communication?
In the following sections we first discuss the concepts of Social TV, real-time opinion sharing, and the utilization of mobile phones as a research tool. We then give an overview of the design and system architecture of our test application and discuss the distribution and publication channels for the application. After that we present results derived from log files as well as from a subsequent online-questionnaire and report on the experiences we made with the public prototype. We conclude with recommendations for research in the large and with giving ideas for future work.