Understanding Mobile Relationships

Recent advances in mobile technology and media convergence present new issues to both researchers and designers, which are strictly connected with the adoption of mobile services; the main challenges seem to be linked not only to technical aspects, but especially to human factors. In order to understand human relationships in a mobile environment, here defined as mobile relationships, we make a parallel between social software and mobile social software. Extending Shirky’s definition of social software, we defined mobile social software as “kind of software that supports interaction among networked mobile users”. Finally, we used Martti’s framework to analyse the social impact of mobile interactions, presenting and comparing some existing mobile social applications. Identity, trust and user control of information flow seem to be among the most important parameters affecting the acceptance and utilisation of mobile social applications. 1