MobiTip
key words: local shared content, bluetooth, mobile phones
A rather academic research project with an implementation in a shopping mall in Stockholm. Again this is more of a research study but not a working business model that actually took off.
People can share information about the places they are at with others via the bluetooth-connectivity of their mobiles. People either receive messages directly from other people with the running software within their reach or from a bluetooth hotspot nearby. People can send tips and informations about a specific place to a nearby hotspot or to nearby people with the running software.
Sharing Culture around iPods and PSPs
There are many (many!) webpages that enable publishing, sharing and downloading of small, very short movies or audio files (podcasts). There are so many podcast directories that it is difficult to keep track. The podcasts cover many topics and come in different flavours. Some podcast-sites are very specific (e.g. the site that only publishes videos that were used in court trials or the site that offers a free wine course and is only about wine).
weedshare.com
A new concept for sharing music files. You can listen to songs three times free before you might descide to buy them. When you then share these bought files on a server for others you can even get some money out of it. Is mainly used by unknown and (hopefully) upcoming bands. Can´t say whether this will be the future or not… – Is not very interesting (for me at least) right now, since I don´t know many of the bands.
soundPryer – joint music listening on the highway
An application for PDAs (prototype) from the Swedish Interactive Institute. People play their music on their PDAs and when they come into the w-lan reach of somebody who is also using this program, suddenly you listen to the music of the other person and vice versa. In their scenarios they used the program in cars on the highway.
Question: Why would I want to listen to music of complete strangers instead of turning on the radio?
Sonic City
A project from the Interactive Institue in Göteborg and the Viktoria Institute, Göteborg. They use different kind of sensors that users wear while walking through the city. From these sensor inputs (e.g. metal detector, light sensor, heart rate measurements, …) music (sound) is created on the fly with a computer. So while walking through the city people hear different sounds depending on where they are and how their physical status (biofeedback) is.
– I am not sure to what extend users feel that they can actually control the music or if the sounds seem to be rather random to them. A cool project.
tunA – a handheld ad-hoc radio device for local music sharing
A project from the (now closed) media lab europe. People can tune into the music that other people within range (w-lan) listen to. You receive a live-stream from other people´s mobile devices (PDAs). Quite similar to soundPryer.
Designing a Mobile Music Sharing System Based on Emergent Properties
A work from the Viktoria Institute, Göteborg. Until now it is only a concept without implementation. But the conceptioners did six interviews and relate to other work within that field. The idea is the following:
Mp3-files on a mobile device (a PDA) are treated as autonomous agents that “live” in an ecology on the PDA. The ecology consists of all the other agents and is affected by the user´s behaviour. Depending on the environment, an agent may thrive or starve, be stimulated or bored, which impacts on its behaviour. A file for instance might die (become deleted) if never played. A file might migrate (beeing copied) to a different ecosystem (a different PDA) within w-lan reach. And so on…
I think it is a pretty new and interesting approach to treat songs like agents. But I am not sure whether I (as a user) would like to give the control to a complex system, not knowing what the system does and how it behaves.
Listening In: Practices Surrounding iTunes Music Sharing
A paper from the CHI conference 2005 from people either working at the Georgia Institute of Technology or at the Palo Alto Research Center.
It is about the habits of people using iTunes and concentrates on the sharing functionality of the program. (People using iTunes can share their music with people in the same subnet.) The authors also make some design suggestions.
One interesting outcome of the study was (– relates to IDENTITY) that people did something that the authors called “impression management”. It means that they started to think about what impression they would make to others. One interviewee of the study said that he had changed his music library only to make a different impression to other people (i.e. he has ripped some more CDs and added them to the library to make a more complete and balanced portrayal of himself since he did not want to be only associated with the music he already had). Also some people only published specific playlists that they wanted to be associated with.
And it seems as if this behaviour was no waste of time since people actually did judge the shared collections and by that also the owner.
The authors also write about the implications coming from the fact that iTunes occupies the grey area between intimacy and anonymity in the music sharing space (since you sometimes know the people you share your music with very well and sometimes you do not know them at all). They also write about if people discover new music through iTunes (– and they don´t).
personal music listening utilites vs. music sharing online communities
