Mystate: sharing social and contextual information through touch interactions with tagged objects

Sharing social and contextual information via services like Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare has become extremely popular in the recent years. This paper introduces the novel MyState concept in which users can augment any kind of object with Near Field Communication (NFC) tags, can write any social or contextual information on those tags using their mobile phones and can publish this information on a social networking site just by touching such a tag with their phone. The distinct features of MyState are A) the possibility to augment any personal or public object with any contextual or social information, B) the possibility that everybody can touch those tags in order to post the related information to a social networking site, C) the speed and convenience to publish information by a simple touch as users don't have to look at the mobile phone screen, interact with mobile phone menus or write any text when touching an already deployed tag. The paper reports on two field studies which provide insights on where the participants placed the tags, how they used MyState and what type of information was shared. Here we observed that users typically shared identity, location, activity and time, but also feelings, social meanings and experiences. Furthermore we identified several distinct social usage patterns such as synchronizing activities, expressing moods, games and tracking shared items.