Social needs meet Automation. Prototype + More Analysis. Physical object development.

So i was thinking about the data i gathered during my discovery phase and how to bring needed quality of life improvements to life.

Most things people claimed directly to be quality of life improvements such as emphasis on sharing and collaboration is something that is already accessible via multiple social networks, like Facebook.

So first lets analyse why do people actually use Facebook.

Facebook is an accepted means of communication. It is a never-ending virtual social gathering filled with adopted puppies, cute LOL kitties, baby announcements, viral articles and videos, events, groups, organizations and fan pages. But why do people really use it?

A new study entitled “Why do people use Facebook?” from Boston University’s Ashwini Nadkarni and Stefan G. Hofmann proposes that the social network meets two primary human needs: (1) the need to belong and (2) the need for self-presentation. The study also acknowledges demographic and cultural factors as they relate to the belonging need, and the variation of personality types on Facebook usage.

The study defines social networking sites (SNSs) as “Internet-based services that give individuals three major capabilities: The ability to construct a public or semi-private profile, identify a list of other users with whom a connection is shared, and view and track connections made by individuals and others.

More info on the above here (interesting read, i encourage to check it out) — http://readwrite.com/2012/01/16/study_why_do_people_use_facebook

The problem i can see here is that seeing how people get sucked into both professional and social networks it becomes increasingly hard to maintain profiles on a certain level and generate enough relevant content.

So can Social Life Book (SLB) be a base for a new social network (or even existing ones) — definetely. Imagine you have friends who are not active on facebook — how do you know what’s happening in their lives? Well, now, you can’t without poking them. With SLB — you can.

Studies have found that on Facebook, the self you portray is not idealized — it is the real you. But a 2008 study by Zhao, Grasmuck & Martin found that the Facebook selves appeared to be socially desirable identities that individuals aspired to have offline but do not have — yet. Furthermore, identities created on Facebook differed greatly from those constructed in anonymous online environments.

SLB can be moderated or sustainable, meaning it will benefit from moderation but it doesn’t need it. E.g. adding tags and deleting meaningless content, but it’s ultimately easier than creating and adding new content. More importantly, it should be used in conjunction with manually created content.

The possibilities are endless — imagine you are writing about starting to work out one year ago and you can enhance your story with a visual time lapse of how you changed during this year. Or you are writing a post about how your team and office expanded — again you have interesting content to back it up.

But it’s not just that, SLB can be used on it’s own without any additional input to it purely based on tags. Want to create a community for male surfers in California? — Easy, just add SLBs with #surfing #california #men. Want to continue conversation in other social network? — easy, just create a facebook group based on SLBs.

Prototype

What can my MVP (minimum viable product) be? Well, first of i would like to check if getting photos at random times of the day creates an appealing enough content so my prototype will start with doing just that.

Create an arduino operated camera

Program it to take photos and upload to www

Place the camera and power it

Review the content

Create rules for camera placement and tagging

Connect camera to a social network like twitter or fb

….