Social Acceptance and Usage Experiences from a Mobile Location-Aware Service Environment

MUGGES is a European research project with the goal of evaluating peer-to-peer service concepts based on GNSS systems for mobile phones. MUGGES provides an infrastructure to create, publish, provide and consume mobile micro-services directly from mobile devices. As part of the project four application prototypes have been developed, which allow for the description and sharing of places and routes between users. This paper reports about a user trial conducted in real environments with early adopters. The goal has been to identify benefits and best practices for the type of applications envisioned in the MUGGES project. The obtained results indicate that users like to share information about preferred places or routes, and see it as a complementary application to already existing applications such as Facebook or Twitter. These types of applications are often used in time-killing situations, e.g. at the bus stop. Their value lies on the highlighting of important places or non-everyday events, and on making daily coordinations simpler. People feel that the application is less intrusive, since no information such as the whereabouts of persons are shared anyhow.