'Would You Be My Friend?' - Creating a Mobile Friend Network with 'Hot in the City'

An emerging technology called Near Field Communication (NFC) is used to enable touch between mobile devices. This paper describes how a mobile social media system called 'Hot in the City' (HIC) enables people to make friend connections on the spot when they meet each other. We first describe the HIC system, and then explain how the visibility of friends is arranged in the system. The research focuses on the context during the action of friend connection and how context data should be taken into account in design. A use pilot was organized to study the use of HIC. Observations from the pilot lead us to reconsider the HIC mobile application logic, study location and status information, and plan to add event and time as useful contextual data to organize collected and generated mobile information. Finally, design issues for the next steps are delineated.