Design issues of ambient social media for better decision making

Since our daily life is becoming more and more complex, it is difficult to make a decision for a variety of issues about ourselves. Of course, the Internet gives us a possibility to reactively find necessary information through search engines. But, it requires users to understand what they like to know currently. Also, they need significant cognitive efforts to collect a set of necessary information reactively for making their decisions. Ambient social media offer an alternative way that people find information in the real world. The ambient social media will be pervasively integrated in our digital lives, and reflect the various facts in the real world. They do not need to use a browser for retrieving information from the Internet explicitly, and necessary information to people is shown in ambient social media proactively. This kind of new media is a promising approach to return feedback information to people for making a better decision or for avoiding a mindless decision. In this paper, we are developing two case studies to support the user's decision making in our daily life by returning necessary information proactively, and some design implications for developing future ambient social media.