Spiderweb: A social mobile network

Social networking sites obtained a great success in the last years. Their popularity is related to changing lifestyles, where people increasingly look for new acquaintances or cultivate old friendships by means of the Internet, typically using a PC. Yet along with the rapidly increasing amount of mobile phone users, as well as the development of so-called smart phones, the possibility for creating similar services for mobiles arises. Importantly, the mobile phones are not just entry points to existing social networks with their centralized architectures; being mobile offers one more degree of freedom. However, mobile social network services are unquestionably limited by mobile phones weaknesses (e.g. small screen, keyboards), so several challenges are necessary to be addressed. Consequently, in this paper we analyze usability and user satisfaction of mobile social networks. Thus, a mobile social network application called Spiderweb is implemented and used as a test case. Spiderweb provides to the users an opportunity to make acquaintances, search for people on the basis of certain criteria, chat, view profiles of other users, and with numerous other possibilities. Yet the application not only offers the mobile phone users services similar to social networks available on the web. Spiderweb moves beyond this concept, also giving an opportunity to interact with other users through Bluetooth connectivity. Thus, the application enables establishment of spontaneous collaborative networks which are further explored and evaluated in this paper.