Wallop: designing social software for co-located social networks

Technology is increasingly being incorporated into people´s day-to-day social relationships, particularly for people whose friendships occupy the center of their social lives. In the following paper we discuss a co-located social group´s tendency to integrate planning and re-experiencing around social events with tools for persistent conversations. Through a questionnaire study we found that emails and mailing lists were used as much as phone conversations to plan social activities, and that said usage was positively correlated with measures of friendship satisfaction, sense of community, and percentage of time spent socializing. In response to our observations, we designed a sharing and communication application, Wallop, to enrich the co-located social group´s planning and sharing around social events. Wallop provides both communication and social awareness tools, enabling users to build conversations in the context of shared content and browse their implicit social networks. Initial responses to Wallop from a focus group and limited deployment to test users have been positive.