Swarm: Hyper Awareness, Micro Coordination, and Smart Convergence through Mobile Group Text Messaging

Text messaging has become an integral part of mobile communication, with a significant impact on cultural and social norms in many countries. Our goal is to explore how group-based text messaging enables continuous social awareness, group coordination and smart convergence on social events. We implemented a group text messaging system, Swarm, and deployed it to several communication groups for ten months. Through usage logs, questionnaires, text analysis, and direct observation we examined how people integrate group text messaging into their day to day social lives. Swarm was used primarily for lightweight distribution of context information (availability, location, and event status) in order to facilitate social convergence. We discuss the lessons learned from our deployment, and the implications for the design of mobile, group communication systems.