The Impact of NFC on Multimodal Social Media Application

In this paper we describe the NFC-based multimodal social media application Hot in the City. This application allows users to make friends by touching other users’ NFC devices through the peer-to-peer mode. Users can also inform friends of their current location by touching hotspot tags. This study describes the three NFC modes in detail and delineates what kind of impact NFC has had in the creation of the Hot in the City social media application. In addition, we analyse how the use of different NFC modes – reader/writer and peer-to-peer – has unique consequences on user interface and system design. Even though NFC offers intuitive, natural interactions, the changing between modes seemed to confuse less experienced users.