About Mobile phones have now permeated the market such that virtually everyone has one and they are no longer simply phones, but advanced electronic devices that people use everyday as MP3 players, schedule planners, email inboxes, instant messengers, and digital camera/camcorders. In addition to these powerfully versatile functionalities, a particularly exploitable fact is that people carry their phones around wherever they go. My30seconds is a project that takes advantage of this: using mobile phones to take and immediately share videos whenever and wherever you are. That's the tagline: "Your Motion Memories Captured, Shared anywhere, anytime". My30seconds would consist of three main components: the website (my30seconds.net) the SMS and the MMS function on mobile phones. The website serves as a portal where users can store, manage, and share the videos that were taken and sent from their mobile phones using the MMS functionalities. SMS also allows a real-time sharing experience by broadcasting their videos immediately to other mobile phones seconds after their capture.
Although this use of existing technology is not new, my30seconds attempts to distinguish itself by presenting several designed functions. First is that all videos are limited to 30 seconds in length. This is intended to force users to submit original and creative content that only captures salient highlights of their day. These videos would then be automatically mapped onto a "personal calendar", forming a kind of video-based profile/diary of the users. These videos can further be socially linked. A user can initiate a SMS message to his friends and call for a particular kind of video to be recorded, for example, to send a birthday message. This collection of videos centered on a particular theme can then be viewed by the recipient successively or even concurrently on mini-streams on his screen.
Another method of organizing and sharing the user videos would be to divide them into geographical locations where they were taken. Videos organized this way would add an extra dimension above that of the individual user by presenting a video profile of the community/locality/city/country. Users can both present and learn about their own and others' communities by sharing these video clips of themselves and events in and around their communities. This snapshot in videos of the particular community would be of interest to both locals and tourists. Finally, local small business owners can also use my30seconds to post self-made advertisement videos for their businesses, adding a commercial and convenient facet to my30seconds.
The Concept “video as diary – your half-minute media”. Although sites where users can in effect use as a web-based electronic diary like xanga or myspace, are already prolific, my30seconds has a different approach: it is a platform, which allows users to document their life through short videos taken with their cellular phones. This is the distinction dubbed, “video as diary”. While it is true that the aforementioned existing blogging sites like xanga and myspace already offer users the ability to upload videos, the main focus is still on the written text; what may be considered as “text as diary”. The major difference that sets my30seconds part then, is that the main focus is on capturing motion memories on video. Using video as the main medium to communicate with friends and other users takes advantage of the much more expanded capabilities of video as a medium of self-expression. Combining speech, background noise and images, body language, and facial expressions all into one compact video makes for one powerful package that instantly conveys the mood and context important for a diary entry that will serve as captured memories. The essence of the captured event is enhanced by the use of the cell phone as the immediate capture and transfer medium, taking full advantage of both its ubiquity as an everyday device, and the ability to instantly send the video to my30seconds via multimedia messaging (MMS).
As a more specialized feature, the second concept is the idea of asking for or to collect videos from your friends or a group by initiating through a text message (SMS) to my30seconds. This allows for the commemoration of special days like birthdays by having users initiate calls for video submissions to be collected by my30seconds before they are sent to the recipient as a batch.
The Two Major Features The first feature will be the backbone of the service allowing users to send any videos to my30seconds.net. Registered users with a video-capable cellular phone can send their videos taken in any format through MMS to (mms@my30seonds.net). These videos will be automatically converted to flash format (.flv) and mapped onto the personal calendar of that user or a preset theme page (group created page) on my30seconds.net in real time.
The second feature instead involves the use of SMS to initiate group/friends-wide calls for video submissions centered on a theme like the conceptualized birthday wishes videos. Any registered users can send an initiating SMS to myseconds.net, and the server will send that message to all their friends or a pre-defined, created group of my30seconds.net and ask for a particular kind of videos to be sent to a designated recipient. These videos will be collected by my30seconds and mapped automatically onto a specially created web page of my30seonds.net, where the selected recipient can view these videos at any time.
Target Audience The target audience for this project is mostly for young people aged between 14 to 30, who are familiar with the Internet, mobile devices, and are interested in expressing and sharing their stories with others. Audience’s equipment needs: This target audience should also have a cellular phone with video taking capability, although videos will also be able to be sent to my30seconds by email from a computer or uploaded. Ideally, they should also have subscribed to a SMS/MMS package plan from their wireless service provider to ensure full activity and interest in using my30seconds. This is both from a psychological standpoint that since they have already paid for it, they will be more willing to expand the services available, and a financial standpoint of reduced cost. Otherwise, they might only remain as passive consumers for the content uploaded by other users when they browse through my30seconds without generating their own content. THE GOALS: The first goal of this project is to provide an alternative platform for people to capture their special moments in real time and have them shared with friends instantly as it is happening, without wasting extra time on thinking up a text-based dairy entry after the fact like other web blogging services. The second goal is to extend this concept to a larger format of display (not the standard computer screen) and for a bigger event: MotionMemoriesWall. For more details, please visit motion-memories-wall.com.
Assessment and Market Research As it is important to conduct a survey of current services that are already available that are similar to my30seconds, five products/services were identified and compared to my30seconds. These can be separated into two main groups: The first group is services that are offered by existing and popular social networking and video posting sites that allow the sending of content directly from cell phones. The second group consists of services that attempt to bridge the cell phone-web gap with applications that anchor and link their services from the cell phone to the web.
Group 1: There are two services that were classified as the first group, representing extensions of existing popular services that incorporate the use of cell phones in creating, sending, and viewing content. These two services are Youtube Mobile and Facebook Mobile. There are two features in the Youtube Mobile service. One allows the uploading of videos to Youtube by using a cell phone’s MMS feature, and the other is a mobile site that streamlines and specializes for viewing Youtube content by using the cell phone’s web browser. The uploading through MMS feature requires registered users to create a profile specifically to receive uploaded videos from their cell phones. The created profile generates and is associated with a special email address. Videos uploaded through MMS to this email address would thus be posted to the account the email address is associated with. There does not seem to be any set limitations on video lengths or file sizes that can be uploaded through MMS, presumably because current technical standards of sending MMS messages do the limiting for them. The second feature, a website that is accessible and viewable with a cell phone browser obviously requires a data plan, and it is actually currently only available with Verizon’s Vcast service, but set to be soon available to all subscribers to any carrier. Although the use of uploading videos through MMS is the same route that my30seconds uses, Youtube did not add any other specialized functions for videos uploaded this way. It is only an extra method to upload videos to Youtube. The specially created video profile for cell phone generated video content seems to only serve the purpose of a private destination for the videos to go, and does not stress any organizational or special sharing abilities that my30seconds seeks to do. Most importantly, uploading videos through MMS is not a stressed feature for Youtube, which as a platform, also is fundamentally different to the more individualized and social sharing blogging functions that my30seconds is designed for. Facebook Mobile incorporates the use of cell phones with three features: Mobile Web, Mobile Uploads, and Mobile Text. Mobile Web is basically a skimmed down version of the Facebook website that is modified for the cell phone browser and screen limitations. Mobile Text involves the use of SMS to access and update various features of Facebook such as your current status (what you are doing at the moment), search profiles, get cell phone numbers on a profile, and post, send, and receive Facebook messages, pokes, and wall posts. Facebook Uploads allows the posting of notes and uploading of photos through MMS to a profile. This is done by sending a photo to the email address, photo@facebook.com, and the system will reply back with a code. Enter this code after logging on, and the cell phone number that sent the MMS will be linked to your profile such that future MMS will be correctly uploaded to your profile. Facebook, unlike Youtube, is a social networking site that stresses individualized profiles and content. However, although it features that are akin to blogging with notes and current status, it is not at all designed as a diary-type platform. Furthermore, entirely unlike my30seconds, Facebook Uploads only uses MMS to upload photos. In fact, Facebook does not provide any space for video uploads at all, regardless of the method of transmission. The use of MMS only serves as an alternate method for photo transmission, and does not provide any specialized additional features for using MMS.
Group 2: Services classified into group 2 include Nokia Lifeblog, Juicecaster, and Shozu. These services were distinctively created to bridge the gap between cell phone generated content, and the posting and blogging of such content on the web. A commonality of such services is the reliance on applications that need to be installed on the cell phone and the PC. It is these applications that accomplish the linking and manage the transmissions between the content on the cell phone to the web accessed on the PC. Also similar is the partnership that each service has with existing popular video or social networking and blogging platforms such as Youtube, Xanga, Myspace, Typepad, etc. Nokia Lifeblog first has the limitation that it only works on selected Nokia phones. Lifeblog is essentially a mobile application that organizes cell phone generated content on the phone chronologically with a timeline. Photos and videos can be associated with notes as captions, and all of these exist as a framed block on the timeline. This timeline is the backbone of Lifeblog that can also be sent to the PC Lifeblog application via a USB cable or Bluetooth. With the PC Lifeblog application, the content on the timeline can be edited, arranged, and shared by email or postings to the web within the application. The blog portion of Lifeblog can be accomplished either by first transferring the content from the cell phone to the PC or by direct transmission to the exclusive blogging service, Typepad, from the cell phone. Nokia Lifeblog is limited first by being available only on selected Nokia phones and then only directly transferable to Typepad, which requires paid subscriptions. The transfer of phone content to the PC via Bluetooth or a USB cable is not innovative and Lifeblog remains simply as a organizational application that handles the transfer from the cell phone to the PC. The only direct-to-web interaction, the direct weblogging service which presumably employs MMS, does offer similar possibilities as the video-as-diary feature of my30seconds. The differences are the second feature of my30seconds, and the calendar layout. The basic premise of Juicecast is a massive interconnected network that is reminiscent of a Youtube that accepts any format from text, to photos, to videos. Content created from any device, cell phones, digital cameras, or whatever files from a PC can be uploaded to the website to add to the huge collection. Additionally, an application called Juicecaster Mediabox serves as the display screen for personal content that can be inserted as HTML code, and displayed on any personal webpage, or commercialized blogging or social networking sites like Xanga, Myspace, Blogger, etc. It also features a mobile component with a mobile website that is accessible through the phone browser, where the Juicecast application can be downloaded onto the phone to start creating, sending, and viewing content on Juicecast. Without this application, content can still be submitted by MMS to an email address, whereby a code that is generated can be entered on the website to link the cell phone number to your account. My30seconds most differs from Juicecast in that it does not require an application to be downloaded in order to fully use the features. Although Juicecast supports transmission of content by MMS, it is not the main focus. Furthermore, Juicecast is both a standalone website service where content can be viewed and commented on, as it is a middleman between phone generated content, and the end display on a webpage or a blogging, social networking site. It therefore does not actually support direct content transfer from the cell phone to the end display sharing platform. Indeed, it is difficult to ascertain exactly what Juicecast is meant for. It is just reminiscent of a Youtube for everything with a cell phone application and its feature to embed into blogs and websites can already be done by Youtube. Shozu is yet another service that works by downloading an application to a cell phone that then in essence, becomes a upload manager that directly uploads videos and photos to an email address, a personal webpage, video sites like Youtube, photo sites like Flickr, or blogging sites like Blogger, Typepad, etc. In this sense, it is different from these sites’, like Youtube’s mobile upload feature, because Shozu is a centralized application that allows uploads to a multitude of different services. It is also different from Juicecast in that it eliminates the middleman and directly uploads to the end webpage without first passing through the Juicecast service. However, it also does not serve any novel function in organizing, editing, displaying, or sharing of content. Shozu also has a second feature, Zucast, which delivers content to cell phones. It is not clear how this would be distinctive from Juicecast or Youtube Mobile beyond offering different content. The obvious fundamental difference between My30seconds and Shozu is that again, My30seconds work without applications, but relies on MMS technology. My30second also offers other features as a standalone service on its website, and even before that in the way themed videos can be initiated before content is even generated to be shared. From this brief survey of existing services, My30seconds’ distinguishing features are that it is based on MMS technology without the limitations placed upon requiring an application and in its additional features as a standalone platform focusing on using videos as the medium to document life and express messages such as birthday themed videos. The use of MMS can be considered an advantage because it allows the broadest mass to use it since cell phones that can take videos can also send MMS. The requirement to use applications that Nokia Lifeblog, Juicecast, and Shozu are based on, places limitations on which phones are compatible with their respective applications, complications arising from the extra technical difficulty to install these applications, and hinges on the affordability in purchasing a data plan. Aside from perhaps Nokia’s Lifeblog, which has obvious market limitations to being tied only to Nokia phones, the rest of the services do not specifically focus on using video as a way to document life, video-as-diary. They are also tied to existing services rather than being standalone services. As peripheral products acting as extra supporting features to existing services, they lack independence or the flexibility and creativity in usage that My30seconds offers as a new platform with a different focus: Video-as-diary as the use of video as an independent medium of expression without the need to be tied to traditional text-based blogs.
Public Perception and Interpretation The project my30seconds started out early this semester, and since then, several user testings have been done. Valuable and practical usage data was gathered from the insights and feedback from the users. These basically reflect the following general perceptions about taking videos and pictures with their mobile phones and regarding sending them to other users via MMS to their mobile phone numbers or email accounts: 1. Although people are mostly familiar with the term text messaging or SMS they are not very sure what MMS is. This signals a lack of marketing and education regarding to MMS and as a direct result might explain the lower usage. 2. People do send pictures and videos by Bluetooth but avoid sending photo or video messages (MMS) over the air because they do not want to incur extra charges for using these services from their wireless provider. This again suggests inadequate marketing efforts to push MMS or perhaps a lack of attraction for users to use MMS capabilities. Services like what my30seconds.net seeks to become a compelling force to popularize MMS usage by providing a purpose end-point for sending videos and pictures over the air. This might in turn pique consumer interest to learn more about MMS and, in a circular fashion, create an impetus for wireless service providers to make MMS more attractive by making MMS rates and terms less ambiguous. 3. People have the misconception that they can only send pictures and videos to other mobile phone numbers but not to email addresses, which then becomes an under used link between the mobile phone and the home computer, representing general central storage and more proliferated and powerful editing and sharing functions provided by the Internet. Since the findings listed above are based on feedback from only a few users, a larger scale survey or study would be needed to reflect a more accurate depiction of the general knowledge and use of MMS in the United States. This prompted me to start an online survey in order to obtain more substantial data.
Current State Different wireless providers have different ways of charging their users for SMS and MMS service. There are basically two types of rates: (1) Pay-per-message: each message will be charged $0.25 and $0.5 for messages sent to international numbers. (2) Flat rate package plan: prices ranging from $4.99 for 200 messages to $14.99 for unlimited. These figures were taken from Cingular. However, SMS and MMS service pricing is not the most difficult problem to engage users in this project. The biggest obstacle is the file size limitations for sending a MMS message. A MMS message is limited to only 300KB, which according to Cingular, translates to about 30 seconds of video. This figure corresponded well with my own testing. However, the networks do allow messages over 300KB to be sent, but messages over 300KB will be charged extra fees. Interestingly, some mobile phones were programmed with this in mind, and will not allow the sending of messages over 300KB or restrict the video length to 30 seconds. Since it would be the most economical for users to sign up for a flat rate plan and will not be charged any extra fees if their messages stay with the 300KB–rule, design specifications should take this point into consideration. The design of this project should therefore promote users to be creative even they can only send a 300KB message or 30 seconds of video each time. This directly leads to the functionality of what this project (or this project’s website, my60seconds.net) can offer: (1)Video as diary, (2) MoboMix, and etc.