Usage Patterns for Cameraphone Driven Moblogs

Between August and December of 2003 an occasional crawl was done on the main moblog page for users that had posted new pictures. A list of 2780 such users was assembled. In January 2004, user blogs were crawled and postings (with dates) automatically extracted. During the full crawl we discovered that a large number of users no longer had an account. In total we were able to correctly crawl and extract information from 1448 users. For each user, pictures were placed into weekly buckets (bucket 0 representing the first full week that they user used the service, bucket 1 the second, and so on).

2. Results

Figure 1

Figure 2

While we have plotted the usage patterns to week 30, we caution that data at the far end is noisy due to a small sampling size but is consistent with the general trend. Figure 3 shows the number of users in the sample that held accounts for different periods. While there are 1448 users that used the service for at least 1 week, the number drops off to 98 users by week 30 (i.e. ~7% of the users have had accounts for more than 30 weeks).

Figure 3

3. Discussion

• Users who never posted a picture are not in the data set. Furthermore, if the user posted a single picture and our crawler did not capture that user's name, the user was not included in the experiment (as we have no way to determine that they exist).
• A number of users who had accounts sometime in the initial name collection stage, no longer had an account by January 2004. Arguably, from the time that these users stopped having an account, up until January 2004, these users would have posted no pictures. As we are unable to determine when the accounts were cancelled we opted not to include these individuals.
• Group moblogs, or non-cameraphone moblogs may also contribute to an overestimate. We believe that these users contribute to the extreme maximum postings. One user, who no longer has an account, posted 315 pictures in the first week. This clearly causes the average to be higher and indicates that the median may be more trustworthy.

The results clearly point at a problem in the moblogging space. We have no reason to believe that there is anything flawed in this particular website's design relative to other solutions that lead to the behavior we see here.

We believe that the next step is to specifically understand why user interest in moblogging falls off dramatically. We can hypothesize that this may be related to design of the moblogging services, or to issues with the actual device. For the service providers such results should be indicate the need for better incentives for the posting of content. These incentives can be anything from a simple display of who and how many people are viewing images, the ability to rank images, better social networking, community formation, etc. More complex schemes would allow the images posted on the moblog to be pushed out to other medium. Integration into a user's blog or homepage is one existing example, but others are possible as well.

While incentives can come from the service providers, device manufacturers (and software vendors) have an opportunity to decrease the costs of using moblogging services. While bad resolution and image quality may diminish the desire to share an image, another major issue is the large number of key presses from the time a picture is taken to the posting. Users may be unwilling to deal with the hassle of the interface beyond the first few pictures.

While only preliminary, we believe that the results of this study are both a challenge and opportunity to service providers and device manufacturers who can properly incent users and eliminate usage barriers.

4. Acknowledgements

5. Further Readings

• Moblogging Uptake Weak, Even in Japan, Eric Lin
• US Subs Losing Interest in Picture Messaging, Eric Lin
• Reiter's Camera Phone Report