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Eytan Edar from HP research labs looked at the growing popularity of
camera phones and conducted a study on usage patterns covering such
areas as frequency of photo posting and what factors affect interest
levels. One thing is clear - mobile blogging and photo posting is on
the rise! Considering the age of this paper the work seems mildly but not surprisingly prophetic.
Full article and credits are below:
Usage Patterns for Cameraphone Driven Moblogs
Eytan Adar
HP Labs
1. Introduction
Despite the significant penetration of cameraphones, there has been
sparse publicly-available analysis of usage patterns. Usage may involve
anything from the capture of images for personal use (picture stays on
the camera or is uploaded to a user's PC), to person-to-person use
(picture is e-mailed or messaged to another individual), to
person-to-web use (an instance of moblogging). In this report we
specifically address the last of these, and describe a simple
experiment run in late January of 2004 on public data collected from a
popular moblogging website*. We find that while the median user takes 8
pictures in their first week (13.57 on average), the median number
quickly drops to 1 picture a week within a month of use (4 on average),
and a median of 0 by week 5. For reasons described below, we believe
that these may also be overestimates.
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 depicts the distribution of pictures for each week until week
30. The boxplot illustrates the minimum (lower whisker), maximum (upper
whisker), as well as the first and third quartiles (the box). We have
also illustrated the median and average values which are barely visible
in the figure due to the extreme maximum. Figure 2 is the same plot
with the maximum whisker removed. Here the average/median behavior is
much more obvious.
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).
3. Discussion
It is very likely that the actual usage is in fact significantly lower than our data shows. This is for a number of reasons:
* 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
Thanks to Josh Tyler for early data collection. And as always, Bernardo Huberman for letting me explore new research spaces.
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
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