Thoughts On CampusMesh

Landay pointed me at CampusMesh, a project out of the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

It's a Cluster-esque app that's a part of a group of mobile social applications called SmartCampus that they're developing with the following stuff in mind (from their website):

1. Community building / social network impacts
2. Team / group coordination
3. User privacy [personal exchanges & location data use]
4. User Interface Techniques
5. Middleware design
6. Security [user authentication, access control, intrusion prevention, data integrity, etc]

There really isn't much actual description about the app available on their website and I wasn't able to find any screen shots, but CampusMesh itself is described as "a location-aware geo-temporal social matching, reminding and coordination system." They've really focused on their app being a tool - it provides reminders and fuels goal-based group interaction whereas we've kept Cluster broad to enable an open-ended and casual social-networking experience. Our adhesion to the facebook model has made Cluster a hobbyists' toy and kept it out of the "getting stuff done" space.

It's not that Cluster couldn't be used to facilitate work (by which I mean things you do for your job or for school). There have been dozens of times I've tried to coordinate project meetings with Sierra on the fly and we've both noted that a working Cluster could have smoothed the process. But it's more that we have been designing for our own demographic - college age people who use social-networking purely for extra-curricular enjoyment. Facebook and myspace might bleed into your "work life" but only in the areas where your private "friend life" does, such as going out for drinks with your coworkers after work on friday or blogging about work stuff.

To oversimplify, CampusMesh seems akin to running Outlook or Excel on your phone - so that you can bring your work with you and use your social network to enhance your productivity on the go. Having Cluster on your phone is supposed to be much more like having chat, facebook, and your social calendar so that you needn't leave your connection with your holistic social network at your PC when you can't be with your friends physically.

It would be interesting to spend some time thinking about what kind of tasks people will want out of their always available location-aware social network that never leaves their side. How does the tool help them conduct their broader life - not just a segment of it like work (CampushMesh) or play (Cluster). The telephone itself is an example of tool that serves a broad communication purpose but serves a specialized role in different areas (mobile, land, work phones, personal numbers, household) while the higher level concept remains the same (you dial someone's phone up, it rings, they answer, you talk...) . Cluster could still be a similar sort of tool since we really haven't committed to a specialization yet. However, we haven't been designing for the open-ended possibilities either. If there was more time, I've love to devote some effort here once all the baseline functionality we've already laid out is in place.

Okay. Apologies for the novel.

The SmartCampus Project Site