In the past month or so since the release of the iPhone 4S, there has been a lot of chat surrounding Siri – the beta voice assistant that (controversially?) formed the central thrust of Apple’s advertising for the device. Friends with conveniently timed upgrades on their mobile contracts are major fans of Siri – especially the points scored when demonstrating ‘call my girlfriend’ to said girlfriend – although it probably helps that they’re not Scottish.

Siri’s shortcomings are documented in various levels of detail across the internet, from blogs full of mildly amusing screenshots of strange answers to detailed rants about how and why the program doesn’t deliver, but the crux of the problem comes down to the fact that Siri just listens to the words you say. A lot of work has obviously gone into Siri having an answer for everything, with a multitude of strange responses on offer, most often when you forget you’re talking to a robot. This is clearly a tool  being used by Apple to encourage users to knit Siri into their lives and develop a reliance on it, like Lyra and Pantalaimon, Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, or Professor Philip Brainard and Weebo.

At this point I’d like to make it clear this is not a blog post about Siri but the relationship between you and your mobile, a device that goes everywhere with you, supplies you with music, TV programs, connects you with close friends and family as well as your boss, doctor or gas supplier. A device that over 90% of 18-29 year olds take to bed, a more constant companion than any person could be. And currently it’s just listening to the words you use to ask it questions – of course it’s going to be a bit rubbish! As Hitch so memorably put it, ‘90% of what you’re saying ain’t coming out of your mouth.’ For what is essentially a communication device, there’s currently a massive lack of communication between user and device. But that’s before you take context sensing technology into consideration…

This week I read an article that dealt with 6 Myths about the Mobile User Experience. The first ‘myth’ was concerning mobile context – specifically that there is no single mobile context and so design for ‘the mobile context’ was a bogus idea. The point ended with the observation that there are multiple mobile contexts and that ‘design needs to take this fact into account and not assume that mobile use is always the same.’ At this point I had a vision of the Context Engine flying in a superhero costume, coming to rescue Design as a whole: this is the whole point of context sensing – you can do really great design for specific contexts and leave the working out to the phone, as we have established it knows you in a totally different way than the closest humans in your life.

Last week we went along to OpenMIC 12 and had our minds stretched (even further than usual) in a futuristic, internet-of-things direction. We listened to lots of fascinating talks about meshing the physical world into the digital as much as possible, with technology making connections that currently we do manually. Discussion covered methods of connecting devices through RFID tags, the internet, and the idea of touchscreens on everything (generally agreement was that this would be too far). Imagine that when you got home it would trigger a summary of who’s in, how much electricity is left on the meter – giving you a heads up on what kind of state you’ll find the place in.

This meshing of the physical world into the digital is what the Context Engine seeks to achieve, by making connections seamlessly and intuitively through the way in which you naturally behave. All current mobile experiences are user initiated, however, with the information digitally captured around us at all times, the next step is knitting it all together to make it all a bit more immediately useful.

Until then, Siri users will just have to make do with the strange kind of love offered by their constant companion…

Making friends, once past the playground stage when ‘will you be my friend?’ was enough, is not simple. Now there are all kinds of social networks that ‘cement’ a connection, but even this doesn’t mean somebody is your ‘friend’ in the real sense of the word.

Since the start of MySpace, when Tom was your handy ‘First Friend’ the word ‘friend’ has been stretched, bent and wrapped around every relationship imaginable: like a too-small piece of wrapping paper awkwardly concealing a spiky complex-shaped gift, the term has arguably been stretched so much that it has lost some of its meaning. I’m not going to discuss the complex, psychological and philosophical meanings of ‘friendship’ here, but rather look at how while all people may be created equal, friendships/relationships/connections are not.

While previously friends would be organised by surname in a hard-copy address book and the real indicator of intimacy was who made it to your speed dial list and who you actually remembered to contact, we now have equal access to hundreds of people. This raises one issue in two parts: sharing settings and mass-managing these friends so the news that matters doesn’t get lost among the stuff that doesn’t.

Having hundreds of people as ‘friends’ on sites such as Facebook means that there are hundreds of people that you are boring with that ‘off to bed’ status update, or intriguing with a ‘just can’t take it anymore.’ The ‘friends’ that see these updates are as wide ranging as family members, to workmates, to people you met once on a night out, and while some things are great for sharing with everyone (recent weeks have seen a lot of weddings/engagements in my news feed), other things (jokes off Sickipedia, for example) are probably not going to be appreciated by the parents of your 13-year-old cousin.

But how to select, from the aforementioned hundreds of ‘friends’, exactly who you want to share each post with, or conversely, whose news you want to prioritise, is one of the biggest problems faced by each social network.

From the aspect of accessing relevant data, Twitter’s ‘list’ tool is handy when you want to follow people for certain things, such as football allegiances or annual/one off events like Glastonbury, but not at other times when they just tweet about their breakfast. Facebook’s List function is handy if you a, know it exists and b, want to find everyone who falls into a Facebook data category (hometown, university network etc), or all those you ‘recently interacted’ with (although Facebook’s definition of ‘recent’ is a fluid one). Zuckerberg’s social empire also uses Groups which are quite a nice way for communal sharing with your family members, housemates or similar.

However, these functions don’t make limited sharing easy from the status bar and if you put someone in a group, they know about it (just before you create one called ‘people I secretly hate’). Google+ has gone some way to deal with this with Circles, which helpfully work in both directions of sharing and accessing, and get around the issues of offence brought by ‘Limited Profile’ settings on Facebook (people can always tell) in the easy select-at-point-of-publication approach.

When reading up on this subject one of my favourite terms that I came across was ‘social torrent’ because it conjures such a vivid image of information overload being like a high power hose ready to bowl you over. And this is the problem. Although these structures, however varied, are in place, they are used by a very limited proportion of users because sorting through these social connections turns time spent social networking into a chore, and I don’t know how you feel about housework, but it’s not something I like doing when I could be hanging out with my friends.

The sheer quantity of information my social network accounts hold about me and my connections are ripe picking for services like Katango to work out ‘meaningful’ groups or categories of friends, to a fair degree of success. However, this type of grouping based on the people/places you have in common has the drawback of being detached from how you personally relate to individuals within this group. When I tried Katango out, sorting through, editing and labelling the groups it had created took forever and by the end of it I was struggling to understand what purpose these lists were going to serve me.

As it stands, the confusing variety of ways to categorise friends across social networks is a reflection on just how hard it is to define relationships as a whole. We’ve previously looked at mobile social context here, and this is somewhere that context could be used to great effect – through group check-ins, even accessing sites from the same web connection regularly – meaning can be deferred on relationships and connections. This kind of information could not only make your regular real-life set more easy access, but also be used to remind you of people who might’ve fallen off your radar, and prompt you to reconnect, or (not meaning to sound heartless) maybe even cut them out..?

In a complex social minefield what seems clear is that making and maintaining friend lists, groups or circles isn’t easy and while getting computers to do the majority of it is a good idea, current non-contextual solutions aren’t quite enough.

Last week I attended a workshop called ‘Context-Based Services in Tourism’ at Bournemouth University’s International Centre for Tourism and Hospitality Research, and I felt a little like a tourist myself. Previously if you had asked me my thoughts on tourism, I’d probably have told you that, yes, I do love to go on holiday. This week, however, I’d be much more likely to rattle on about how the tourist experience can be improved through context-aware services, and how, like the weather, human mobility is something you can guess at but never reliably predict. Today’s blog attempts to make sense of the mass of information that was discussed in Bournemouth in terms of Overlay Media’s primary focus of mobile context awareness.

As voyagers on Planet Earth we all seek the essentials of human life: food, shelter and clothing. In our western culture this might have evolved (for some) to ordering take-away, living in air-conditioned apartments and shopping in Harvey Nics, but the principle remains. We tend to connect with these things due to local knowledge, recommendations from neighbours, past experience, and more recently, online reviews. Once we go on holiday and become tourists, we’re looking for the same necessities but without the usual pointers that knowing an area give us. Previously this has been dealt with through buying tourist guides and maps, and trusting travel agents for better or for worse. Now the web lets us share information on an unprecedented level both before we travel and, increasingly, also once we have reached our destination via smartphones.

As a mobile device understands more and more about its user, building a map of their regular haunts and habits, it will also recognise when that user is in a place that is new to them. This could trigger any number of services tailored to giving the tourist-user the information they need: from hotels to transport hubs to places to eat, these pieces of information could be filtered by how appropriate they are to a user’s usual interests, and therefore avoiding the information overload that makes finding what you want such a challenge.

While charges for data when ‘roaming’ are currently prohibitive to mobile web access abroad, there have been indications that this barrier will be reduced, at least within the EU. CICtourGUNE’s Maria Peralta mentioned last week that in 2015 there will be 1.5bn people moving around the world, and with the expansion of smartphone use that we have seen in the past year or two alone, the informational requirements of tourists are highly likely to be best served via their mobile devices.

Closer to home, improving the tourist experience in the UK has taken a step forward with the Government set to release information about rail timetables, rail service performance, roadworks, current road conditions, car parks and cycle routes, which should enable developers to create useful tools for people moving around Britain. While the 2012 Olympics may be less friendly towards mobile phones, the industry at large seems to have embraced them with English Heritage, the National Trust, enjoyEngland, all providing guides to cultural highlights and areas of outstanding beauty. Other guides go by city, with Edinburgh, London and Cardiff all well-represented in the App Store, although my (biased) favourite has to be the one for Bristol. While these are individual guides set up by local tourist boards or similar, there are still the recognisable brands of Lonely Planet and Rough Guide which, along with a newer rival called mTrip, offer the tourist a name to trust wherever they go and are arguably more useful than their paper counterparts because of their location abilities.

While the location-sensing abilities of smartphones are a huge bonus for tourists, as discussed in previous blog posts this is only the first step of context. Working more complex contextual technologies into the tourist’s journey to enable a richer travelling experience is the next challenge.