For my project i have decided to focus on social networking websites and the theory behind them. If you look at the most popular social networking websites at the moment, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, there is one main thing that is evident in all of them. That is that there is an underlying purpose to them, these sites are around simply for the user to be able to communicate with people they know but may not be able to see on a daily basis. This purpose has worked very well so far, however if a new social networking website was to be created, it would struggle to come up with something new for this purpose that hasn't been developed already.
So far social networking websites help people keep in contact with other people they might not see a lot. However these sites do not encourage their users to go out and interact with each other, why would they encourage this, it would pull people away from their website.
Because of these websites encouraging the users to stay at home and communicate over the internet, interaction between people is starting to dissapear in the real world. I have decided to act on this and create my social networking website based around the theory of going out and meeting their friends and other new people.
To do this i plan to create a social networking website where you can login, create a profile and then find your friends. Once you have your friend's lists you can then do everything with them that you can do in the more standard social networking websites. However once you've done this, you will also be able to download a version of the website for your mobile device. This version will then use GPS to find out where you are. This will then update your location on the website for all your friends to see, so they can join you.
The extra bonus of using locative media will be that you will be able to see your current location and then check the area to see which of your friends are in the area. For example, you're at a gig, you want to know which of your friends are also there, you then login to the website through your mobile device, select the "find your friends" option and you will be shown your local area and which of your friends are there. This will encourage more interaction between users.
