Tomorrow I’m running the first (and hopefully not the last) 24 hr GameJam event for the students here at Infolab21 at Lancaster University. I have managed to persuade a very interesting array of speakers to kick the GameJam off and although the competition itself is only open to students If anyone is in this area and wants to attend you are more than welcome.  Sorry not to do this sooner been busy getting it all organised

This blog relates to my favorite MSc project from last year which was completed by one my favorite students Klen Copic Pucihar who was also behind the very successful 4 in a row widget game. Basically I wanted to create a social network whose principal interaction was performed via mobile and addressed the fact the most people are not in fact members of one large social homogeneous network but rather members of a complex array of smaller networks generally formed around specific relationships, activities or places. To this end we created the mobile social network Chillrs which was named after its use of small communal public displays which in this case was on a fridge as shown in the figure below.

 Whilst the fridge door metaphor is not a new idea the use within Chillrs provides what effectively could be considered as equivalent to suped up Whereabouts clock used by the Weasleys’ in the Harry Potter films. The mobile widget allows users to define their current location through there personally generated location list which is updated on any of the Chillr displays they are a member off. For instance you could have a family Chillr, a work Chillr, or team Chillr, the point is that you can then filter the information you supply to the individual social networks you belong too rather than revealing the same information to all. The current version allows users to post not only their location but blogs, to do notes, shopping lists which builds upon the fridge door metaphor but we envisage other functionality could be more applicable to different group and users could customize the display to their own particular needs. The display doesn’t have to be a physical item such as the Nokia 810 (finally found a good use for mine  )we embedded in this small beer fridge but could be a desktop widget and indeed all the information is available through the mobile application itself. The following video not only presents the widget but also the display (if you can sit through it to the end as itsone of my longer productions  ). Personally I think that addressing the need for smaller more intimate social networks deserves more attention and I can envisage a Chillrs type service being incredibly popular.