The longer you moblog, the fewer photos you send

A study by an HP researcher indicates that the longer people have their moblogs, the few photos they transmit.

Eytan Adar, a member of the HP Labs Information Dynamics Group, has posted data that shows the median user takes eight photos (13.57 on average) during the first week of their moblog, the number drops to one photo a week (four on average) within a month and a median of zero photos after five weeks.

Worse than indicated

Adar says the reduction in picture taking is probably worse than the data indicates. This is because:

"* 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."

Trouble for moblogging companies

Adar says the data highlights trouble for moblogging companies. No kidding! He suggests a few reasons why moblogging falls off so 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."

Discussing findings at WWW2004

Adar will be discussing his findings during a day-long Weblogging workshop during the 13th annual World Wide Web conference in New York, May 17 - 22.

The "Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics" will feature more than half a dozen speakers and will be held on May 18 from 9:00 to 5:15 p.m.

Comments

[Michael Tippett]

Given the formative nature of this market it is plausible that the results of this survey are skewed. Because of the wide variety of moblogging alternatives there must be a lot of cases where new members sign up at a given site, test it out and never return. I for one have moblogging accounts everywhere and yet I only use one (for the most part).

What this study is really measuring is not the durability of people's moblogging habits. At best, this study is measuring the retention rate of a particular moblogging site.

Michael,
blueherenow.com

[Myron Kassaraba]

This is not surprising. When we were running web publishing communities for a number of portals at Trellix, the fall-off was very similar. We found that the #1 reason was lack of audience and feedback. If you do not get both viewers and feedback, your motivation level goes down very quickly. Conversely, if you do get both viewers and comments, your curve can go in the other direction with an increase in activity - then the problem becomes sustainability of that activity over time. We found that users with a proclivity for public web publishing were also experimenters who would get really intense with one thing for a few months and would them hop on to the next thing (I think social networking is experiencing a similar phenomenon with lack of interest and fall-off of activity). It all begs the question of whether this is a fad or a business!