Connect-U: A System for Enhancing Social Networking

The application of ubiquitous and social computational systems shows a rapidly increasing trend in our everyday environments: Enhancing social interactions and communication in both online and real-world settings is an important issue in a broad range of application contexts. This chapter describes the development of ubiquitous and social software for enhancing social networking. The Connect-U demonstrator features a class of such applications. In particular, it comprises the Conferator and MyGroup applications for enabling smarter social interactions in the context of conferences and working groups. We describe the applied socio-technical design process, and discuss experiences and lessons learned.