The business canvas of Passim/Barrio after discussing with the team:
(Re-sized picture to best fit the blog post space)

Our team has come up with the actual features for Passim/Barrio to develop for the alpha version. Most of them are going to be done during the winter break.

Program Workflow:

Features:
uploading content

- Creating events

• o Picking Location
• o Creating title
• o Creating description
• o Uploading content
  + Photos
  + Video
  + Commentary

- Adding to existing events

• o Showing events within radius that can be added to
• o Rating current content
• o Combining events(?)
• o Linking to events in locations outside radius (?)

viewing content
- Location browsing

• o Local content
• o Most viewed international content
  + Based also on outside views
  + Growth rate taking into account

- Sharing abilities
- Map browsing
- Categories

profile login features
- Facebook tie-in

• o Automatically following your friends activity on bariio (i.e. Pinterest/Quora)
• o Ease of upload to both FB and bariio
• o Only friends show up on map, other users marked as anonymous

- Twitter system

• o (need to research more)

rating systems
- Growth rate
- Amount of contributors
- Ratings
- Amount of outside or local views

I first want to thank my friend Coffey to bring up this topic, and I want to briefly discuss about the facebook/Twitter integration for Passim here.

The reason Passim integrates facebook/Twitter is because the users can login Passim without creating new accounts, bringing the additional benefits of knowing whether their friends also have Passim accounts and locate their positions if they’re also on Passim at the same time. Of course, you can view what your friends are recently doing on the map if they use Passim actively. You might also send messages directly to your friends, but this feature is provided by the back-end system of facebook, not developed by Passim.

The only benefit of using Passim with your friends is the visual demonstration of their locations and status provided by Passim through the map. For other activities involving friends, facebook itself does a much better job than Passim.

What Passim really wants is to encourage social engagement with people you don’t know, or even with buildings, lakes, or anything else. This kind of social engagement could be direct interactions, such as exchanging your ideas about an ongoing football game or a concert on the map with other users, or indirect interactions by simply adding your thoughts or announcement so people can later view them and add more on the map.

There are many benefits of posting, even randomly, on the map. Let me name a few of them:

1. You might like to express your ideas with the sense of location. For example, you might want to left some thoughts for the beautiful Lake Mendota by uploading a photo depicting a sunset on the map so that other people could find, comment and add more pictures to it (Passim will proper cluster relevant contents). You’d feel great the next time that the post you started becomes 10 times longer.

2. What you posted could get huge and become visible from the top level view of the map system (remember Passim is also a news discovery platform). This is where spontaneous social events contribute the most -> think about When you see a UFO above Lake Mendota, and you’re sure many people see it too (Passim clusters information toward the 1st topic owner).

3. Make new friends. If someone else is using Passim around you, they actually gives you the chance of displaying messages to them without knowing their numbers. You could post a good joke on Passim while you’re waiting your coffee in starbucks, and see if someone around you react to it.

So I hope this gives a clearer view of Passim and some possible applications of this platform. By the way, the official name of Passim is actually “Bariio” for the NEST and Qualcomm competition this year.

I spent a little time thinking about the possible ways to add some game factors to Passim to make it more interesting (this would be helpful for early user adoption). One idea I came up with is to implement a user credibility system to give some contributors titles like “the most knowledgable guy in Madison” based on the votes on his uploaded contents, the amount of uploads and locations he travelled within Madison. We can have many interesting titles and set many levels for users.

Some other features I recently considered(write it down here just to remind myself):

1.Dynamic replay of historical social events at given time and place -> Paid feature.
2.Virtual group SMS, no friendship requirement -> paid feature
3.Snag people around you to make friend directly -> free feature
4.Tracking people -> free/paid feature depend on privacy control
5.Dynamic advertising.

When I talked with some other guys today during the NEST kickoff, some said Passim is just like Twitter. I tried to explain but I have to admit that I wasn’t quite prepared. I need to write the differences down.

So if you’re trying to find tweets based on geolocation information of any sort on Twitter or look for what’s happening around you, here are some articles that points out the ways; actually lots of website extend Twitter to provide some sorts of location services for tweets:

Local Tweets: 9 Ways to Find Twitter Users in Your Town
http://mashable.com/2009/06/08​/twitter-local-2/

5 Ways to Share Images on Twitter
http://mashable.com/2009/05/19​/twitter-share-images/

Top 5 Ways to Share Videos on Twitter
http://mashable.com/2009/05/23​/video-for-twitter/

But if you went through all of the examples given in those links, you would find that:
1) Picture, video, and topics uploads are segmented in different places and websites.
2) None allow you to check concentrated social news story or spontaneous social events.
3) No map views or map navigation.
4) No rating or popularity system on the user level.
5) No history track.
6) Geo-locations are not precise.
7) Content organization and UI are poor.
And the most importantly :7) They do not allow you to PARTICIPATE in other’s events/topic.

But Passim offers all of these features that those website do not. Just use Passim!

1. Authentic native application: This requires the most amount of work, and we need to write the user interface layer and back-end service layer. We also need to create the logic that initiates http calls to the remote server (cloud server). The biggest benefit is that we get the full control of user interface design and local storage capability in the phone.

2. Tianium: a well-developed platform based on the latest web development kit (HTML5,CSS3) that allows developers to code JavaScript to directly interact with iOS environment, including control to the native iOS interface. The Javascript code is transformed by the Tianium engine into the native Objective-C code to build the application. Features such as map, geo-location service, email, camera, and native UI interface come out of the box in Tianium. So we can reuse our Javascipt code for our desktop app without iOS Objective-C  code development. More details can be found at: http://www.appcelerator.com/products/titanium-mobile-application-development/

3. PhoneGap: Basically, it wraps a web browser into a native application on many platforms such as iOS, andoird and blackberry, and the wrapped browser will visit a mobile version of the website directly. This means the user interaction actually happens in the website coded with a different CSS for phones. PhoneGap also provides some basic Javascript API that allows the website to initiate API calls to services such as SMS, file storage, camera .etc., but it does not allow any control to the native phone UI directly, making the application looks more like a website instead of the phone-y app. The benefits of using PhoneGap is that it does not require any change to the core functions of a website to transform into an iphone app, and it supports android blackberry, windows phone applications, so we can easily release android version using this. http://www.phonegap.com/about/features

Which way should Passim choose to develop this app, and what are the tradeoffs between these decisions? I need to spend time think about that and write more things down.

What I concern the most about is the speed of our application development and the speed of the actual app experienced by our users. We want our alpha version to support at least 500 users using at the same time, so hosting on a cloud server would be a good idea to make us care-free about computation power and database security/conflict. Hosting our DB in the cloud also means that we can DEVELOP our product using the cloud, and all developers will share the same DB instance without synchronizing DB data among other developers all the time.

The other new strategy is the way we use the Google Map system. We want to reduce the communication overhead between our app and Google’s servers. So instead of calling Google’s API to place markers on the map, we maintain another individual layer on the map so that we can draw the markers using the data from our own database, eliminating the necessity of calling Google’s services. We hope this will decrease a great amount of traffic on our website and make both our desktop version and mobile version run faster.

Coming soon: Passim feature sketch up and UI