For my mobile media midterm, I choose to focus on developing my street photography site, StreetSnaps. StreetSnaps lets mobile users to snapshoot stylish people on the street, upload from their mobile phones or cameras, and see the results of what have been posted online. Peruse through different neighborhoods to see the different looks for each New York neighborhood listed.

Design: StreetSnaps sports two designs, one made specifically for web browsers and for iPhones/Android web-kit enabled browsers. The web interface takes advantage of horizontal scrolling to allow a photographic touch that lets users scroll as if viewing a camera roll. The mobile web interface utilizes JQTouch to create a “mobile-app feel” and utilizes vertical scrolling.

The PHP script in StreetSnaps will auto-detect whether the user is using an iPhone, iPod Touch, or Google Android  phone to forward them directly to my designed mobile site.

So, Microsoft’s 2010 Design Expo Challenge is “Service Meets Social” and ITP is ready to tackle that amorphous concept now that Prof. Nancy Herchinger has finalized our teams. My teammates, Julio Terra, Noah Waxman, Tianwei Liu, and I tussled with the ideas of household savings management for families versus making environmentally food accessible to urban dwellers. How can technology aid either need? What serves as a greater impact? Food for thought (pun intended).

After much discussion, my teammates and I  are looking at the issue of making local, environmentally friendly food available to urban dwellers. Essentially, we’d like to strengthen the community of local farmers to local customers for those of us who would like to see better bulk buying power, accessibility, etc. then what is currently accessible (local bodega, super market, farmer’s market, Whole Foods, FreshDirect.com, etc). New York City has a very strong network of CSAs and Farmer’s Market and we hope that we can make local agriculture even stronger by expanding the options for where local farmers can market their wares (directly to consumers) with the convenience of online technology. As Noah said: “Let’s empower local farmers to retail their own produce while giving urban-dwellers a greater sense of connection to the food they eat.”

We’ll be doing investigations and interviews with farmers, current networks between consumers/local farmers, profiling produce selection at various locations, among others for the next weeks ahead. Let’s just say: Google Wave will be our very close friends while we’re coordinating this.

“I am fashion” – Coco Chanel

Street fashion, as self-photographed by stylish individualists,  is increasingly becoming the successor  to mainstream fashion media with individuals turning online for visual inspiration, rather then traditional fashion magazines. With an explosion of cheap consumer technology and free online publishing  platforms, people have the means to immediately share their fashionable observations in near real-time. A stylish democracy of sorts.

So far, this creative self-expression has been documented through online networks, street photographer sites, and personal blogs. See the examples below: LookBook, The Sartorialist, and Vogue’s TweetChic (which is more capturing thought of fashion insiders then their photos).

However, wouldn’t it be great to see documentation in real time with less effort (ie., no need to plug your camera and upload?) – something as easy as whipping out your cellphone and capturing a shot on the street? Living in New York, I see fashion as divided by different neighborhood tribes – East Village, SoHo, Brooklyn, Upper East Side, Harlem, Meatpacking District, etc.

Plans: Explore MMS, extracting caption data and, perhaps, geo-location data, and extend Street Snaps so it can be subdivided by neighborhood so people can peek at New York’s unique styles. Adapt the SnapStyle website so that it can be easily viewable in a mobile webviewer, which would be great when after people submit their snapshots, they can then view it on their smartphones.

So far, from the documentation I’ve been reading, Apple doesn’t include EXIF data when photos are snapped with 3rd party iPhone apps but there appears to be some workarounds. That’s going to be an area of exploration.

Execution: Explore photo submission process, so users can be filtered by neighborhood (EXIF data?) or by self-captioning their location? How can we provide easier to find, readble caption information? Currently, I use the <title> tag within the <img> tag so when the cursor hovers, the caption data is seen there. I will have to explore Webkit and JQTouch.

Shawn’s Advice: ”Come up with a midterm project idea, talk with potential collaborators. Document and describe the idea on your blog and prepare to discuss it in class next week. Your documentation/description should include what the idea is, why you want to do it and a diagram of how it will work (wireframes, napkin drawings, etc..). “

Street Snaps is an MMS service where users can submit their fashion or street photos via cellphones/smartphones through MMS and see it live on my website. Snap your shot, MMS it to cindyw.itp@gmail.com, and see it uploaded to Street Snaps.

Behind the scenes: This MMS service is being powered by a PHP script provided by Prof. Shawn Van Every where my MySQL database is collecting all submitted MMS and logging it. I’m outputting all my photo submissions via my PHP website here (seen above). I’ve used the meta-tag <title>  to encase the MMS info to serve as a pop-up caption (Caption, Time Stamp). Ideally, I’d like to filter out the photo results based on certain keywords in the MMS message. Otherwise, I think this is a handy resource for people who want a micro-photoblog or even as informational as a missing-persons database. Food for thought.

Castlevania Heart by Loserkid5150

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I decided to create an SMS service that would help socially awkward nerds find other socially awkward nerds: ITP NYU Geek Pick Up Line Generator. Using TextMarks, I created an account and keyword that would trigger my  PHP script that prints out  a randomized funny (or terribly corny) line that nerds (may) relate to one another. I tried for some variety after using this as my source of witticisms.  Whether you’re a math geek, gamer geek, or coder geek, I hope you can enjoy this. How does it work? Text 41411 to NYUITP Geek and have fun with the response back! Who knows, maybe you’ll find a good ice breaker at your next social meetup.

Add on: I’m also flexing my n00b MySQL skills and created a table so I can log the frequency of people trying out this service for metric purposes. Privacy will be preserved since I’m only using this as an educational exercise. My original idea, Free Food Notification system @ ITP, didn’t have enough data to populate it as I was searching for free food deals in the NYU area and couldn’t find a consistent, up-to-date source. Looks like, it may be a work in progress for later.