NokiaBetaLabs

Nokia Image Exchange is a unique community for mobile photos

Written by Elina of the Nokia Image Exchange team

In January, we invited Nokia Image Exchange users to participate in a survey to gather insight and feedback about how the service is used and collect new ideas. As a result, we found out that many of our users needed improvements for sharing photos within the service and even more importantly to people outside the service.

To investigate the topic further, we organized interviews in March-April with 22 users of Nokia Image Exchange from 15 different countries.  We asked the participants to tell us how they currently share images and what social aspects of Nokia Image Exchange are important to them and what are missing. The interviews revealed very interesting viewpoints about photo sharing that we would like to share with the Nokia Beta Labs community.
Community

For many participants, Nokia Image Exchange is a separate community that they do not necessarily want to mix with other communities. For example, in Facebook one reveals his/her real identity while in Nokia Image Exchange one may have an avatar. Nokia Image Exchange is a special service for mobile photos, which are about spontaneous and curious things in everyday life. Topics of the mobile photos include places, objects, events, or funny incidents, but photos usually do not reveal much about the user or his/her close ones.

Many participants enjoy viewing pictures from all over the world. They commented that in Nokia Image Exchange the photos are in focus, not necessarily the people. If a user publishes interesting photos, it is handy to add him as a virtual friend to be able to follow his latest shots more easily.

Intimate sharing

Nokia Image Exchange also provided a special environment for “intimate sharing”, where a small group of people stays online and frequently shares photos to each other. Intimate sharing can be very frequent between the users and utilizes the always-on connection. Notifications played an important role to keep the participants up to date of their friends’ photos and comments. 

Back-up

Above all, the participants considered Nokia Image Exchange as a reliable back-up tool for mobile photos. The online back-up is an excellent starting point for all photo sharing, also to other Internet services. When Nokia Image Exchange was mainly used for backing up, the social aspects do not play such a big role but browsing the public photos was seen as a source of entertainment.

Your thoughts?

We are grateful to the participants for their valuable input that helped us to understand better photo sharing habits in Nokia Image Exchange. Now we invite all of you readers to share your thoughts on these findings: How do they relate to your activities in Nokia Image Exchange?