User-Generated Content in Mobile Multimedia: Empirical Evidence from User Studies

This paper presents evidence from two studies on the use of mobile multimedia. Mobile image has more than 1000 multimedia messages collected from a pilot in 1999-2001. Radiolinja has more than 4000 messages from a multimedia messaging (MMS) pilot in summer 2002. In Radiolinja, it was found that 32% of messages were a part of an interaction chain such as question-answer pairs, greetings, or stories. Thus, approximately 50% of traffic in the network arose from interactional needs rather than from individual, unattached messages. After the practice phase, fluctuations in use are largely explained by interactional reasons. This paper suggests that user-generated content is a key element in the success of mobile multimedia.