David Boardman [dabo at mit.edu] , Federico Casalegno [casalegno at mit.edu]
MIT Mobile Experience Laboratory (MIT Design Lab)

Social Shopping and introduce the preliminary results of a related application named This or That (henceforth indicated as ToT). Despite what is commonly intended for Social Shopping2 as online platforms being largely based on aspects such as information sharing, recommendation systems and prices comparison, we intend to differentiate this area by stressing the role of Mobile Computing. ToT is in fact a way to explore the potentialities of Mobile Social Shopping. The main assumption of ToT is to maintain the in-situ and tangible characteristics of a common shopping session and to augment the social experience connecting the users to the own network in real-time. Shopping is in fact a rich-user experience that is both characterized by social aspects – discuss with friends about products and ask them opinions – and multi-sensorial ones – watch, touch, smell, taste, hear the available products. These conditions cannot be reproduced by online Social Shopping platforms that are rather focused on the simple exchange of information. With ToT we ntend to maintain the relevance of the physical context by a ding a constant social support for whom cannot access friends’ opinionin every moment