Get Lost: Facilitating Serendipitous Exploration in Location-Sharing Services

This paper describes ongoing work in developing social computing systems and services to support serendipitous real life experiences. The paper introduces the location-aware prototype service "GetLostBot", which uses the Foursquare API to longitudinally monitor a user's check-in locations and intervenes when they have fallen into a predictable routine. Interventions take the form of mysterious walking directions on a map to unknown destinations that challenge the user to take an explorative attitude and go into the unknown. Early results from a user trial suggest that while users are extremely positive about the ideas and concept of delivering serendipity through social computing, in this case there was low engagement with the actual suggested new experiences and activity. Despite this, the act of the intervention itself is reported to still have intrinsic value. This finding is discussed in terms of potential design issues around supporting serendipity in future systems.