Full-Time Intimate Community and Radar
Joi Ito writes about Full-Time Intimate Community (FTIC) and the Radar web service.
[tease]
FTICs are the close group of friends (usually around 8-10 people) with whom you share presence. Most mobile youths know whether members of their FTIC are awake, at school, happy, sick, finished with their homework, etc.
They use their mobile phones to keep in touch with their FTIC usually sending state changes by text message.
The idea behind Radar is to use photos as a presence stream to your intimate friends so you can share a richer presence and make short comments on the stream of images that show up in the “channels” from your friends.
Because of it’s rather intimate and private nature, you end up snapping photos for their presence value over perfect artistic value and because of the private nature of the friends list, the content is also often more intimate.