SmilieFace: developing and evaluating an affective Facebook Application

Abstract

Because of their proliferation, Social Network Sites (SNS) are growing in importance as communication centres. Plain text messages between users, even if augmented with appropriate smilie icons or emoticons, often cause misunderstanding. Interaction between users on SNSs, such as Facebook may benefit by being able to use an emotional or affective based communication system. Smiliemail is an existing, easy to use, and effective web-based application that enhances online communication by enabling users to create and send affective and engaging messages. It uses a computer generated video avatar, which articulates a sender’s message that has been tagged using an XML markup language. Hence the affective avatars of Smiliemail may provide an effective inter-user communication on SNSs. This case-study details some implementation and user interface issues that arose in the development of SmilieFace: a Facebook application that uses affective avatars for inter-user communication.