Location-aware mobile media allow users to see their locations on a map on their mobile phone screens. These applications either disclose the physical positions of known friends, or represent the locations of groups of unknown people. We call these interfaces eponymous and anonymous, respectively. This article presents our classification of eponymous and anonymous location-aware interfaces by investigating how these applications may require us to rethink our understanding of urban sociability, particularly how we coordinate and communicate in public spaces. We argue that common assumptions made about location-aware mobile media, namely their ability to increase one’s spatial awareness and to encourage one to meet more people in public spaces, might be fallacious due to pre-existing practices of sociability in the city. We explore these issues in the light of three bodies of theory: Goffman’s presentation of self in everyday life, Simmel’s ideas on sociability, and Lehtonen and Mäenpää’s concept of street sociability.

Hybrid spaces arise when virtual communities (chats, multiuser domains, and massively multi-player online role-playing games), previously enacted in what was conceptualized as cyberspace, migrate to physical spaces because of the use of mobile technologies as interfaces. Mobile interfaces such as cell phones allow users to be constantly connected to the Internet while walking through urban spaces. This article defines hybrid spaces in the light of three major shifts in the interaction between mobile technology and spaces. First, it investigates how the use of mobile technologies as connection interfaces blurs the traditional borders between physical and digital spaces. Second, it argues that the shift from static to mobile interfaces brings social networks into physical spaces. Finally, it explores how urban spaces are reconfigured when they become hybrid spaces. For this purpose, hybrid spaces are conceptualized according to three distinct but overlapping trends: hybrid spaces as connected spaces, as mobile spaces, and as social spaces.

This study conceptualizes the new spatial logic created by the social use of location aware mobile technologies, analyzing how mobile communities are formed by the mapping of social networks in urban spaces. It explores two main areas with the goal of understanding how locative mobile social networks (LMSNs) challenge the traditional logic of networks. First, it conceptualizes LMSNs by comparing them to (1) traditional transportation and communication networks, and (2) mobile social networks (MSNs). Second, the paper discusses potential social implications of LMSNs, such as privacy, surveillance, and social exclusion.