ThisOrThat: Social Mobile Shopping

ThisOrThat is a mobile application that we developed to support everyday decisions through advice from trusted friends.

A user can photograph two alternatives, create a short survey, and send it to a selected group of contacts while shopping. Because people value different friends' opinions on different subjects, users can associate each topic with the contacts whose advice they trust most.

The system includes a dynamic trust and reputation model that evolves as participants contribute comments and opinions. With ThisOrThat, we investigated how a mobile social network could deliver advice from selected contacts while a decision was being made.

The accompanying study began with shopping behavior rather than an app deployment. Among 77 consumers, only six said that they made an immediate decision when uncertain; the others sought information or advice, delayed the choice, bought every alternative, chose at random, or abandoned the purchase. Those accounts motivated the design, but they did not test whether people would use ThisOrThat in a shop or whether its trust model improved their decisions.

The ThisOrThat mobile experience, from posing a question to receiving advice.

Videos

Publications

@misc{cherubini2009shopping,
  author = {Cherubini, Mauro and De Oliveira, Rodrigo and Oliver, Nuria},
  title = {Shopping Uncertainties in a Mobile and Social Context},
  year = 2009,
  eprint = {0906.2307},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.0906.2307},
  cites = 0,
  citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}

Press

• "Telefonica works on 3D video and social shopping". Expansión, October 2008.
• "Telefonica predicts that the mobile phone will be used to do social shopping". Expansión, October 2008.

Team

Telefónica I+D: Nuria Oliver, Mauro Cherubini and Juan Carlos Valverde

MIT Mobile Experience Lab: Federico Casalegno, David Boardman, Brian McMurray, Steve Pomeroy, Lauren Silberman and Jason Terhorst